Having seen the industry evolve exponentially over the past few years, iGaming Expert sat down with Elantil’s Chief Product Officer Clyde Vassallo to learn about his journey to co-founding one of iGaming’s most exciting start-ups and how the lessons he learnt along the way have helped shape the company’s product.
iGaming Expert: Tell us about your career in iGaming and how you have evolved to your position as Co-founder and CPO at Elantil? What experiences have you accrued throughout your career that have put you in the best possible position to succeed with Elantil?
Clyde Vassallo: If I look back at my career in iGaming, there’s been one consistent theme: I’ve always been driven by a need to understand what quality really means in a digital product within our space – not just as a checklist, but as an actual foundation for building rich experiences with total peace of mind.
My first role was in engineering, building automated quality systems for a B2B platform. That was my crash course in learning our industry and I spent time with anyone willing to teach me – clients, operations teams, infrastructure engineers; really anyone I felt I could learn something from. As an engineer, I was trying to understand what “great” looked like from each of their perspectives.
That period taught me two major lessons: firstly, that quality is defined by the people who live with the product every day, and secondly, that some attributes simply can’t be retrofitted and instead need to be baked into the foundation from the very start. With this in mind, when an opportunity in the company came to build a new platform from scratch, I naturally grabbed it with both hands.
In under two years, a small, tightly aligned team managed to build, certify and launch a platform in the US. That experience shaped my understanding of ownership, empowerment, and the discipline required to set a vision and deliver against it. As that platform matured, I felt the pull to do it all over again, only this time without the influence and safety net of a larger organisation. That became Elantil. We started with two principles we all believed in: that operators should have the freedom to actualise their visions and the peace of mind that their technology will support them.
Nine months later we had a live platform and real operators building on top of it. As we grew, we naturally gravitated into roles that fit our strengths, and for me, that meant becoming CPO. Today, I’m back where I feel I do my best work: close to the people using our product, understanding their ambitions, and making sure our technology is the foundation for them to express their vision.
iGX: Where do you think the technology gap is in iGaming and how do you hope to fill that with Elantil?
CV: The last five years have undoubtedly reshaped iGaming. We’ve moved from trying to digitise a casino floor to building something far more expressive: immersive digital entertainment competing with the likes of Netflix, Robinhood and TikTok.
This shift has created new demands on the underlying tech stack. Operators now rely on a constantly expanding ecosystem of specialised products. Experiences are richer, more dynamic, and more personalised, and the truth is that the technology platform solutions providers had been building up until this point hadn’t actually been designed with any of these developments in mind.
Because Elantil was built at this exact moment in the industry’s evolution, we had the advantage of designing for today’s challenges, not yesterday’s assumptions. Integrations that would have previously taken months could now be done in a matter of days, giving operators instant access to a wider ecosystem, and we’ve also provided a financial system that’s capable of transacting with fiat, crypto and virtual currencies, enabling experiences that extend far beyond traditional gameplay.
In addition to that, we’ve added real-time data aggregation inside and outside of our platform to empower operators to build their own differentiated value on top of our infrastructure.
Given my previous point about certain aspects needing to be baked into the foundation from the very start, by placing these capabilities at our core rather than having them as patched add-ons, we’ve positioned Elantil to serve the operators building for the next wave of digital entertainment.
iGX: A core aspect of the Elantil ecosystem is the ability to have multi wallets and multi currencies. How important is that for operators and what are the important considerations to make when developing a feature like this?
CV: It’s already essential and, to my mind, it will soon be non-negotiable if you’re building something that’s set up to last over the next three years. The reality is that players today are already accustomed to managing funds across multiple wallets and currencies through finance and crypto apps, so their mental model has already evolved. In this respect, offering a single wallet in a single currency not only feels outdated but also limits players’ ability to spend on your platform.
By way of response, operators have begun offering vaults, multiple balances, flexible funding options, and even rewards tied to players’ holding behaviour. At Elantil, our job is therefore to ensure the platform never constrains the experience operators want to create, so we’ve worked hard to remove the traditional limitations that have dogged our industry. With Elantil, operators can define how many wallets a player has, when they’re created and in which currencies, and even the ownership model that they use, including shared ownership, which we support natively.
We built our funding ecosystem this way so that operators can innovate freely, rather than within the boundaries of what a legacy wallet system was designed to handle. This way, operators are essentially future-proofed, as they’re always ready to adapt to emerging trends like crypto and virtual currencies without having to overhaul their existing systems whenever a new change arrives.
iGX: Another important part of Elantil’s platform is the ability to power personalisation through its lobby design. How do you go about developing personalised lobbies that allow operators to showcase their unique character while still retaining Elantil technology at their core?
CV: As a platform, we sit at the intersection of every action a player takes and every adjustment an operator makes. That gives us an incredibly rich data foundation to work from, but data is only useful if it can lead to meaningful action at the right time.
When it comes to user personalisation, our focus has been two-fold – real-time insight and real-time influence. Our KPI engine gives operators the immediate context that they need to make more informed choices, giving them data-driven insights into what games are trending, what gamification elements are resonating and how various player groups respond to them differently.
Through our internal systems and the integrations we have with best-in-class external tools, operators can shape a player’s experience as it unfolds, showcasing games that are likely to appeal based on their preferences while also encouraging discovery. In this way, they not only have the data they need to hand, but also the capability to act on it in a more meaningful way.
In the remainder of 2025 and going forward into 2026, we’re aiming to deepen this data-driven approach even further. The primary goal is to make cost-effective, out-of-the-box personalisation accessible at scale, without diluting the unique character that each operator brings to their brand.
iGX: Finally – what do you think the main technological trend for the iGaming industry/crypto casino sector will be in 2026?
CV: 2025 was definitely the year of exploration. Levelling systems, crypto futures, Lamborghinis in battle passes, prediction markets, new content verticals, strong community layers, we’ve incorporated it all into our offerings as an industry.
I imagine 2026 will be more about curation and identity. Operators now have more building blocks at their disposal than ever before, so the next challenge is going to be arranging them in a way that expresses a clear point of view, namely: “This is who we are. This is the experience we stand for.” In this respect, the winners won’t be the ones who have the most features, but rather the ones who use them with intention, coherence and distinctiveness.
Looking at 2026, our focus at Elantil is becoming even clearer: we want to turn operators into creators. Our goal is to support that shift by ensuring our platform takes on the heavy lifting, giving operators the creative freedom to set up, monitor and optimise their offering with confidence and with the peace of mind that comes from knowing the foundations beneath them are reliable, resilient and built to grow with their ambitions.
