EWagers wants to build on the side bet culture in esports

EWagers was built around a simple observation: competitive gamers already wager on themselves and each other, but the tools to do it safely, legally, and inside the game itself haven’t really existed.

For Noah Fulk, that gap was personal. A lifelong gamer who started playing at age four and went semi-professional as a teenager, Fulk was already wagering on his own Call of Duty matches and using PayPal to settle peer-to-peer bets—an arrangement that ultimately ran afoul of the platform’s terms of service.

“I made a PayPal account back in the day while playing Call of Duty. That later progressed to me getting blacklisted and banned from PayPal for life,” he said on the BettingStartups Podcast. “Fast forward a decade later, and that’s really what inspired EWagers.”

Early on, EWagers leaned more consumer-facing. The initial idea was to give players a safer destination to compete for cash without worrying about getting cheated or losing access to payments. As the product evolved, the team realized that skill-based wagering was already happening alongside gameplay—and that pulling players out into a standalone product introduced friction rather than removing it.

That realization pushed EWagers toward a different model. Instead of trying to own the end user, the company began positioning itself as a skill-based esports betting platform that sat on top of popular games with big playerbases—quietly enabling real-money competition without forcing publishers to become betting operators.

Today, EWagers works behind the scenes, allowing developers to integrate peer-to-peer wagering directly into gameplay by connecting live game data to EWagers’ backend. “We're fine kind of being the infrastructure layer behind the scenes,” Fulk said. “You're effectively just calling our APIs, ensuring that the state laws are being met, KYC is being met. Everything is safe and secure.”

That approach also means publishers don’t need to rebuild or re-launch their games. “You're not doing an SDK wrapper, you're not creating a whole new game that has to be listed on the app store,” Fulk explained. “You're effectively just monetizing your existing established game.”

Getting there required EWagers to do the unglamorous work first. Building a compliant wagering layer meant navigating approvals from payment processors and banking partners, undergoing gaming lab audits, and securing legal opinions across individual states. “It's not fun,” Fulk said of the process. “And it's especially not fun when you don't know what you're building because again, I'm only 27.”

What he initially assumed would take under a year stretched far longer. “That was really just the initial auditing period for our banking partner,” he said, pointing to a process that involved tokenization, PCI compliance, geolocation, fraud checks, and KYC—table-stakes requirements for infrastructure, but largely invisible to players.

That foundation supports EWagers’ monetization model, which is intentionally straightforward. The platform takes a service fee on wagered prize pools—typically between 10% and 20%—and splits it with the game partner. “If I waged you, Jesse, $50, you put up $50, that's a hundred dollars prize pool,” Fulk explained. “If we took a 10% service fee, that means the winner's gonna receive $90.”

Looking ahead, Fulk is pragmatic about where EWagers ultimately fits in the ecosystem. Rather than insisting on permanence as a standalone brand, he sees the technology as something that could live more effectively inside a larger platform. “I think it makes a lot more sense for somebody who's bigger—more resources, more games, more users at their disposal—to take the technology and monetize it in a much better way than we are,” he said.

It’s a perspective shaped by the company’s evolution from B2C to B2B and one that positions EWagers not as a destination, but as a tech layer for how skill-based competition and real-money play quietly intersect inside esports.

Listen to the full podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.