Twitch Shuts Down Crypto Gambling Live Streaming
Twitch will ban crypto gambling on its site, the Amazon-owned live streaming platform announced on Wednesday (September 21).
According to a message posted on Twitter, Twitch will prevent live streaming of gambling sites such as Stake.com, Rollbit and Duelbits.com that “are not licensed either in the United States or other jurisdictions that provide adequate consumer protection.”
The ban comes into effect on October 18 and does not affect websites involving sports betting, poker or fantasy sports.
“While we prohibit the sharing of links or referral codes to any sites that include slot machines, roulette or dice games, we have seen some people circumvent these rules and expose our community to potential harm,” the statement said.
The move comes in the wake of threats from popular Twitch personalities to stop streaming on the channel unless Twitch cracked down on gambling, according to media reports.
In a video last weekend, a streamer named Abraham Mohammed, known to fans as Sliker, admitted to defrauding fans and other creators of at least $200,000 to fund his gambling addiction. A number of high-profile streamers began promoting a Christmas week boycott of Twitch to protest the platform’s guidelines for gambling streams.
Learn more: Some gaming companies are done flirting with NFTs
The news follows reports earlier this week that some game companies that had been offering non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, to players as in-game rewards have concluded that their virtual kingdoms are better off without them.
One reason for pulling back from NFT schemes is that prices for some NFTs and for cryptoassets in general have fallen since the surge in NFT enthusiasm in 2021. Apart from that, gaming company executives say players don’t seem to like them .
In a recent announcement detailing a new policy of not blocking NFTs on the platform, Minecraft maker Mojang pointed to several NFT applications in the game.
“Each of these uses of NFTs and other blockchain technologies creates digital ownership based on scarcity and exclusion, which is inconsistent with the Minecraft values of creative inclusion and playing together,” the announcement said.
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