Colorado Lottery GameJam - Tom Seaver, Senior Director at Colorado Lottery

Colorado Lottery & ETHDenver 2020 GameJam · 31 Jul 2020 · 7:22

Tom Seaver, senior director at the Colorado Lottery, joins the Colorado Lottery GameJam session at ETHDenver 2020 to discuss why a state lottery agency is exploring blockchain technology for game design and verifiable randomness. He outlines what the Lottery hoped participating developers would build during the GameJam and how blockchain based mechanics might eventually fit into a regulated state gaming product.

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From Colorado Lottery & ETHDenver 2020 GameJam, hosted by ETH Denver.

Transcript

i'm going to introduce tom seaver who's a senior director at the colorado state lottery and he's going to tell you a little bit more about this initiative how this came to be why the heck we're even doing this how we came to be a partnership and in a little bit more about what to expect so tom i'm going to go ahead and shift the time to you thanks everyone for being here thank you john and thank everybody for being here today you know the colorado lottery is the only lottery in the world whose proceeds are dedicated to parks recreation open space wildlife preservation and with some dedicated to school construction through our best program the lottery has pretty aggressive goals

in fact by fy23 we want to be a one billion dollar per year business what that means when we achieve that is we'll be giving hundreds of millions of more dollars to our proceeds beneficiaries and that's where tonight comes in you know last year alone 67 000 new people moved to colorado and that's been pretty much an average year for us lately in addition to that u.s news and world report ranked us as the 10th base best place to live in the united states so we don't see the growth in our population and our in our number of new coloradans slowing down anytime soon and that's just fun but part of the reason that they come here

is for parks it's for our mountains it's for the opportunities to get outdoors and have a great time that's never been more true than it is today when people are going outside to get away from their monitor and to get something interesting and physically challenging maybe to do so the lottery has to grow in order to continue to provide places for people to go outside um we need to be able to provide money for all of our beneficiaries so that they can continue to buy land they continue to upgrade playgrounds they can continue to all those things the lottery's been here since 1983 and in that amount of time we've raised over

three and a half billion dollars to go to our to our proceeds of recipients and that's a lot of money and it's all thanks to our players and to our retailers those great stores that have remained open for us selling our products we are so grateful to them and that also is going to tie into what we're going to be doing this week so i'm excited to to thank them and bring them into this mix but i don't want you to just take my word for it um justin has a video that he's going to queue up here in a second that just gives you a little taste of what the colorado lottery and our partners do in the state of colorado so justin roll it

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thank you in that little video you shot you saw 15 different projects that were funded either fully or partially by the lottery there are literally hundreds more and in order to keep that going we need to find a way to keep up with the increasing demand for these types of projects how are we going to do that clearly we need to do more than just evolve you know we need to reinvent the lottery we need to find new ways to bring new products to new players in new places all over the state that's really important i think a lot of people don't understand that the lottery's demographics mirror the state of colorado's demographics our players have jobs they have good

incomes they have good educations and they're looking for more opportunities to engage in a way that will help fund the way that they play when they go out on the weekend so it's important that we grow the base of our playership and that means growing new opportunities and new versions of products not just enhanced old products but new products and how we do that that's a lot about what we're here for technology is one of the most important ways that we can increase the interest level of our colorado player base and and attract new players to the lottery um that's why we're so excited about engaging with your world it's it's a it's kind of like in

ghostbusters where they cross the streams you know we haven't always done a very good job as an industry reaching out for fresh ideas and we're very excited about what we're going to do with this group before we get started i want to say thanks to a number of people not a not a really big number so don't worry about that but we want to especially thank our commissioners stella peterson who's the chair of our commission jim bensberg the honorable dennis mays stan padalski and and bill clayton i think some of you are on the call tonight if you are thank you so much for joining us

your support is really really really important um