Despite a booming crypto industry, the East Java branch of the Indonesian Islamic organisation Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) has declared cryptocurrency ‘haram’, or forbidden under Islamic law.
The rise in cryptocurrency payments can be traced to increasing online gambling activity in Asia. Countries like India, Japan, and Indonesia are top players when it comes to the positive momentum behind cryptocurrency betting.
Where Bitcoin was hailed as the digital answer to currency, NFTs are now being touted as the digital answer to collectibles. Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of skeptics who think it is all a bubble that is going to burst.
The world’s largest digital currency by market value rose more than 3% to an all-time high of $50,487 at about 7:30 a.m. et
How big is the scale of the problem? A recent study by Berlin-based Transparency International showed that in Asia alone, the illegal gambling market was calculated to be generating revenues of around $400 billion in 2018.
Oscar Brodkin, the director of intelligence and investigation services at Sportradar said, “With key figures being imprisoned or disrupted and very high-profile cases being discussed in the media, match-fixing over the last five years has become much more fragmented.”
Netentcasinos.com, an established site that reviews the best Bitcoin online casinos, says crypto is the future of the gambling industry. Netent Casinos cites crypto’s anonymity, decentralization and corruption-free nature as a significant reason why the iGaming industry will continue to accept crypto for payments.
Online casinos can be banned and geo-restricted, as often occurs at national level. Dapps, while not the censorship-resistant paradise their proponents would have them, are a lot harder to block.
The birth of Libra doesn’t come off as a surprise to many tech enthusiasts that have quite followed the agile steps of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg as he continues to grow his tech empire. If there is a dream Mr. Zuckerberg has always had, it is going into financial payments & tapping on the billions of users of his platforms(Facebook & Whatsapp) to enable them to send, receive cash and pay for goods and services.
Despite Japan’s reputation for being one of the most welcoming nations for fintech, online crypto gambling has struggled to take off in light of the country’s strict regulation.
