From the Kingston foreshore to the desert of Nevada - Luke Millanta has made history in the glitzy world of Las Vegas.
The Canberra entrepreneur is co-owner of a company that last month engineered the first legal cryptocurrency wager in a casino in Las Vegas.
Millanta co-owns BurraPay, a cryptocurrency payments processor that is the first to operate in Nevada's regulated gaming market.
On June 4, American TikTok celebrity Bryce Hall deposited $350,000 to the BurraPay platform and made the first legal Bitcoin wager in Nevada history.
Hall bet five-and-a-half Bitcoins, valued at the time at $US350,000 or nearly $AU520,000, at the Circa Resort and Casino. The wagers were on Ultimate Fighting Championship fights.
"I'm kind of nervous," Hall admitted.
The 26-year-old later walked away with a $US100,000 ($AU148,000) win.
Millanta says it was a historic moment and one he hopes creates a big payday for his own company, with it receiving a percentage per each transaction.
"To be the first and only platform to be given the regulatory approvals to go live is a huge achievement," he said.
The Canberra Times last year profiled Luke Millanta, one of the national capital's wealthiest men who mostly flies under the radar.
He lives in a penthouse in Kingston and is planning his wedding to girlfriend Linda Leck on Lake Como in Italy in May 2027.
"The reason for getting married in Italy, other than Como being beautiful, is that I'm actually a dual citizen," Millanta said.
"I was recognised as an Italian citizen in 2022 due to my ancestry. Getting recognised was a little project of mine during COVID lockdown."
The now 35-year-old is a high school dropout turned online video game designer who has more than 23 million subscribers and who has also built and sold multiple digital companies.
He moved from Sydney to Canberra in 2011 and fell in love with the national capital's "liveability" - it's quiet, easy to get around, all his work is online so it doesn't matter where he lives.
Millanta is also a fan of Questacon, creating an AI exhibition in 2023 and keen to work with the institution again.
Millanta and business partner, Australian lawyer David Greenslade, started BurraPay in 2015, right from the start zeroing in on the United States gambling industry and ensuring their platform was set up to work legally within it.
Millanta said it was not easy, initially, to win over the Nevada Gambling Control Board.
"When it was first raised with the board, they kind of said, 'Are you nuts? We're never going to let this happen'," Millanta said.
"And then, after about 90 minutes of talking and demonstrating what we can do, in terms of making sure that we remove the bad actors, but also handle the responsible gambling requirements, they were happy look at it and run it through their lab. It went through their lab process and then got the approvals we needed to commercialise."
Gamblers at casinos which have signed up with the BurraPay platform can now use crypto including Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin to fund their wagers. First to sign upwas Circa Casino and Resort owner Derek Stevens.
"We've now got operators up and down the Vegas strip that have signed with us. We've got sportsbooks up the wazoo," Millanta said.
BurraPay is also approved in five other American states, with others set to follow. The platform may also appear soon in Australia.
"We're working on a deal that will bring our product here to Australia but in a non-gambling capacity," Millanta said. said.
Americans already use crypto to gamble, but usually on unregulated sites running offshore casinos, with no customer checks or deposit limits.
Millanta says their system brings regulation to crypto wagering.
"We bring the crypto onshore, we make sure it's clean, we allow it to be taxed and, at the same time, we can put those checks and balances in place to make sure that users aren't losing their house," he said.
"The really interesting thing that we can do that nobody else can do, from a crypto point of view, as opposed to traditional money-funded gaming, is if we go and sign up a bunch of different operators, and we know this individual is essentially spending their deposit limit at casino one and then casino two and then casino three, the casinos don't talk to one another, they don't know.
"The banks, if they are doing traditional finance, they don't know, they don't care. But we can see it, because it's all coming from the same [crypto] wallet, so we can go, 'Hey, you might want to go talk to that person because that person might actually have a problem'."
Millanta is confident he and Greenslade are too far ahead of the ball to worry about imitators to BurraPay, with the pair filing patents since 2015.
"Look, there's always going to be copycats and competitors but we're, I would expect, 12 to 18 months, in front in terms of regulator approvals," he said.
"So, by the time they do come into the market, hopefully we've signed up the market."
