TLDR

In this episode of BidCast, Jason Kam talks with Sterling, the token lead of Shuffle. They discuss the evolution of crypto casinos, the competitive landscape, and how Shuffle differentiates itself from major players like Stake and Rollbit. Sterling explains the metrics of revenue generation, including NGR and GGR, and delves into Shuffle's innovative lottery mechanism designed to reward token holders. The conversation also covers the challenges of growth in the crypto casino market, the importance of VIP users, and the strategic shift from a buyback and burn model to a lottery-based payout system. In this conversation, Sterling discusses the growth strategies and innovative marketing approaches for Rubett's in the competitive landscape of crypto casinos. He emphasizes the untapped potential of lotteries in the crypto space and outlines plans for an on-chain lottery product that aims to democratize access and enhance user experience. The discussion also covers revenue models, challenges in the lottery market, and the future vision for the Shuffle token, including strategic decisions regarding blockchain integration and exchange relationships.

Chapters / Timeline

• 00:00 Opening

• 01:38 Introduction to Shuffle and Crypto Casinos

• 02:57 Differentiating Shuffle from Competitors

• 05:09 Understanding Revenue Metrics in Crypto Casinos

• 09:11 The Lottery Mechanism and Value Capture

• 14:35 The Shift from Buyback to Lottery Payouts

• 16:10 Breakdown of Revenue Allocation

• 21:42 Growth Strategies and Market Positioning

• 30:30 Growth Strategies in Crypto Casinos

• 32:57 Innovative Marketing Approaches

• 34:18 The Future of Lotteries in Crypto

• 36:29 On-Chain Lottery Concepts

• 39:16 User Experience and Accessibility

• 40:49 Revenue Models and Market Potential

• 43:53 Challenges and Opportunities in the Lottery Space

• 46:22 Vision for Shuffle Token’s Future

• 51:15 Navigating Exchange Relationships

• 56:53 Strategic Chain Decisions

• 60:28 Final Thoughts and Future Directions

Transcript

<Jason Kam (01:39)>   OK, GM, we are live. Welcome to another episode of BidCast. I'm your host, Jason Kam, AKA at Maple Leaf Cap. Today is May 22, 2025, 7 PM Hong Kong time. BidCast is being livestreamed to BitClub members. Questions are from the members and my own. Today I'm speaking with Sterling, the token lead of Shuffle. Sterling, welcome. 

<Sterling (02:00)>   Alright, thanks Jason, thanks for the intro. 

<Jason Kam (02:03)>   Yeah, I mean, I remember my first foray into crypto was aping US casino coins, the Ponzi's back. It's fucking nuts. I didn't know you were doing that as well back in the days. 

<Sterling (02:11)>   Yeah.  Yeah, 2019 was wild times because the only on-chain apps you could really play were basic casinos. was like, use casinos and from ages ago you had stuff like Bust a Bit and all these other Bitcoin casinos. So if you wanted to do anything on-chain, it was always a coin flip or dice or something with on-chain, truthfully, fairness, right? 

<Jason Kam (02:30)>   Yes.  I remember dice. It's fucking, oh my God, like I made so much money in PA. But fast forward today, Shuffle is doing quite well. Here's the first question for you. I mean, internally, externally, when you talk to people, you probably get this question a lot. What is the difference between Shuffle and Rollbit and Stake? How do you differentiate yourself versus them? 

<Sterling (02:57)>   Okay, this is a fun question because there's a lot of parables between traditional crypto companies. So the way I kind of think about it is that stake is kind of like your Coinbase. They are growing to the top funnel of users. They're basically going out there and marketing to people that have never heard of Crypto Casino as they're going out there and talking to users that would typically never touch crypto and only use crypto basically to like...  for payments and whatnot. like Stake's kind of like Coinbase. Like they're always kind of growing the pot. The product's really good on Stake. Like the way I kind of think about it, if I play a game on Stake or the user experience on Stake, it's like closing like a German car door. Like basically, you know, it's like high quality and the product's really great. Like it has that funk sound to it. I know it's a bit esoteric, but that's like the way I think about it. It's like Stake's product is really great. And from like a perspective of a crypto product, they're like Coinbase. Rollbit is an interesting one too.  you because Rollbit bit was really early on a lot of stuff but  they've kind of changed directions and they've kind of always been from a different type of background, so to speak. So the way I think about Rollbit is Rollbit's kind of like your Bittrex 2017 era kind of exchange. like the exchange that basically was really early to things got some of the product right, but didn't really follow through with like that next wave of user. And then the way I kind of compare Shuffle is like Shuffle's like FTX was before everything blew up. Like they were the first kind of to do things  the right way, the first to kind of think about it from like... 

<Sterling (04:31)>   crypto first principles type role. And like the real first thing that I like, would say is like crypto native, like all the founders, like all the original kind of people at Shuffle basically like are all crypto kids all around the same age have all like kind of used these products where if you think about Bittrex back in the day, it was much more of just an exchange business. It was much more of like older school mentality. And that's where kind of where it sits right now. And Shuffle kind of sits as that like kind of bleeding edge of like crypto  to casino tech, crypto casino onboarding when it comes to like air drops and stuff like that. Like we've been quite the trailblazer on that front. 

<Jason Kam (05:09)>   And just so I have a sense when it comes to like revenue or when it comes to NGR, like betting volume, how do these three, do you think of them as competitors and how do you compare in terms of metrics? 

<Sterling (05:18)>   So, Stake is definitely a competitor, but Stake is almost so ginormously big. Like, when I say Coinbase, I mean in the product sense, and I mean like growing the pie sense, but from like industry kind of...  hyper this like from industry domination point of view, they're more like Binance. So they have like 80 to 90 % or sorry, not 80 to 90%, 70 to 80 % of all crypto casino betting volume goes through stake. So that level of dominance is like pretty unheard of even in say crypto, Like Binance, don't, I'm not sure what Binance's derivatives volume like mixes right now, but it's pretty dominant. Stake is like as dominant as it gets when it comes to that. So stake would do, I think the latest number was like they did 5 billion in revenue.  that's NGR or NGR meaning net gaming revenue or GGR which is gross gaming revenue. I don't know which number that is but it's five billion in that area. With Rollbit all their revenues are public on their dashboard but I don't know specifically what their GGR or NGR is because it just has revenue. just again it's like not a number we can kind of compare apples to apples to. And then on shuffle side like our NGR is like based off like our last couple weeks of  What is it? Last couple of weeks of what we've given to lottery, it's about 102 to 105 million in NGR. So this is getting tactical right away, but there's like two different, there's two definitions there. Like GGR is gross gaming revenue. So that's like your top line, top line revenue. That's like the, the, basically there's nothing getting taken away from that. NGR is like everything after bonuses, commissions, stuff you have to pay to kind of users. So when you play on like a crypto casino, it's a bit different than like trading on exchange.  or whatnot, you're basically getting bonuses via cash back and stuff like that as you wager and as you play. So basically with NGR, you take away that commission, take away those bonuses, and that's what you end up with. 

<Jason Kam (07:14)>   It's usually like half of TGR. 

<Sterling (07:16)>   I don't know the full mix, it really depends though. It depends on how we do bonuses that week, depends on how we do bonuses that month, it depends on the user too. Like if the user mix is different a week, one week from another, it can vary quite a bit. So it's hard to really pin down. 

<Jason Kam (07:30)>   Got it. Got it. And sorry, and you say $120 to $150 million annualized. 

<Sterling (07:37)>   So I said 102 to 105, like that's like roughly where it is, but yeah, that's just based off our last couple of NGR ads to the lottery. But we've been growing that pretty, yeah, anyways. 

<Jason Kam (07:47)>   Got it. Annualize. So it's like 1.50 of the size of stake if you're both counting and NGR OK. Got it. That makes sense. 

<Sterling (07:52)>   Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, but again, like with stake it's tough because you don't actually know what their NGR is. You just have a revenue number and that's probably GGR if I had to guess. 

<Jason Kam (08:02)>   Got it. And then on your website, shuffle.com, and then tokenomics lottery history, we also see that on a weekly basis, there is a NGR contribution of 250 to 350k. What is that compared to the revenue number of about 100 million that you just gave me? 

<Sterling (08:19)>   So that revenue number I just gave you is based off our lottery. So that's like, that's our NGR. That's the thing we pay out. So like, even if you just extrapolate what we give out to the lottery, that's what our number is. Like our GGR would be like quite a bit higher than that because, you know, shuffle as a business, we have to give up bonuses. That's kind of like how the industry works. So that's just based off the NGR number, the stuff that actually goes straight back to the token holders. Yeah. 

<Jason Kam (08:40)>   Got it. And that's all of your revenue going back to lottery, or is it part of it? 

<Sterling (08:47)>   It's all the 15%. Like the 15 % we dedicate to, sorry, the lottery. 

<Jason Kam (08:54)>   OK, so walk me through this. So there's the betting volume, and then there's your GGR and NGR. And after you get the NGR, which is like 200, 300K a week or 100 million a year, the mechanism of your lottery mechanism for value capture is interesting. So walk me through how that works. 

<Sterling (09:11)>   So basically the way it works is we have the GGR, have NGR, which is like the net gaming revenue. We take 15 % of that NGR and we basically give it, yeah, 15 % of that NGR and we give it right back to the lottery. So the way the lottery works right now, if I'm just talking to a crypto investor audience, this is the easiest way to put it. Basically there's a jackpot and nine tiers of lottery prizes. Those are basically determined by a power 

<Jason Kam (09:20)>   One five. 

<Sterling (09:40)>   So you have five balls, one power ball. Essentially what we have is everything, how I basically count yields is that everything from like say second division to ninth division, stuff that's easier to win, is basically like a yield that a token holder can basically get. And then the jackpot is essentially like a call option. And so each week you basically get 15 % of this $100 million businesses like revenues directly to tokens. And then on top of that, there's a call option that's built in that you possibly hit for  the jackpot with our lottery. That's really from like a token, whole this point of view, like from users on our platform, we don't pitch it like that. We don't talk about it like that. The way we look at it is more of like, this is a product for retention. This is a product to get people like, you know, more familiar with staking. This is a product, like a product to like get people kind of familiar with what shuffle token does. So to a crypto investor, it's like, it's like a yield product plus a call option to like people on our platform, which are not crypto people at all. They're just gamblers really. 

<Sterling (10:40)>   It's a lottery. 

<Jason Kam (10:43)>   did you guys decide on this effectively lottery-based or pseudo-dividend type of payout of value capturing for your token versus actually buying back? 

<Sterling (10:53)>   super funny because like it's such a tough question to kind of answer. If I could take myself all the way back because we started out a lot like Rollbit did where it's like we have a buy back and burn, know, we buy back tokens each week depending on what our NGR is, we can use that NGR to purchase tokens on the open market. And it just didn't really work for us. Like we were spending millions of dollars of bankroll just basically purchasing tokens and having tokens get absolutely dumped by the market. This is obviously during our  our first airdrop. So we had quite a few tokens like ready to be sold into, I guess. But the way we kind of thought about it is like, okay, lotteries are a product that haven't really been perfected, so to speak, or even tried really well for crypto casinos in general. It's like this one area that...  crypto casinos for whatever reason just couldn't get right. There's lotteries on roll bit, is like, it's not that fun to play. There's lotteries on BC game, which are like not really like lotteries in any sense. They just feel like, like horrible products. Um, so we're like, how can we use the token to kind of like enter a new kind of vertical in our own field? So right now Shuffle's kind of split between, uh, you know, sports casino and lottery and like a lot of other casinos just don't have the third category. So the way we're kind of looking  out it is we start with a buy back and burn which is like great if you  I have a bunch of bankroll. It's great if you're a little bit of an older product, like an older casino to some extent. But we're still kind of young where bankroll is like not as big as say something like stake. So we kind of got to try new methods to kind of give value feedback to token as well as grow like our own user base. Cause at the end of the day, like if I keep paying out, say it's like token holders or whatnot, doesn't actually grow the product a ton just because there's this idea that... 

<Sterling (12:42)>   People think that like crypto casinos and like crypto exchanges have like the same user base. Like it's the same users you're competing for. But in reality, a crypto casino is like completely different business than crypto users. Like Jason, you are not my customer. Just being completely honest. Lots of guys. Yeah. Right. Like ants, a lot of guys on BidCast are listening are not my customer either. Like my customer is using crypto to deposit, you know, 200,000 USDT on Tron. So they can play blackjack ads. And then when they're done gambling,  they want to be able to withdraw that. It's a bit different than like a token holder's perspective where it's like most of the products you use, you can kind of tell like how good it is or like basically like you can basically feel the yield or you can feel the product. With us, like our main focus is on gamblers and getting people to keep playing on the casino. So we want to basically reward those people, right? So playing a lottery product makes a lot more sense. 

<Jason Kam (13:36)>   I see. So to the extent that it's basically finding another way to monetize or reward your user base. And if it's a buyback and burn, then it's just rewarding your non-user base. 

<Sterling (13:52)>   I think the thing is, is like you do buy back and burn, like it's great for like token price in the short term, at least when you have a bigger bank roll. When we were doing buy back and burn, our bank roll was nowhere near what it is like now. Like we just have a lot more kind of ammo to play with.  With Buyback and Burn, yeah, it's just a bit tricky. With lottery, I'm directly rewarding people on the platform that are playing these games, people that add to that revenue and whatnot. So if I send it out to, say, a Buyback or whatnot, I'm actually not rewarding my user base as much and not rewarding my true fans. So it's very tricky as a product to wrap your head around, because for us, I'm selling to one person and then I also have to sell it to another that it's not intended for, if that makes sense. Yeah. 

<Jason Kam (14:24)>   Fair enough. 

<Jason Kam (14:35)>   That's a good answer. When Kharitosh, and you talked to the lawyers about this mechanism design, did it scare you about maybe like security and capturing value for the dividend? 

<Sterling (14:47)>   I think the thing is we never call it dividend. Internally, it is a lottery. It's like you have a chance to play it. There's no guarantees that you will win anything to some extent. It's just the mechanics of a lottery at a certain size, they kind of mimic. The volatility basically spikes down to some extent because as you own more of that lottery pool, your volatility basically goes down. When we talk to Carataz and talk to Loris and whatnot, the main thing concerns we had was  like we want to make a lottery product. We want to basically make shuffle staking part of that lottery products because we think that's interesting product innovation. And when we talk to like, how do I put this? When we talk to like industry players, within the casino industry, they're like, wow, no one's ever done that before. So it's like.  The way we kind of looked at it is basically like it's an innovation when it comes to lotteries. It's an innovation when comes to rewarding token holders. Like we don't really call it dividend. We don't push as a dividend. We push it specifically just as something we can do to reward users on platform and basically keep them on platform and gambling. 

<Jason Kam (15:51)>   Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting design. I find it kind of cool. 

<Sterling (15:56)>   Yeah, it's not perfect, I think there's a lot of, mean, shuffles, there's definitely a lot of things wrong with shuffles, a lot of things we've done right. And I'm sure as we go into the call, we can talk about that as well. There's definitely improvements there. 

<Jason Kam (16:10)>   Before we get to the growth and the business aspect, I want to get a few more things straight. So GGR turns to NGR, and 15 % of it goes towards the lottery. You do have an equity component, which I guess is where the remainder 85 % goes to. Can you help me break down what that 85 % has kind of broken down into the equity part of your business? 

<Sterling (16:27)>   Correct. 

<Sterling (16:32)>   So I would say with the equity part, we haven't really done like many distributions, if at all, I'd have to double check. But on the equity side, it's not really equity per se, because you have to think about a crypto casino business a bit different than you would say an exchange business. Like I'll give you an example. So like hyperliquids, obviously like Jewel of crypto Twitter these days, like they're just seeing those revenue numbers go up like crazy. Like Jeff's built amazing product, like more power to him. It's a great business. So if Jeff has a hundred million,  in volume that goes through hyperliquid, can take, it's basically costless to him, right? As long as he has people trading on that, he can basically rip out 1%, half a percent, whatever the rake is from each one of those trades and basically shove it back into buyback and burn. When it comes to a crypto casino, it's actually a lot more like, uh,  The way you think about it is more like a trader. It's like you're growing bankroll. So the step process that you have to think about is completely different to most businesses that have revenue in crypto, which is like, to be completely frank, it's mostly exchanges. It's mostly centralized exchanges as well. So the way you have to think about it, yeah, yes. Yeah. 

<Jason Kam (17:38)>   understand. It's a book value business. It's a book value business that compounds. guess, so $100 of NGR, and then $15 goes to the lottery. The $85, do you spend most of it in marketing? And then some gets left over, gets added to the bankroll? How do you, if you can disclose that. 

<Sterling (17:59)>   A lot of it goes to bankroll these days just because the nature of Shuffle's crypto casino is like we do a lot of business with VIPs. VIPs are the main thing that grow our business. And it's a constant battle between how much bankroll you can grow and how you can basically scale up that VIP. So it's like when we were younger, say when the token launched and whatnot, we couldn't do $50,000 hands of blackjack just because if we had that, the variance on that is way too big. And just like a trader, your limits  are too big, just like if your leverage is too big, have a risk of of ruin. So essentially it is like we want to be able to grow bankroll as progressively as possible with our VIPs. So every time we grow bankroll, we're allowed to upper limits, grow bankroll, upper limits, grow bankroll, upper limits. And if we do that too quickly or we do that too in a case where it's not safe, it's a real threat to the business as opposed to crypto exchange where it's like, you know, someone makes a trade. Like all I really got to focus on is like basically giving that revenue right back to the token in the case of hyperliquid.  That's why Hyperliquid was done so well, I don't know off the top of my head actually what a bankroll is, but we're easily able to accept like $50,000 hands of blackjacks for certain VIPs. where limits are quite good when it comes to sports, off the street as well. Like I'm not sure what the specifics on that are, but yeah, like it's considerably better than when we first started with a token, when we first started the business obviously in like 2023. Yeah. 

<Jason Kam (18:59)>   Got it. And how big is your bankroll today? 

<Jason Kam (19:25)>   I'm just trying to get a sense of magnitude because the bankroll is basically your book value of the equity. If you're running $100 million in NGR, NGR is a lot higher because you pay out affiliate fees. You pay out $15 million to lottery. There's like an $85 million annualized income, which part of it, I don't know, $10 million, $20 million goes to paying salaries and whatnot. Your bankroll should be after two years, I don't know, 

<Sterling (19:30)>   Yeah. 

<Jason Kam (19:52)>   mid to mid a figures low nine figures is that the right way to think about this. 

<Sterling (19:56)>   I think it's the right way to think about it, but I would also say it's like you're putting that capital to use. It's like, it's not like it's like sitting there. Like you're basically just using it to get those next, that next level of users. and the way I kind of think about it is like, stake is the behemoth in the room, right? Like if you think our bankroll is like quite decent, like stakes bankroll is significantly better, right? Like they're able to basically take anyone's bets, anyone's size. Like if you're a billionaire, if you're a multi-billionaire, all that type of stuff. So they can basically accept all these VIPs at face value and take them on as clients, which is great.  as a casino. With Shuffle, it's growing against that's very tough because the network effects of capital, I guess, to some extent is super strong mistake. Where Shuffle's done really well in the last year or so is that we've been able to pick off some of these major VIPs from Stake and convert them over to Shuffle as a platform because Shuffle's like from a performance point of view, very similar to Stake, from a VIP management point of view, we actually do a lot of things better than them. So being able to grow bankroll as aggressively as 

<Jason Kam (20:34)>   Yes. 

<Sterling (20:56)>   can makes it so like the top line growth in business is so much better just because you can onboard these VIPs that typically haven't been able to go to any other casino because Steak has been the biggest guy in town. So it's a bit tricky to be like oh yeah like these guys are making a ton of money they're not using it all they're not giving it to token holders they're not giving it to equity or whatnot it's just like we're still in growth mode we're still trying to get more VIPs from guys like Roubette and Steak and we're just starting to get to the point where we can take on more and more VIPs with our bankroll. 

<Jason Kam (21:25)>   Yeah, I totally understand that because there's a real difference if your bankroll is 100 million versus like 500 million because to me, that's just the equities treasury that you could do discretionary buybacks, the shuffle token, if you so choose to. So, so I guess, I guess you can't disclose it is what I'm reading into it. 

<Sterling (21:42)>   I can't really disclose it now, but like the thing is with the, guess we have to talk about is like, you know, how we view the shuffle token in the future and stuff like that. Because like, you know, from my perspective and from a lot of people's perspective, yeah, I, up to you, honestly, like I can, I can talk about anything, but yeah. 

<Jason Kam (21:45)>   That's fine. 

<Jason Kam (21:51)>   Yeah, we could do it now, we could do it later, mean, whatever you want.  Yeah. Why don't we talk about growth for a second? Because to me, at least, the growth of a casino is the volume is not an easy feat. mean, you're able to claw away to VIP users. I guess the best way for me to phrase this question is that on the 100 million-ish kind of NGR you have today, with this current base, what would make you happy?  or what would make the management team happy in a year or two years time? Is there a number you want to get the NGR number to? And to get to that number, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or what kind of expenses do you think you need to run to increase that number? 

<Sterling (22:37)>   It's not really it. 

<Sterling (22:44)>   Yeah, this is thing, like it's not really a number for us. It's like, we want to be number two solidly. Like we want to be in that half space between Rubet and Stake. Like we don't want to be number three anymore. We don't want to be number four. We want to be basically that, that rate on Stake's tail where they're nervous about us. and to do that for spending it, it's really tough because, to be completely frank with a lot of crypto casinos and like a lot of people have been around a lot longer.  Their bankrolls are bigger. They just haven't been able to grow deposits that well, but they spend so much money, obsessive amounts, sorry, excessive amounts of money on basic things that aren't worth it. So a lot of the things that we could use to grow, in like a regular market, I say regular with big quotations, like in a regular industry, like just gets overbid, like crazy. Like there's some examples of like, I'll give you an example. So like a gambling streamer that has like a thousand  Sorry, like, yeah, say like a thousand concurrent views or say, or say a thousand views on YouTube video. How much do you think like someone in industry would pay that person a month to stream like, say like two videos, three videos a month? How much do you think we pay? So a thousand views a video, they make four to eight videos a month. How much do we pay a month? Or how much does the industry pay a month for that person? 

<Jason Kam (23:51)>   1000 per. 

<Jason Kam (24:00)>   I have no idea you pay $10 $50 per viewer, something like that. 

<Sterling (24:05)>   It's like 10 to 15,000 US a month just to get that person and they're doing a thousand views. it's like the bottom end of the market is extremely strong. And then on the top end, you have guys like TrainwrecksTV, guys like Aiden Ross that Stake is like, paying, I think the rumors are like, you know, almost like a hundred million US. Like they're getting paid more than LeBron James to stream slots. So like that entire market where lots of growth is for us as well as other crypto casinos, 

<Jason Kam (24:11)>   That's about right. 

<Sterling (24:35)>   is like massively, massively overpriced. So it's a bit tricky. Yeah, it's really tricky. mean, thing is, you're trying to be a value investor as much as possible. So with us, we've had a lot of success with finding new markets and finding new ways to grow. So when it comes to streamers, that's a big deal for us. We kind of identified a weird niche where it's like, we were first to this. It was like... 

<Jason Kam (24:40)>   So how do you grow? Or do you want to grow? Yeah. How do you do that? 

<Sterling (25:03)>   This is going to sound ridiculous, like roided out weightlifters. Like that was a whole niche that we basically took over and owned. It's super bizarre to say a lot, but basically like that demographic was not really identified as like some place where you could stick money into and you'd convert to users. So.  For people that are like more like on the internet and stuff like that, it's like guys named Togi. This guy's like Steve will do it. Togi used to be on shuffle.com. Now he's with Rubet Steve will do it. Same type of thing where he's like these, you know, these big bustled up guys that basically like are hyper masculine. We were super early to that. We made a ton of ROI when comes to like that conversion. And then we kind of work with people that like really love Shuffle the Brand because I think like a lot of these  Crypto casinos are kind of faceless, they're nameless. Like if you want to take a call with them, you wouldn't be able to talk to anyone. It's kind of like with Rollbit, like who are the founders of Rollbit? No one knows, but like everyone knows what Noah's face looks like from the crypto casino point of view. You're taking a call with me, this is my real name. Like that type of stuff lowers the cost of capital for us, like quite significantly when it comes to growing. 

<Jason Kam (26:10)>   How do you calculate internally, how do you think about the ROI of some of these marketing deals? Do you offer them cash? it affiliate, by gambling volume? Is there a framework that you guys use? 

<Sterling (26:21)>   Yeah. So like usually most of the industry does actually, don't know how real estate and all these guys used to do it, but like a lot of the industry, they do is they take a look at, they take a look at what the music, the creator can bring to the table. It's kind of like influencer marketing in its very essence, but you're just overpaying for everyone.  That being said, like we work with really great partners that are like unbelievable, repping shuffle the brand, like kind of those type of guys and the people we want to work with just because the rest of the industry is so predatory when it comes to pricing. as soon as there's some sort of hype or some sort of momentum behind it, they'll push like basically all their dollars into bidding that up. So we kind of have to compete on just being like the best place to hang out with on top of like place to work with. So when we look at it's streamers and whatnot, maybe like an initial deal, we'll look at like.  How many concurrent viewers do they get on kick.com? How many concurrent viewers do they get on Twitch? What does their affiliate data look like if they've worked with another partner before? What do they like to talk to? What's their demographics like? It's kind of intangible stuff like that. And then we can kind of pass them on a deal. But most of the time, the best deals for us, and the best deals for us growing, is working with people that really want to work with us and work with the brand.  And that's been probably like our best area of growth is working with service that love us. 

<Jason Kam (27:42)>   So those guys, don't take cash upfront. kind of just. 

<Sterling (27:44)>   So what the, sorry, I'll cut you off there, but basically what it'll do is like, say it's like a deal for, you know, Jason would give you a casino deal. You talk with Shuffle on Twitter sometimes and every month we'll deposit $10,000 of balance in your account. That's yours. You can withdraw it. You can use it to play. You can do whatever you want with it. You can give it to your community. You can basically use any of those methods to kind of grow your audience or whatnot.  And that's your money. it's, not ours. Like we give it to you and that's your raw balance. So all our industry basically works like this. You have a raw balance that you can use the gamble or use the withdraw or use the pay for other things. But that's basically how it works. It's like you evaluate a deal, you give a raw balance. That usually plays on your platform. They may use it in other ways, like giving to their community members, but that's like the kind of like, yeah. 

<Jason Kam (28:30)>   I see. then you assess them every month. Like, you delivering gambling? Are you delivering NGR to us? And then usually there's a re- okay. 

<Sterling (28:36)>   Kind of. Yeah, kind of. It depends though. It's like, it's a lot more contextual. It's like, if, if someone has like a great partner for us historically and they're having a bad month, we're not going to be like, like you're on the street where like some other casinos would be like, okay, we have milked this cow dry, moving on to the next cow. You know what I mean? Yeah. 

<Jason Kam (28:54)>   I see. So it's a tough thing because your NGR is not recurring, so to speak. Over time, gamblers do lose money. So if your growth effort doesn't pan out, the NGR actually drops over time until all your gamblers go bankrupt. So I guess from what I gather from you, actually growing this run rate number is quite challenging. It changes from month 

<Sterling (29:17)>   it's extremely challenging. And like, if you look at our docs from way back in the day, there's some months where we didn't do any buyback and that's because we lost $5 million that week or we lost $2 million that week. We lost a hundred grand that week.  was just in the negative. So it's again, it's a lot more like growing your trading account rather than growing hyperliquid to some extent. And that's what's really tricky. A lot of people aren't very good at growing their trading account. And a lot of people, even if they have an edge or an implied edge with us, right, we have an edge against our players, of course, it's really tough to grow bankroll. And especially if you don't know what you're doing. So that's why it's really tough for these really small casinos to grow because they can't take on VIPs to grow. It's really tough for mid-market casinos to grow because there's always someone else that can service them.  it's very tough and that's someone else's stake. 

<Jason Kam (30:05)>   Let me put this to another question that if you want to become the number two and surpass rollbit and become this, what do you have to do to get there in the next 12 to 24 months? 

<Sterling (30:15)>   So yeah, would say for once, we're in front of it a bit when it comes to like all these metrics, when it comes to like, we pass them firmly, which is great, great to talk about. But Rubets are number two, Rubets like. 

<Jason Kam (30:24)>   Nice. 

<Sterling (30:30)>   Rubet's had a lot of growth in the last year. Basically, they are the over payers. If Stake doesn't pay for someone, Rubet's going to come in and basically drop a ton of cash on these guys. So it's been really tough to grow on that streamer angle. We're looking at a lot of different opportunities though. Obviously there's stuff when it comes to sponsorship. We haven't really touched that yet.  Stake.com obviously has the F1 team. Rollbit has their front of Jersey on Southampton. Rubet has Chelsea FC, I think either on the side or like maybe like as an official partner or something like that. Like we haven't really touched that yet. We've done really cheap things of way to do that. So we sponsored Crypto Fight Night for like a couple, a couple iterations of that. Like when Ansem and Barney fought, like we were one of the title sponsors for that. That's been really good for us. But that really doesn't, that's really small potatoes now compared to going from third to second.  Um, I think the main thing with us is like, lotteries is a massive category that hasn't been touched by any of these other crypto casinos. And to be honest, I think like the way we're going to do the next iterations of the lottery and stuff like that, it's just, it's going to be basically a whole other vertical for them that I don't think they'll be able to compete against once we get to that point. So the way we're thinking about it is like, we have to try new things. We have to try stuff like sponsorship. We have to basically start paying more, maybe for more streamers, just so we get more people in the door.  not overpaying but just like just doing it like just going out there and spending more money and then on top of that doing new and innovative stuff because that's what we're really good at like I think if you asked anyone in the last year like what the best marketing or the best like kind of inbound for Casino was it was Shuffle's airdrop  We went from a hundred million a month in wager volume to two billion in one month. It's like unheard of. It's like never been done before. So we have to do that again, basically without doing token missions or anything like that. Just creating a new product category, creating something that's more crypto-ish. like, that's what I'd like to talk to you about at the end of this call is like talking about lotteries and stuff, because that is super, super exciting. 

<Jason Kam (32:29)>   Well, we can touch on that now, which is kind of the next question. I was trying to get a guidance out of you on NGR, but I guess that's not how you think about it. You think about the size of your kind of book compounding over time. And there could be a lull in your business, and you just can't grow that number. Interesting. Maybe let me ask it this way. What are some of the most exciting things that you're working on right now that could kind of drive your business to the next level? Is it? 

<Jason Kam (32:57)>   different type of sports betting? it the lottery talk that is something else we haven't touched on? 

<Sterling (33:02)>   Yeah, I think the sponsorship side we talked about is obviously important. It's something that you can spend a lot of money on and get a lot of eyeballs on. lot of these casinos that have spent money on it have seen decent returns from stuff like that. I think from a, we're like a product-led company. If we wanted to make a casino that felt like every other casino or felt like BC Game or some of these other casinos that are kind of mish-mashed together, we could do that. But we're product-led. The reason why we have users and the reason why we have users that stay and keep playing on a shuffle is because  because like the products grade. So basically what I'm trying to get at is that this whole new category with the lottery is like something where we have a massive edge in where it's right now, erase the shuffle lottery from your brain as far as like a product goes. Like think about it from a crypto person's point of view or like the way I think about it is.  Lotteries have basically been an idea that's been in crypto since 2015, 16, basically ages ago. Like there should be a global lottery that basically anyone in the world can play. Anyone in the world can buy a ticket. Anyone in the world can log on and basically play this Powerball or play this Mega Millions. So the way we want to kind of do that is like do more of a crypto product because lotteries are like one of those things that from a point of view of like, you know, how we've been talking about bankroll and growing that and whatnot.  It's actually like a lot more durable when it comes to like how it works and whatnot. Like you have this big float of cash that you use to basically incentivize ticket sales. You have a lot easier time tracking sales as well, like with mega millions and say like something like Powerball, right? Basically once it enters a certain number or enters a certain EV, it takes off like this. It's very easy to track basically that revenue. So.  If we can do lotteries the right way, and when I lotteries the right way, mean lotteries like on-chain, permissionless. 

<Sterling (34:50)>   basically anyone in the world can buy a ticket. Like I think that's a crazy, crazy business opportunity for shuffle and specifically shuffle token as well. Just because right now it's like, right now we're like Binance before like BNB was like a network coin. We're like just BNB at the moment. Like we're not BSC. And to that extent too, we're kind of like Solana when Solana was just kind like an FTX coin. Like you really couldn't do much on chain. You could do stuff on chain, but the product wasn't very good. Now we're basically trying to take that lottery from that BNB  to like a BSC experience where it's going to be something that's on chain, something that anyone can play and someone that anyone can really build on top of. So I know Mitchell, like kind of talks about it in the bid club, like this LST idea of like, basically, okay, if you have a lottery that gives up yield, like we should be able to plug that into every other concept that exists on chain, like Pendle, liquid staking tokens, all type of infrastructure. And that's like an idea that's been in my head for ages. I've been wanting to do something like that for a really long time. And it's just like, we haven't had...  the resources of the focus that kind of go from BNB to BSC, but now we do. So if I had to like summarize this, it's basically like we're looking at the lottery product as a category in the casino. That's super interesting, but even more interesting is like bringing that on chain and doing that with like all the tools that make that experience great now. Cause like, you know, back in the day it's, or even still to this day, some people just don't get on chain. Some people don't get that you need to make it feel like a great product. And like, we can take that knowledge from shuffle.com and  basically apply that to like a decentralized permissionless on-chain lottery that involves like shuffle token and stuff like that. So that's kind of like the most exciting thing for us. 

<Jason Kam (36:29)>   What, I guess, timeline and form factor of what that might look like for a typical user? 

<Sterling (36:34)>   Yeah, I think the thing is with us is like, there's like a lot of moving parts of this. Like, I think like the stuff we can do to make shuffle better is like so easy to me. It's like right in front of me. It just like hasn't addressed yet. It hasn't been like, I think we kind of go after. So with us, it's like, if we do something on chain, like shuffle the coin is on ETH mainnet. It's like, what year is it? You know what mean? Like no one trades on mainnet anymore, but that's a consequence of.  basically us launching at the wrong time. We launched when the biggest runners of the day were like Unibot and Pepe on ETH Mainnet. It's a very different ecosystem now. And to be honest, from a user point of view, no one would ever play an on-chain lottery where you got to spend money on ETH Mainnet. It's got to be on something like Base or Solana. So one of the big innovations we want to do is basically just bring Shuffle onto a chain where it can be used on-chain and be part of DeFi. So don't really have too many details more outside of that.  looking at two the networks, I think you can kind of guess which ones to look at, to basically shuffle there. And on top of that, creating a smart contract that basically allows us to do the on-chain Powerball and then as well as that have the on-chain shuffle lottery. So kind of the similar format now, but the whole yield and like being able to like access that yield is super easy to do because I know I'm going on and on about lotteries and stuff like that. But like one of the key takeaways from like why this yield like doesn't get arbitraised away from like a trader's point of view is like you have to deposit on a  So if you're like at a hedge fund or your family office or your prop fund or whatnot, basically no one's going to sign off on depositing millions and millions of dollars onto a casino. Like no one will write off that risk. So it's like, if you think about it from that perspective, like the product gets better on chain from a shuffle lottery perspective, the user base gets bigger because it's basically permissionless. Anyone can go and buy a ticket. And on top of that, the network effects for actually having on chain lottery is absolutely massive. it's hard to describe.  But basically, if you can do that product, it's really, really strong. 

<Jason Kam (38:33)>   That makes sense. I guess the transition to different chain and actually, it going to be on mobile first product? Is it to be a mobile first PWA product or is it going to be desktop? 

<Sterling (38:40)>   So, say it again, mobile first. 

<Sterling (38:45)>   Yeah.  That's basically like the, can do both, but like essentially what we'll have is like basically this, this lottery product that exists outside of Shuffle, but it's still connected to Shuffle on the backend. So the way we're kind of thinking about it is like shuffle.com is again, like Coinbase or Binance. And then you have the network kind of thing attached to it. So with Coinbase it's based with BNB it's BSC. And basically those two things interact with each other, but anyone can access this, this pool of lottery funds and still be connected to this pool like this. 

<Jason Kam (39:16)>   Right, but you're not launching a layer one or a layer two. You're just creating a pool that is on chain somewhere and any people can tap into it. Okay. But the first product you come out with using this pool would be a, cause I'm imagining it would be like a mobile first PWA product where you can use Apple pay to like buy a lottery ticket, something like that. 

<Sterling (39:34)>   Yeah, I mean, that'd be the perfect use case. Obviously it's tough with gambling, getting like on the app stores and stuff like that, but like there's so much good tech when it comes to like, I don't know if you've used like stuff like HyperLigure and stuff, they use Privy for all like their logins. Ostium does stuff where basically you can basically deposit any type of USDC or Solana or whatever and basically be on the network. Polymarket does that perfectly. So having a product kind of like Polymarket, but for lotteries would be the ultimate goal for us. 

<Jason Kam (40:04)>   How soon can you build this? it in the works? Are we looking at next year? What does it look like? 

<Sterling (40:13)>   We're still talking with bunch of the partners for this, but we're trying to aim for end of this year for like getting this out. But again, like my focus is mostly on that. And then the rest of team will continue to focus basically on the core casino. basically Shuffle Lottery will still exist. Shuffle Lottery will still be something we do, but this is about like basically democratizing that, making it easier to access rather than just being on the casino. 

<Jason Kam (40:38)>   Got it. So it's like a mass market blockchain backend ring fenced, probably mobile, highly entertaining, like polymarket type of lottery experience running on a faster chain. 

<Sterling (40:49)>   Yeah, basically. It's like basically over the last six months, I've learned everything there is to do with lotteries. And one of the big innovations from lotteries back in the day, and I know this is a complete diversion from crypto and all that core uses, but lotteries used to be little pools of capital in each state. So it's like the state in New York would have a $10 million lottery. Oregon would have a $5 million lottery. And all these individual little states would basically run their own lottery pools and use it to the governments or fund whatever.  And then the eighties or nineties, there's this innovation called the multi-state lottery organization where they connected everyone's prize pool to the same prize pool. So a Powerball ticket sold in one state is connected to another Powerball ticket sold in another state. So instead of having 50 lotteries with $1 million prizes, you now have one lottery all interconnected with a $50 million jackpot, which helps everyone because you get more sales, helps everyone because it's just more interesting products when you have all everything kind of connected. And what we want to do at Shuffle is basically  create that multi-state lottery thing on-chain where basically we have shuffle.com is that kind of like first front end for the lottery. And then we have this on-chain prize pool where anyone can play and basically connect to. That's kind of what we want to create because lotteries, as you know, like there's not really any great ones. even like, if you think back to like 2019, you have like pool together. That's not really a lottery. You have Megapod, which is on base. That's not really a lottery either. It's like more of a raffle system. Like there really isn't.  And there's such a huge opportunity to create basically like the internet's powerball. And that's kind of like what we're looking at next. Yeah. 

<Jason Kam (42:25)>   I see. Does it move to needle versus the $50 million you give to the shuffle lottery stakers? 

<Sterling (42:34)>   Yeah, I think so because it's a lot more durable when it comes to like revenue. So like the way we kind of look at it is like if you can sell a lottery ticket, like lottery tickets margins are like, you know, 50 % goes to the prize pool and like from like, from a conventional lottery's point of view, the like, basically the revenue is massive. Like if we sell a Plinko bed or we sell a sports bed or whatnot, that usually like margin is like, you 1 % to 10 % or  With lotteries, it's like in the 15 to 50 % margin. So that revenue is a lot more durable when it comes to being able to basically feed that back into the token. And it's just like, if you can grow that and you can have that innovative product, I also think it unlocks quite a bit on the other side of shuffle, which is associating it more with lotteries and basically this fun thing that everyone plays rather than gambling to some extent. So it's like a kind of a two-edged prong where it's like, if you can kind of get that product out the door and you can feed users into it,  it. You can basically create a network effect that is more durable product that has more user base outside of like pure crypto people like you can get more consumers on it and on top of that it's just like a way easier pill to swallow than just like pure gambling because everyone plays lotteries. They're the most popular gambling product in the world. They're endorsed by governments etc etc. 

<Jason Kam (43:53)>   But it seems like it's a year-end kind of thing. It's not imminent. 

<Sterling (43:56)>   No, not in the next week or so, like, you know, it's going to be something that's going to be big focus for us outside of the corkus, you know. 

<Jason Kam (44:02)>   Got it. Is it as big as your other efforts or are there any other efforts that's like similar size, smaller, bigger sports betting or any other? 

<Sterling (44:11)>   I would say on the sports betting side, in the casino side, it's very iterative, right? Like we're trying to basically grow our games. We're trying to grow our, like make the product as good as possible. And that's like, you know, improving the amount of providers we have on the platform. That's creating new games for users of play. So from our side, it's like we have a bunch of originals, like originals in our sense just means like games we make ourselves. So it's like Plinko.  Dice, Kino, Mines, to like someone that's never been on a casino, these probably don't mean a lot to you, but they're basically games that are replicated across every casino that you go on online. And basically we want to grow that stack because a lot of our competitors are starting to invest more in original games and we think that's pretty important for us too. 

<Jason Kam (44:55)>   So those efforts are more incremental versus if the lottery kind of works, it will be more transformational to the valid capture. Okay. 

<Sterling (45:01)>   Yeah, extremely, extremely. Like I think if the lottery takes off, it's a generational product, because it's like one of those things in crypto that's been talked about forever. it basically like Vitalik, if you go back from like 2017, he's talking about lotteries. If you go to like the original Bitcoin threads, they're talking about like lotteries that Bitcoin can provide for and like you place with tickets for it. Because there just hasn't been an internet lottery yet. So like shuffle the token and shuffle the company. Like we really want to basically give our best efforts at creating that. 

<Jason Kam (45:31)>   Do you plan to up the tick rate of 15 % on the NGR to the token? 

<Sterling (45:36)>   for NGR, I think maybe in the future, but definitely not at this moment. We're still growing. If we were to stake position, it'd be something we'd look into, but it's not something that's not a radar. We're still looking at trying to grow the pipe when it comes to lotteries and the rest of the games and growing bankroll. 

<Jason Kam (45:52)>   Yeah, I mean, guess regarding the lottery, just because I haven't done the deep dive like you did. I just can't wrap my head around what it could mean for the shuffle stakeholders, because the economics of this thing is very different than a casino or a sports betting. And it seems like there are a lot of go to market barriers that prevented it from being big. There's infrastructure issues of crypto that prevented from being big. I guess. 

<Jason Kam (46:22)>   Just what would success look like for you if this lottery thing worked? Like, are we talking about 100 million per annum of valid capture to token hold? Like, what would it look like if you were to paint a picture? 

<Sterling (46:31)>   If I was to paint a picture, it's like...  When we have like a product like a lottery that is like has a solid user base, like with Shuffle right now we have 45,000 active users that play like at least once a week or whatnot. Like that's, that's pretty big for a casino. Um, with a, with a lottery, like the amount of people that play lotteries in real life, lot of people that play lotteries across the world is massive. Um, the revenues are a lot more durable and in theory, this lottery would be something that we'd give like most, if not all of that revenue back to the token. So obviously.  I'm a big admirer of hyperliquid. I love what they've done with the product and stuff like that. The reason we can't do hyperliquid for shuffles is the whole reason I basically talked about on this podcast is like we need to grow bankroll. When it comes to you, lotteries, they're so much more durable and so much easier to like project out when it comes to revenue. They're fully like, basically lotteries you can't lose as a product, right? So the way I think about it is like if you get to a point of view where the lottery is doing, you know, say it's like a hundred million dollar lottery or  which with Powerball Omega Millions, the starting jackpot's at 20 million. So you can get to a point where basically you have equivalent products and you have it where anyone in the world can kind of play this equivalent product and you have these revenues that are a lot more durable.  And you can connect it to the core casino, like say like shuffle.com. Like that is a crazy great product as far as like giving as much back to shuffle token holders as possible because like the opportunity there for connecting that internet lotto to web free infrastructure is just something that hasn't been touched at and something that's super exciting for us. 

<Jason Kam (48:07)>   Hmm. I guess it hasn't been done. Part of it is in front of the part of it is it just seems like the cost to reach the end state customer to just pull up something and just do Apple pay, pay $5. While none of the channels I think are very friendly because of regulatory reasons to that, that seems like a big issue of go to market. Is that, is that right? 

<Sterling (48:31)>   Yeah, yeah, for sure. But I think that's correct. But in the same methods, like why did Shuffle take off? guess like it has all the same problems that a typical lottery would have on top of, you know, it's a scary product to use with like a more niche audience. Sure, there's whales and like there's lots of people like that, but...  I think like a generalized lottery with it connected to like a core casino is just like a killer product just because this core casino can basically market that lottery. And this lottery as well as being on chain is permissionless. So as it grows and as it gains that network effect of having say a 15, 20, $50 million jackpot, it gets a lot easier to sell to people. And it gets a lot easier for to basically get rid of those blockers because once it gets to a number that's exciting and it's real and people can play it.  It kind of goes on from there, right? It's just like the cold start problem is the tough part. And when you have a business that is doing well as like Shuffle OZ, it helps with the cold start problem quite a bit. 

<Jason Kam (49:32)>   That is true. And I guess just to, because this is a big part of the growth effort, it seems like. Let's say it does get to like a $50 million jackpot and it kind of rolls every month or every other week, let's say. And for some reason, I heard about it because for whatever, like how do I go from hearing about it at that point to buying a lottery ticket in your mind, like at the end state? 

<Sterling (49:55)>   In my mind, it's like any of these really great on-chain experiences. It's like, basically, if you go on Polymarket right now, you deposit whatever you have in your Coinbase or any other wallet. You deposit, you buy tickets, you wait for those tickets to resolve. And then when that experience is done or you've won $50 million, you can just withdraw it just as a permissionless app, almost like exactly how Polymarket does it. Yeah. 

<Jason Kam (50:19)>   I see. Okay. And if I don't have crypto, I'll just like moon pay it like it'll be on the website. Interesting. 

<Sterling (50:25)>   Yeah, like MoonPaint, MoonPaint, all those types of onboarding is so much better than even when we started to make shuffle like in 2023, like so many of the things have improved like 10X from there. it's, that's what makes it so exciting. Like that consumer side of it, we can finally do it now. 

<Jason Kam (50:40)>   And Casino, like gambling, like this is okay with MoonPay? I guess you're doing it now. Okay. Interesting. 

<Sterling (50:45)>   Yeah, it depends though. Moonpay and these onboarders and whatnot, they're kind of finicky. They're kind of like centralized exchanges where it's like, if you're too small and they can't make enough money on you, they don't really care. But once you get to a certain size and you get to a point where you make sense as a business, basically they come and basically want to talk to you. So it'd be the same thing for the lottery. 

<Jason Kam (51:09)>   Now, how do you think about shuffle as a token going forward? 

<Sterling (51:15)>   Shuffle is a token going forward. So like the interim, it's basically like what it is right now. It's a shuffle lottery. You basically will get a portion of shuffles out of yards and growing that as well as like, you know, doing small improvements to the shuffle lottery on site. But in the future, like we want to get to that point where we can shove as much as we can into a buyback or into yields or into staking or whatnot.  And a lot of that again comes back to the on-chain lottery part. If we can get that product right, basically we can turn on the taps when it comes to like basically feeding the token as much as possible. Just because like, you know, it's very clear, like you'd have to...  The way I look at it, like, if you're in crypto and you're an operator, if you're not looking at hyperliquid and seeing what they're doing, like if you have the ability to generate revenue or you have the ability to basically be a business, like a lottery or a casino or an exchange, like basically make money, I think the hyperliquid method is the best way to do it. And like, if we get to a point where the large product is done extremely well, I think that's like the best model to go for. But yeah. 

<Jason Kam (52:16)>   Noah in interviews talked about wanting to get shuffle to the top 100. I guess the lottery is the way you get there. 

<Sterling (52:23)>   Yeah, I think it's lottery. think it's like, even if, even if the lottery fuzz on space or say like, we don't launch it for another two years, think like shuffle the core casino is like in such a good place right now when it comes to bankroll, when it comes to like our tenacity to get more deals, when it comes to like what our sites are on for the product. So even if, even if lottery doesn't pan out or say, even if like, you know, we experienced like less growth or whatnot, like I think the core, poor businesses in such a good state at the moment that I think shuffle a token will  do extremely well just because like we're getting better at doing everything like you gotta be you gotta look back at this like from the perspective of us like we started with you know like two years ago and now it's like basically you know top two top three in a land that started in 2017 2018 BC game like 2016 like basically super long ago like these guys are kind of weathered warriors compared to us to some extent so we're still got a lot of white space 

<Jason Kam (53:19)>   And how, because to me, it's a bit of like a black box outside looking in because NGR depends on how crazy people feel like every particular week of gambling. But I guess how comfortable, how much visibility do you guys have on the sort of one through six month look forward NGR figures of your business? 

<Sterling (53:39)>   I think we kind of grow it like...  Like it's so tough because it's so whale dominated, right? Like some, some days, like some guy can walk through the door and like change the business overnight. That's what's so difficult about modeling these things out. Like if steak, if steak has a bunch of VIPs and they're not service correctly, like there's soup, there's no switching costs when it comes to these businesses, right? Like if you don't like the deal that steak's giving you, like from the perspective of a whale, you can go shuffle or you can go to roulette or you can go to a roll bit. So the way these guys stick around usually is like, uh, they'll leave steak, they'll try. 

<Sterling (54:12)>   bunch of the casinos and they'll end up either back at stake or at shuffle. Just, it's just very, very tough to model out because one or two whales can just decide so much of your, of your NGR that month. So it's hard, it's hard to model out. The best thing we can do is basically keep growing our margins, keep growing with the users that we have on platform outside of whales. But again, it's tough to model for. 

<Jason Kam (54:33)>   Hmm. Are you doing anything to improve liquidity or getting on some sandbox changes, stuff like that? 

<Sterling (54:40)>   you  Oh man, I can talk about centralized exchanges all day, shuffle and stuff like that. It's such a frustrating thing. So way back in the day when we were doing our token lives, we did it kind of in a weird way from the point of view of now. Like this was like, we decided on this in 2023. But basically it was the only method we could really go and go to market with. So when we were talking to exchanges like Binance and Bybit and whatnot, they just do not want to, they, especially back then, they didn't want to take the risk on casino  coins because they kind of in 2017 and 18 they were kind of open doors to like casino coins so they had like fun token there's a bunch of other I think was like a unicorn was on Binance and stuff like that like there's a wealth of casino gambling coins basically at some point Binance said we can't do this for a more compliance reasons we couldn't they've really buttoned up on that point  I think most of the reason for that is because a lot of these guys have ties to mainland China or stuff that basically the number one rule on the wall is like no gambling, no casinos. So that's been frustrating to deal with prior in like 2023 because the first answer was always no. We kind of had to trot our own path. When it comes to nowadays, it's actually really interesting talking to people because when I talk to exchanges now, it's not so much about the risk because they've all taken that leap with meme coins and kind of all taking that leap with risk.  when it comes to like, you know, the Trump administration and whatnot. So the conversation now is a lot different. It's less about us being a casino and more about, you know, us having low volume right now, just because we haven't really put a ton of focus on the token as much as we could. Where that's being switched on now, where we're going to be going on chain with a lottery. We're going to be putting a lot more efforts into making the token kind of grow through that product, as well as like, you know, potentially switching networks as well. So it's less so about, you know, us being a scary gambling company with like very 

<Sterling (56:33)>   users and more so about like can we get like the on-chain metrics right can we talk to the right people etc etc 

<Jason Kam (56:42)>   So that's interesting. So two things. While the product of your lottery may only come by your end, the chain switching could come faster. You'd have a timeline of that, I guess. 

<Sterling (56:53)>   don't have time like, cause we're still talking to dinner foundations, we're talking to dinner people about what we should do, but I think we have a pretty clear direction. just, when we can announce it, we will announce it and we'll go from there. 

<Jason Kam (57:03)>   But if you do go to a different chain, will be a shuffle token itself will also be live on that chain, obviously, because of the lottery. interesting. And so if central exchanges now, you feel very confident then it's just a matter of paying the right dollars plus having the trading volume up, then you would be listed. 

<Sterling (57:09)>   Correct, 100%. 

<Sterling (57:22)>   I yeah, I think the thing is, like, the way I look at it is like, our users are so much different than crypto users. Like from a differentiation point of view, it's like, I'll give you an example. When we did our airdrop, our first airdrop in March of 2024, all our Japanese users had no idea what airdrop was.  Every single one of them. They had no idea what an airdrop meant. They had no idea what a token was. They had no idea anything about networks or whatnot. They didn't know what Ethereum was basically. All they knew was that they buy on Coinbase so they can deposit on shuffle and gamble with it.  that user is so different than the typical crypto user for exchanges. And the typical person that goes on these places and buys outside of like the feed onboarding ones, kind of like Coinbase, Kraken, Binance and some markets. So from a point of view of that, like our user base is so differentiated. It's a good add on for these exchanges. On top of that, it's what other parts of it? It's like.  We basically just, because we're so opaque as a casino at this moment, like we're just not very good at showing metrics. And like, that's the reason why shuffle token is like kind of suffering in price is that we don't really put out what our yield is at this moment. We don't really put out like how many users we have. We put out like kind of metrics we can share, which is like how much wage of all the token does, how many users like have it on platform, how much is staked on platform and stuff like that. But we don't really put it out into say like DeFiLlama Lama or any of these like really big kind of places where like knowledge cap  for like crypto. Yeah, exactly. Like, why not? It's such an easy thing to do, right? So with us, like, that's what we're to be focusing on next. It's like, you get on a network that makes sense for crypto. It gets more attention on basically our coin. We get like aligned with metrics. We get aligned with like, you know, basically being able to show like, hey, Shuffle is actually like the top 10 of these things. But I think it doesn't make sense right now because realistically speaking, we're a casino product. But in the next year or so, we're going to be turning more into a crypto. 

<Jason Kam (58:51)>  Why not? 

<Sterling (59:19)>  it's a product that basically more consumers could use. So when all those things kind of line up, it's kind of unavoidable from a point of view of like an exchange or anyone that's like on chain to like see these things, similar to like how Hyperliquid did it where it's like, wow, these guys are doing X amount of revenue. You can see the buyback, you can see the users. Like we want to get to the point of view where we have a product like a lottery that basically can show off that same types of metrics and keep like the casino business like relatively the same. 

<Jason Kam (59:46)>  But the metrics tracking will come after you shift the chain. So that's not in time soon. early as it seems like a Q3, Q4 thing, right, at the early. 

<Sterling (59:49)>   Yeah, correct. Yeah, correct.  I think we move pretty quick once we pick a direction and we're pretty close to picking a direction. It's just more about can we do this and like what are like, like basically picking what chain you want. Cause like, you know, everyone that's basically launching a coin these days or like if I did launch shuffle again, like it's very obvious where I'd go and whatnot. So it's just more about figuring out what's the best like basically network, what's the best culture for us. And that's what we're kind of identifying right now. Yeah. 

<Jason Kam (01:00:21)>  Understood. Is there anything else we haven’t covered you want to talk about that excites you?

<Sterling (01:00:27)>  There’s a couple of fun ones in here, honestly. I like the Rollbit question about “is the revenue real?” That’s always a fun one for people.

<Jason Kam (01:00:33)>  I mean, is it real? I don’t know, but you’re above them now. So the question becomes, is your revenue real? It kind of doesn’t matter.

<Sterling (01:00:38)>  Yeah, for sure. Well, if you stay for a lot, you’ll be able to see that real revenue with Rollbit. It’s always so weird because crypto people are super skeptical … even if it was real or shady, they couldn’t explain it properly.

<Jason Kam (01:01:31)>  Um, so what I got out of this is you’re going to try to maintain and grow the ~$100 M NGR annualized—no promises—but you feel good about marketing and VIP growth. The big push is the lottery product by year end, with Q3/Q4 chain strategy and stakeholder‐metrics work before then.

<Sterling (01:01:59)> Yeah, I think we’ve built a great crypto‐casino product, and now it’s time to grow a crypto‐native product on top—like Coinbase→Base or Binance→BSC. Not L2‐specific, but giving users a product that fully leverages crypto’s upside.

<Jason Kam (01:02:01)> I basically covered it.

<Jason Kam (01:02:22)>  Hmm—let’s give members three seconds to see if they have any questions.

<Sterling (01:02:29)>  Cool, easy.

<Jason Kam (01:02:33)>  I don’t think so. Sterling, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

<Sterling (01:02:36)>  Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks so much, Jason.

<Jason Kam (01:02:39)>  Thank you.