The Rift

What is The Rift?

When he subsequently looked at casino games, something else struck him – the experience did not seem dramatically different from the slot machines he remembered seeing years earlier.

“I started thinking about how to combine the really great monetisation of randomness in casino games with the attention loop of social media platforms,” Yashin says. “The idea was: what if you could bet on the result of a short video or a short TikTok?”

That question eventually became Swipe Games, a Cyprus-based business that is well on the way to establishing swipe games as a casino category in its own right. Still in its commercial infancy, the company has rapidly gained traction across the industry since beginning sales late last year.

What is The Rift?

Introduced in 1998, ClubGRANTS was designed to channel a share of gambling-linked profits from gaming clubs back into local communities. This includes health and welfare services as well as community development and sporting clubs. 

According to the Gaming Machine Tax Act 2001, a tax rebate of up to 1.85% of a club’s gaming machine profits is made available to any registered club that records profits of over $1 million (US$715,000) during a tax year. 

This is only possible if the club in question allocates at least 0.75% of prescribed profits over $1 million to community-focused activities and services. These profits make up two-thirds of the ClubGRANTS scheme funding. 

How to play The Rift

Buffett has repeatedly raised concerns regarding the mainstreaming of gambling and its marketing under the guise of investing. In May, he targeted prediction markets and traders speculating on short-term instruments like 30-minute bitcoin options.

“If you’re buying or selling one-day options, that is not investing. It is not speculating. It is gambling,” Buffett said during an interview with CNBC. “There’s nobody who can explain why they’re buying an option for one day.”

Buffett, who built his fortune buying “wonderful businesses” at fair prices and holding them for the long term, believes the public has mistakenly adopted a get-rich-quick mindset.