Inside the decentralised casino: A longitudinal study of actual cryptocurrency gambling transactions

Abstract

Decentralised gambling applications are a new way for people to gamble online. Decentralised gambling applications are distinguished from traditional online casinos in that players use cryptocurrency as a stake. Also, rather than being stored on a single centralised server, decentralised gambling applications are stored on a cryptocurrency’s blockchain. Previous work in the player behaviour tracking literature has examined the spending profiles of gamblers on traditional online casinos. However, similar work has not taken place in the decentralised gambling domain. The profile of gamblers on decentralised gambling applications are therefore unknown. This paper explores 2,232,741 transactions from 24,234 unique addresses to three such applications operating atop the Ethereum cryptocurrency network over 583 days. We present spending profiles across these applications, providing the first detailed summary of spending behaviours in this technologically advanced domain. We find that the typical player spends approximately $110 equivalent across a median of 6 bets in a single day, although heavily involved bettors spend approximately $100,000 equivalent over a median of 644 bets across 35 days. Our findings suggest that the average decentralised gambling application player spends less than in other online casinos overall, but that the most heavily involved players in this new domain spend substantially more. This study also demonstrates the use of these applications as a research platform, specifically for large scale longitudinal in-vivo data analysis.