First Money Wager at Online Casino Made On Intercasino in Early 1996
Published on June 6th, 2022 1:53 pm EST
Now, instead of needing to travel to a place like Las Vegas, you can gamble in the comfort of your own home, 24 hours per day. The online casino industry is still relatively young, getting its start in the mid 1990s.
Obviously, the first thing that needed to happen to make online casinos a reality was mainstream access to the Internet, which took place in the mid 1990s.
After that, you needed the technology to be able to offer online casino games - not only the actual games, but also the encryption and communication protocols that would allow people to move money online to play in real money online casinos.
After that, you needed a jurisdiction that would allow companies to set up to offer legal online gambling.
Microgaming provided the world the first online casino software, while Cryptologic provided the encryption and communication protocols.
Once the nation of Antigua and Barbuba passed the Free Trade & Processing Zone Act in 1994, the online casino industry was off and running.
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A number of online casinos offered "play for fun" games in 1995.
The first "real money" online casino action, however, was first offered in January of 2006 by Intercasino. (The Gaming Club also claims that they were the first real-money online casino in the world, though this is in dispute).
Intercasino was based in Antigua and initially offered 18 different online casino games and access to the National Indian Lottery.
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Following the initial success of online casinos, other Caribbean countries looked to host the growing online gambling industry as well, and a number of different sites started popping up, though Intercasino was thought to have been the first.
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Back in 1996, online casinos were very primitive and the graphics were terrible.
In this day and age, there are all sorts of innovations that have been brought to the industry (live dealers, etc), though none of this would have been possible without the initial moves made by Antigua, Cryptologic and Microgaming.
