Show #165 – Paul Rogash of BetU on the Knup Sports Show

Join today’s show and listen in as Paul Rogash of BetU talks about the metaverse, NFT’s, EarnU and more!

Ryan Knuppel

Hey welcome everybody. Ryan Knuppel here in Knup Sports Show, episode 165. Thanks so much for tuning in, watching, listening, however you’re digesting this content, really appreciate you giving us some time and we’ve heard some good things. People enjoying learning about professionals in the iGaming space and the betting space and the any type of gaming space. So I’ve really had a blast and found kind of my niche here, really talking to some of these leaders and professionals and people that are doing amazing things in this space and today we have another guest that I think you’re going to love. I think you’re going to love his story and what he’s up to today. Really cutting edge stuff, Web3 world and I’m excited to really dive in and talk with our guest today. So without further ado, I’m going to go ahead and bring on Paul. Paul, how are you today, buddy?

Paul Rogash

Good thank you. Yourself?

Ryan Knuppel

Good. Good. We got Paul Rogash of BetU. Paul is doing some awesome stuff. Where are you located Paul?

Paul Rogash

I’m in Bali in Indonesia.

Ryan Knuppel

Man. Paul in Bali. So you’re giving me off hours here. What time is it there?

Paul Rogash

Yeah, it’s 10 o’clock but anything for you.

Ryan Knuppel

Hey, I appreciate you giving me some time here and I’m excited to dive in and really learn about you and obviously I’ve been loving this Web3 world as it’s starting to form and so I’m excited to talk to somebody that’s really in it and really doing a lot in it. So tell us first a little bit about yourself, Paul, kind of how you got started in your career and what led you to what you’re doing today?

Paul Rogash

Yeah, so previously I studied bachelor business in entrepreneurship back when I was early 20s and then started a few different businesses in advertising and then went over to America and set up a machinesales.com website, which I sold in 2017 and then started a law firm marketing business for a couple of years and then when COVID hit, I came over to Bali just to escape Los Angeles and I was just getting a bit bored and sort of took on a few marketing roles in the crypto space and it sort of just evolved from there.

Paul Rogash

I’d been investing in crypto sort of since 2016, 2017 after a Burning Man Experience and then I did a few marketing roles, 2020 and 2021 and then we launched BetU almost 12 months’ ago, sort of the start of June last year, so coming up on a year.

Ryan Knuppel

That’s awesome. That’s amazing. So you’ve been all over the spectrum and as far as roles and kind of what you’ve been doing. Let’s talk a little bit before we dive into BetU, let’s talk a little bit about, you mentioned you’ve been investing in crypto since mid 2016, 17 timeframe, I mean that is back a while ago. That’s before this real attention and boom hit crypto. Congrats on that first of all, because there’s not many that were really into the space before it really went mainstream. I’m assuming Bitcoin and some of those initial ones were ones you were investing, is that correct?

Paul Rogash

Yeah. Well it was, they were calling it a big bubble then as well so it’s been a bubble the whole time I think. And it’ll probably stay that way.

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah.

Paul Rogash

There’s always going to be the people that object to it, but yeah. Bitcoin and Ethereum was certainly the first two that I got involved in.

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah. That’s amazing. That’s cool. So BetU, so let’s talk a little bit about what it is. Explain what BetU is, what your ecosystem and you got the verse, you got all of this going on. Tell us what all you have going on with BetU.

Paul Rogash

Yeah, so there’s a little bit going on. We’ve got… So we’re building three different platforms. The first one we’ve released is EarnU, which is a sports and Esports prediction game. So it’s basically trying to give people a gambling alternative or a different sort of like tipping competitions or like a different fantasy sport where you get points to play each week and it’s just essentially a sports betting market, but you can never lose your tokens. So what you profit through the week is paid out in BetU tokens but if you lose, you just don’t get any payout, so it’s essentially like a staking game. So in crypto where you would stake, but you can never lose that stake and then where you pay out, the reward is based on your performance that week as the game so we’ve launched it anew about six weeks ago now and we’ve got NBA, we had the football as well.

Paul Rogash

And we have all the soccer leagues through Europe, AFL, NRL in Australia, the cricket in India so you can… We think it’ll grow really popular where people can put on their predictions and it’s just a fun way that they can earn crypto without that risk of actually losing their crypto so as gambling alternative, so that’s one platform which will put out and then in about, we’re doing an NFT sale at the end of May for BetU Verse, which is going to be a licensed metaverse resort and casino, so where you actually go into the casino, play all table games, slot machines, et cetera, but it’s all through obviously your avatar so in the whole metaverse world, and then we’re building a resort on the back of that-

Ryan Knuppel

[inaudible 00:05:30].

Paul Rogash

… where you’ll have your hotel rooms, you’ll be able to kit it out with your own furniture. We’ll have different entertainment levels to play to own games, even like education and conventions and things so really excited about that because you can create your own space like sort of create your own world, which is exciting and then there’s obviously the BetU platform, which will launch… The timeframe at this stage is 30 days after we do the NFT sale so likely to be the end of June which is a traditional sports book, all crypto based, but we’ll also have a peer-to-peer element where you’ll be able to bet against people, cross board or peer-to-peer using the BetU token.

Paul Rogash

The platform will accept other crypto, the majors Bitcoin, Ethereum, or [inaudible 00:06:16] coin because that’s going so crazy at the minute, the popularity of all the Bored Ape ecosystem and then there’ll also be the typical online casino within the BetU so we’re sort of covering all elements. There’s the game side of it, there’s traditional betting and then there’s the metaverse betting and that’s sort of the summary of the whole BetU ecosystem.

Ryan Knuppel

Oh my gosh, Paul, I totally geek out on this stuff. I’m completely interested in this and I’ve been just digesting this whole world over the last year, two years, whatever it’s been since we’ve really kind of went forward with the whole Web3 and the NFTs in that whole world but the one question I have for you is, being in this space, what do you think the mainstream knowledge or the mainstream understanding of this space is currently? Because I feel like it’s still so understood or not understood and when I’m talking about this space, I mean the metaverse and I mean, doing things virtually and staking and all of this talk that you’re talking and I understand it, but what do you think the mainstream level of understanding is on it currently?

Paul Rogash

In terms of the actual understanding, I think people get quite confused when the word metaverse pops up of what it actually is, but I sort of essentially explain it just as a video game that you can sort of interact with, but it’s more where you live through your avatar so it’s almost like you’re living in your video game in a way and so with the casino and stuff we’re building, each individual game is sort of a game within a game so like the Blackjack, for example, the slot machines, a game within the whole metaverse ecosystem and I think it’s just going to give… So in terms of your question of the understanding, yeah. I think people get a little bit confused about what it’s going to do and how it’s going to change, how they react and I think people, if they, if you look back at how you behave pre telephones and then-

Ryan Knuppel

Yep.

Paul Rogash

… the change that’s done to you, I think you’ll find that the metaverse is going to do something similar again and so how that’ll look in another 10 years, who knows? I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg will have a big thing to say about all that but there’s obviously a lot of exciting stuff done in the Web3 space already with obviously Decentraland and Sandbox.

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah.

Paul Rogash

And we’re really excited with what we’re building so it’s going to be a very interesting time.

Ryan Knuppel

And that’s what’s so exciting about what you’re doing, right, because there’s so much, I think so much upside for getting in early and kind of doing things that are not, I guess, accepted quite in the real world yet and kind of having something there, having a product there for as when people start to really understand and dive in, you’re already ahead of the game, right? You’re already here. What got you into this world? I mean, have you always kind of been a futuristic type thinker?

Paul Rogash

I’ve always had very interesting ideas I guess. My first business out of university was I developed a film to go on to escalator handrails so where you put your hand, we developed a film. So that would actually be advertising or media like when we’d go up to the movie theater, for example, it would show the different movies and stuff and other than that, I guess the machinery side and the law firm marketing were a little bit boring, but the whole betting concept was, we thought the innovation was the peer-to-peer side cross border, where you could actually bet against people in different markets. So there’s like Betfair in Australia and Betfair in the UK, which sort of are the biggest peer-to-peer betting markets, but there’s not really any in the crypto space so we thought that was an innovative idea there.

Paul Rogash

And then the other… That was the initial concept and then the play to earn game, EarnU, that came about basically thinking one with the betting platform will be fully licensed so there’s some jurisdiction such as the US where we won’t operate initially until we had additional licenses to what we’ve already got so EarnU being a non gambling product opens it up globally, which I think is really important for people to see what we’re building and also just involvement within the ecosystem.

Paul Rogash

And then the metaverse stuff just came about, again, there’s the popularity within crypto, because there’s a few elements to our business, obviously, the betting platform will be a for profit business and then we go back to buying BetU tokens with profit and things like that but there’s a huge part of it is the community and trying to create demand for the BetU token. And so the long term, we will see the BetU token become more and more popular and we hope that that demand will then drive the price and so there’s a lot of things involved in that whole ecosystem and I think where we’re covering that whole circle of play to earn, metaverse plus the betting platform, there’s so much we can do.

Paul Rogash

The metaverse stuff is very innovative in the fact where, so I was at ICE last or a week and two weeks ago now in London, which is sort of the biggest gambling conference and there’s no one actually building really any metaverse games or at least not promoting that they’re building it so what we’re actually doing is very innovative in that sense and we can be so creative with it which is sort of the exciting part, even building the avatars or the games or creating new games and things, simple things like we’ll include things like rock, scissors and paper as like a betting game and then flipping the coin, obviously that’s not original, but there’s a lot of different rocket ship games. We’ve got ideas with the crypto and the moon and different things, but it’s going to be a wild world in there.

Ryan Knuppel

It is. It is. So let’s go back to EarnU a little bit because you just launched it, what’d you say, a few weeks ago maybe? I can’t remember that [inaudible 00:12:22].

Paul Rogash

Yeah. I grew up around 6 or 7 now.

Ryan Knuppel

Okay. Oh, okay. Great. So how’s that going? How’s the acceptance going? You mentioned community building. How is that going? Are you getting some attention, getting some users coming in?

Paul Rogash

Yeah, so we’re getting a lot of users actually registering on the platform, but we’ve struggled a little bit so far to convert them into players. So I think last week there’s about 550 odd players. We’re not doing any free to play options so like, it is free to play for BetU token holders, sorry. We’re not doing any like where they don’t hold, like just open to anyone because it just… Because we’re paying out BetU tokens, the financial model doesn’t work if everyone can just play for free and then earn but it does work if they have to own BetU tokens to play and then we give them free points to play the game.

Ryan Knuppel

So we interrupt you real quick. How do you get BetU tokens at first? Do you go buy the [inaudible 00:13:19].

Paul Rogash

Yeah, so you can get BetU tokens from within EarnU where you swap from say USDT, BTCE for example, BNB or there’s… We’re on Gate and BitMart and PancakeSwap as exchanges which will add more shortly after the metaverse-

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah.

Paul Rogash

… NFT sale. So you get BetU tokens to play and then you get points every week based off how many tokens you hold. And then with those points you put on your predictions, tennis, cricket, golf, whatever, sorry, not golf, tennis, cricket football. You can… And then if you win and if you’re correct, that it just essentially you can stack up your points for the whole round. It goes from Tuesday to Tuesday. At the end of the week, you get paid out on any profit you make. So if you started with 200 points and finished with 200 points, you didn’t make a profit so you don’t get any reward but if you started with 200 points and ended up with 1200, then you’ve made a thousand points profit, and that gets paid out in BetU tokens.

Ryan Knuppel

Cool, very innovative, very innovative. I love it. That’s awesome. I’m going to head out to BitMart, that’s one of the platforms I use and grab some of those here after this and then play around with it. So where can everybody find all of this? So betu, earnu dot… What earnu [inaudible 00:14:41].

Paul Rogash

Earnu.io is the game-

Ryan Knuppel

Yep.

Paul Rogash

… and then there’s betu.io, which is for the betting platform and a bit more information just about the token and the ecosystem and then there’s betuverse.io which is all about the metaverse and you’ll see there at betyouverse.io, there’s the animation and things so give you a feel for how the casino’s actually going to look and then the site that’s up now is obviously the EarnU site.

Ryan Knuppel

Let’s scroll through them a little bit here, so betyou.io as well?

Paul Rogash

So this is the more about the token, the whole ecosystem, what we’re doing, a little bit more about the actual peer-to-peer side of things, whereas involves obviously the token, cross border exchange, then the betting contracts and things.

Ryan Knuppel

That’s awesome. And then you have betuverse.io, correct?

Paul Rogash

Yeah. You can click up the top there or take you through and then yeah, so there’s the video, the animation of the actual casino there.

Ryan Knuppel

Amazing. That’s really cool, Paul. I think this is, it really gets me excited and hopefully the audience watching and listening can watch some of these videos and kind of really start to get a better understanding of what’s going on here with all of this stuff you know? Because I think you’re correct, there may be some confusion just on the principles in general of like what in the world’s a metaverse, let alone BetU Verse, you know? And so-

Paul Rogash

Yeah.

Ryan Knuppel

… watching some of this and just hearing people like you explain it and talk, I think is just going to educate people, which I love and is awesome.

Paul Rogash

Yeah. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out in terms of different players, whether someone like Facebook is going to come in and dominate it but now obviously with the craziest success last week of the other side launch, which is from the Bored Apes and sorry from Yugo Labs.

Ryan Knuppel

Yep.

Paul Rogash

It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out, but I’m sure at some point there’s going to be one or two major winners in the space but I think because we’re in the gambling aspect of it, obviously a lot of those companies aren’t going to touch it in terms of, Facebook’s not going to enter into that space so we’ve got a real opportunity to be a leader in that field. And the other, the EarnU game at some stage will get really, really popular. I’m 100% certain of that, it’s just to get that adoption and for people to actually understand the concept of it and how it can work and people who don’t necessarily understand staking and-

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah.

Paul Rogash

… the way crypto works, probably get a little bit confused by how we can actually do it, but we’ll obviously have the betting platform which will be a profitable business that then can go back into funding the game and funding the token payouts and things so I think we’re in a pretty good position moving forward.

Ryan Knuppel

Amazing. Amazing Paul. Well, I’m going to let you go here. I know you’re a busy man. You got to get out here, work and developing one last question I want to understand. What’s one of the biggest challenges you guys have come through just in… Is it something specific to this space? Is it more just a tech, what’s one of the biggest challenges you guys are experiencing maybe currently in business?

Paul Rogash

Oh, sorry. We’ve just lost you. You might want to redo that one.

Ryan Knuppel

Oh, no, very simple question. Sorry. We went so well until the end here. It’s always something techy.

Paul Rogash

Yeah [inaudible 00:18:02].

Ryan Knuppel

[inaudible 00:18:03] challenges. What does one of the biggest challenges in business really that you guys either have experienced or are currently experiencing that maybe somebody watching, somebody listening to this podcast could help with, is there any challenges out there you’re kind of looking for anything?

Paul Rogash

In terms of challenges in the crypto space, one of the hardest is the community and actually getting them involved and the community is the most important factor in any crypto project, because without the buy-in from the community, Bitcoin, wouldn’t be $40,000 if that many people didn’t believe in it.

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah.

Paul Rogash

And so it’s about building that community and obviously crypto is very volatile as we all know. We started off at one and a half cents and then show up to 30 cents and now it’s at about 10 or 11 cents and so people, the fluctuations in the price dictate people’s moods and that’s one of the sad things about crypto as well, where everyone’s just so driven about the price. They’ll wake up happy if their portfolio’s up, and then they’re really pissed off if their portfolio’s down for example, and everyone’s looking at their trust wallet all day.

Ryan Knuppel

Yep.

Paul Rogash

So sort of just monitoring that and managing their community has been something we’ve struggled with a little bit so love to hear from any community managers or anything that are sort of expert in getting involvement and putting on events and that sort of thing. It’s somewhat thing we need to improve on and we’re working very hard with it in terms of the NFT side of things to build a better community based around all the BetU Verse work.

Ryan Knuppel

And most communities in this space that I’ve noticed, most communities seem to be built and are working in what’s called Discord, for those of you that don’t know. Are you guys using Discord pretty heavily as to build your group?

Paul Rogash

Yeah, Discord’s our number one because it can segment it easily, section off for different sports, for example. They’ve got the EarnU, BetU, all the different, the leagues, we’ve got a rule because a Discord casino in there where people can earn whitelists and stuff for the NFT sale, which just gives people something to do, have a bit of fun whereas Telegram gets a little bit messy when there’s a lot of people just talking about different things. People can’t really have a conversation in there whereas Discord you can separate a little bit more so people can interact a bit better.

Ryan Knuppel

Very cool. Very cool. Last, I promise, last question. Is there an-

Paul Rogash

That’s all right.

Ryan Knuppel

… actual, is there a mint date for your BetU Verse?

Paul Rogash

Yeah, we’re targeting the 30th of May so if anyone’s interested, feel free to just mention the show and go into Discord and just log a ticket and mention the show and we’ll get everyone on the whitelist there, but we’re expecting to sell it out and then what will produce the metaverse actual play in terms of the casino won’t launch till Q4.

Ryan Knuppel

Yep.

Paul Rogash

We’ve obviously got to test all the games and license all the games.

Ryan Knuppel

Sure.

Paul Rogash

Both for security for us in terms of payouts, but also for the player so Poker works like Poker and that’s one difference like where there’s the betting platform, we can just license all the games from all the major casinos, there’s already hundreds of sites that do that. Our only real difference is obviously we’re driven by the BetU token-

Ryan Knuppel

Sure.

Paul Rogash

… or there’s a fair few other cryptocurrency casinos, but with the metaverse we have to build every single game ourselves from Blackjack to Poker, Roulette et cetera and how it all works so the good thing with the NFT is it provides utility within the whole ecosystem so you own the NFT, you actually get points to play, EarnU every week so you could actually earn from that as long as your predictions are on the money.

Ryan Knuppel

Mm-hmm.

Paul Rogash

So the whole, everything we do is based around obviously the BetU token but also the NFTs is like owners from within the BetU Verse.

Ryan Knuppel

Cool. Very cool Paul. Well, I want to congratulate you on the early success and I’m excited to see where this all leads. We’ll definitely put all these links in the show notes and we’ll help you build that community as much as we can and anybody watching, I urge you to get ahold of Paul. How would they get ahold of you Paul? Or is it just check out the websites?

Paul Rogash

Yeah, I’m on Telegram. It’s just @paulrogash if anyone wanted to reach me or you can just go into the Discord or the Telegram channels, it’s easy and that’s probably the best way to get ahold of me through Discord or Telegram.

Ryan Knuppel

Cool.

Paul Rogash

And we’ll put a link in your description for people if they want to play EarnU, we can set up a promo code after the show-

Ryan Knuppel

Cool.

Paul Rogash

… and they can get a hundred points to play EarnU and hopefully they get some rewards.

Ryan Knuppel

[inaudible 00:22:46].

Paul Rogash

So you just join and then go to Join A Round. So register on EarnU, Join A Round, enter the promo code that we put in your description, and then they’ll get a hundred points to play so they could turn that into, I think it works out to about a hundred bucks.

Ryan Knuppel

Amazing. Appreciate that-

Paul Rogash

[inaudible 00:23:03].

Ryan Knuppel

… appreciate that hookup, we’ll definitely what man. Episode 165 is going to be a good one for people if they tuned into this one so that’ll be amazing.

Paul Rogash

[inaudible 00:23:12]. Thanks for your time.

Ryan Knuppel

I appreciate your time. Good luck with everything. I hope we’re able to connect in person sometime. If you get down here to Florida, I know you mentioned maybe coming this way off air here, but if you get down this way, make sure you look me up and we’ll we’ll have lunch or something.

Paul Rogash

Awesome. Thanks for the time.

Ryan Knuppel

All right my friend, talk to you soon.

Ryan Knuppel

That was Paul Rogash of BetU. Man it seems like an awesome, awesome thing they got going on with EarnU, BetU, BetU Verse. Super excited about checking that out even more and further after this, Paul. We’ll actually put the links to everything that Paul mentioned in the show notes so you can get the promo code that he has for us, get out to all the links. I urge you to check out that mint date. I’ll make sure to mint some as well. Get into Discord, let’s get out there and chat and man, it seems like an awesome project. So thank you all so much for tuning in. If you have any questions for me, I’m Ryan Knuppel at Knup. This was episode 165 of the Knup Sports Show. Until next time, take care and stay safe.

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