Atari – a gaming company that was huge in the 80s and popular for titles such as “Pong” and the infamous “E.T.” game – has announced that it is heading deeper into crypto territory with the release of a new crypto-based casino.
Gaming Company Atari Sets Up Crypto Casino
The project is being produced with the help of a company called Decentral Games on the Ethereum blockchain. All games set to be offered will be based on old titles issued by Atari. Customers can also play for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and use these tokens to purchase additional digital currencies.
In a statement, executives of Atari announced that they believe bets will exceed $150 million in the year 2021, while bets will ultimately move up to around $400 million within the next two years.
The company has been struggling to make a comeback over the past few months, and it seems to believe that crypto is the way to go. In October of last year, the firm announced the creation of an entirely new digital asset it was calling Atari Token, and that the company would be engaging in a public token sale at some point during November to get things rolling. At that time, people could only purchase the asset using one of the five main cryptocurrencies, which included bitcoin, Ethereum, bitcoin cash and Litecoin.
This would follow two pre-sales, which up to that point, had garnered the company as much as $1.5 million in cash. The firm said that it was looking to build its own distributed ledger technology to permit the usage of the currency and that it had, at that time, made several partnerships with online casinos, thereby hinting at its future.
But while the company is completely excited about what the coming months will bring, digital casinos have been the brunt of much speculation and criticism over the past several years, with some believing that they contribute nothing legitimate to the digital asset space and further its speculative nature.
We’re Seeing a Pattern, Here
By contrast, some are huge believers in the idea of a crypto casino, saying that these digital forums will be the future of gambling and entertainment. As it stands, networks such as Justin Sun’s TRON have already attracted millions of dollars in gambling transactions, and this streak doesn’t appear to be stopping anytime soon.
In addition, NFTs are experiencing a huge boom as of late, with companies such as Twitter now announcing that the first tweet to ever be issued via the social media platform will be sold off as an NFT and that the proceeds will be donated to charity. At the time of writing, the tweet is garnering several bids, with the largest one coming from the likes of Justin Sun, who is pledging $2.5 million to purchase a bit of Twitter history.