Royale Finance, a cross-chain DeFi solution that uses liquidity pools to provide funding for iGaming startups, today announced it has raised $1.45 million USD to merge DeFi with iGaming, a multi-billion dollar market that includes online casinos, sports betting, poker, prediction markets, lotteries, and more.
Contributors to Royale’s funding round include Alphabit Fund, AU21 Capital, Fomocraft Ventures, Kyros Ventures, and Vendetta Capital.
The online gambling market is expected to reach $127.3 billion USD by 2027, a compound annual growth rate of 11.5%. Researchers say that the rise of digital assets and secure digital payments are contributing to the sector’s growth. However, many online games have little transparency in how they operate, leading to concerns over trustworthiness among both players and the platforms that feature them.
Ecosystem
Royale Finance solves the transparency issue by supporting iGaming platforms that use provably fair algorithms, which randomize number generation ensuring that players cannot be cheated and are a verifiable source of truth. As a double layer of security, these random number generators (RNG) are also certified by an accredited testing lab for quality assurance.
For any iGaming startup to access liquidity within the Royale Finance network, it must be licensed and have its provably fair RNG certified. Royale provides an incentive for developers to make their games fair, and provides online casinos with the confidence that any Royale-supported game has achieved this standard of trustworthiness.
“Centralized finance has stifled innovation in the iGaming sector. There is a lack of accountability and transparency, with too much control in the hands of few,” said Giorgio Andrews, CEO of Royale Finance. “Royale takes a hybrid approach that combines blockchain technology and DeFi to bring both fairness and accessibility to the sector, opening the door to the next wave of innovators. By doing this, not only will iGaming startups earn more, but every online casino operator will soon be able to attract provably fair games supported by our network and token holders.”
The Royale Finance ecosystem is powered by ROYA, a valueless governance token used to coordinate between DeFi liquidity providers within the Royale Finance stablecoin collateral pool, which disperses loans to iGaming startups. Token holders vote on which games to support, and developers keep their equity while they build and launch their games. This ‘optimized liquidity’ helps seamlessly power iGaming innovation, and is the first network-driven liquidity approach bridging DeFi with iGaming.
Along with this network-driven liquidity, Royale Finance optimizes liquidity pools within the ecosystem to provide sustainable yield. Following the completion of their v1 Web 3.0 app, Royale Finance will build a suite of provably fair games available to online casino operators. The project also aims to eventually transition to a complete Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) as the technology develops.