The global online poker market is worth around 100 billion dollars, making it one of the largest online gaming segments. Poker stands unique among casino games as it's primarily a game of skill and incomplete information, where players compete against each other rather than the house. This creates an environment where trust becomes paramount - players must have confidence in both the platform dealing the cards and their invisible opponents across the internet. Traditional online poker platforms struggle with issues of bot detection, collusion prevention, and proving their own legitimacy to players. These trust requirements lead to expensive compliance processes and marketing efforts to convince players of platform legitimacy, costs which are ultimately passed down to players through high rake fees.
Decentralized poker solves these fundamental issues by creating a trustless environment where the rules are enforced by code rather than a central authority. By removing the need to trust any single entity, while simultaneously ensuring provably fair gameplay, blockchain-based poker can revolutionize how this classic game is played online.
Cards are generated using verifiable randomness and stored in an encrypted fashion on-chain. Each player can locally decrypt and view their own cards, without revealing to any other party.
With Arcium, on-chain poker would fundamentally transform how trust and fairness work in online poker. Every player's actions are recorded on-chain, creating unprecedented transparency in gameplay. The traditional costs of building trust through marketing, certificates, and compliance can be largely eliminated, as the system's fairness is mathematically provable rather than promised. This leads to dramatically lower operational costs, allowing for significantly reduced rake fees compared to traditional platforms.
Smart contracts handle all game logic and fund management, ensuring instant, automatic payouts and eliminating counterparty risk. Through secure multi-party computation (MPC), Arcium can maintain the privacy of players' cards while still ensuring fair gameplay and preventing cheating. The system becomes accessible to anyone with an internet connection, removing geographic restrictions while maintaining high standards of gameplay integrity. This isn't just an incremental improvement to online poker - it's a fundamental shift in how the game can be operated, making it more accessible, fair, and cost-effective than ever before.