Founded by British aristocrat and high-stakes gambler Lord Porchester (Porchy), Housebets is live right now, giving away more than $5,000,000 in their sign-up airdrop, the most generous offer in online gambling history. Porchy, the son of the Earl of Carnarvon, didn’t launch Housebets because he wanted another startup. He launched it because he was personally sick of being treated like a walking ATM. He’s played every major platform at very high stakes, seen every trick (rigged bonuses, locked out of accounts, delayed & frozen payouts), and finally decided to build the casino he always wished existed — then hand the keys to the players. He recently joined the Bitcoin.com News podcast to share his vision to create a casino platform built on transparency and fairness for players. Porchy, the founder of Housebets, began the discussion by sharing his background in betting and crypto gaming. His interest started at a young age while attending Eaton, where he found he could access Betfair. His journey into crypto was driven by frustrations with traditional sports betting, such as a significant amount of money being owed and the lack of payment recourse from bookmakers, which led him to see the benefit of creating liquidity pools to ensure users get paid reliably. Porchy explained that the initial Housebets model, built on smart contracts and Polygon, was adapted because users were unwilling to deal with network downtime and contract signing. He stressed the importance of building trust, adapting the model to focus on transparency with reserves and margins, and having a public dashboard showing deposits, withdrawals, turnover, and profit and loss, even without being fully on-chain. The core of the Housebets model, according to Porchy, is to be the lowest edge, sustainable casino. This is achieved by planning to give away 100% of the house edge through rewards and keys. He noted that while a casino cannot offer 0% edge forever, Housebets can try to get close to it by providing rebates and giving players a higher chance of winning than a traditional casino. Porchy also detailed the $5 million allocation for the rewards program and the system for on-chain bonuses. Housebets has analyzed the deposit history of top bookmakers and tiered people to receive bonuses ranging from $20 to $100,000, but with a significantly lower turnover requirement (around 10 times) compared to the 35 times often seen in traditional casinos. Porchy confirmed they track ERC20 wallets, primarily USDT and ETH users, estimating nearly two million wallets qualify, while also implementing accurate scoring on token holding duration to mitigate abuse from “abusers” or “farmers.” Regarding the HBTS token, Porchy stated that it is designed to capture all the platform’s value and transparently show its allocation, primarily to stakers. These stakers are granted control over determining the amount of additional rewards that go to users in the long run. Porchy’s confidence in the token’s success is tied to a “flywheel effect”: token holders are incentivized to encourage platform usage and increased turnover, which in turn benefits the token’s value by growing with the platform’s volume. In terms of future vision, Porchy confirmed the project was inspired by Hyperliquid’s community-first airdrop model, and the ultimate goal is for Housebets to become the “Hyperliquid of gambling.” Looking ahead five years, he envisions a heavy focus on developing an aggregated sports book, which will pool liquidity to solve the issue of users being limited by existing bookmakers. To learn more about the project visit housebets.com, and follow the team on X or Telegram.
