The gambling industry has yet to fully adopt blockchain technology, and digital currency itself is still far from becoming mainstream. At the World Gaming Executive Summit (WGES), our lead reporter Becky Liggero Fontana hosted a panel looking at both those issues with three leaders in the blockchain gambling space.

Before blockchain gambling can work, it needs more adoption. One theory of why that adoption hasn’t come yet is because of a bad reputation. Liggero Fontana began the panel by why that is. “Sadly, these bad actors in crypto are constantly conflated with blockchain technology,” said Phillip Runyan, Founder and CEO of Hold Gaming. “Each time an exchange is hacked, or someone probably, maybe, most likely faked their death to bring their keys to their grave/private beach on a non-extradition beach, the underlying technology takes it on the nose as well.”

But that will change as more people see the utility of blockchain, for providing transparent and auditable transaction records as well as acting as a data layer for the internet. Runyan said blockchain will be like what SLL technology for the internet. It’s unthinkable now to do business with a website that isn’t secure, and blockchain will play a similar role in the future.

For the gambling space, Ethereum has been a popular option, but it comes with high transaction fees. Those fees are another reason why adoption hasn’t come, and as FunFair Technologies’ COO Lloyd Purser put it, they have yet to solve the fee problem on Ethereum, but they’re working on it.