Affiliate Interview Series - Nicolás E.

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(This interview was originally published in the July 2026 issue of the GPWA Times Magazine.)

Please tell us about your background — where you grew up, where you live now, and any roles or experiences you had before entered the iGaming affiliate space.
I grew up in a beautiful riverside town in Uruguay called Paysandú, where I spent most of my childhood. Beautiful memories of the river, friends, and school days.

After secondary school it was normal then I moved to the capital city, Montevideo, to continue with university studies. So, that's what I did. But very quickly I started my developer career, working for a company that was building a system for some Belgian newspapers.

About a year later, and equipped with some experience in this coding thing, I was hired by a Brazilian company to develop the front end for a brand entering the online betting space. I think it was 2011, and it was my first contact with the industry. I spent about one more year there, and with two colleges we discovered affiliation, so we decided to quit the safe haven of a salary and started our own media company.

We were young and reckless, as a bunch of your man should be. Things went mostly fine — a partner left here; a casino won't pay a big check there — but we did fine for the experience we had. I moved to Buenos Aires; we get to know the industry, and Malta for the first time thanks to a certain generous operator.

About six years later, I sold my bit, bought a backpack and set off to explore Brazil for a year. I could tell it's a beautiful country, with many opportunities and inequalities, both friendly and hostile. I was 30 years old by then. After too many caipirinhas, well, I fell in love, and moved to São Paulo, where I lived for the next four years. I am currently returning to Uruguay, where I now live between a tiny cabin I built in a beach town near the shore, and Montevideo City.

You have past experience in software and coding. How did those experiences shape your approach to building Betizen and Cubiq?
During my time away from the industry, I kept thinking that it doesn’t need yet another boring affiliate site. What it needs is innovation — better code, better design, and better experiences. I’ve built too many affiliate sites I wasn’t proud of, so Betizen is my bet (a fun bet) on helping make the space better.

You founded Cubiq in September 2025. What was the inspiration behind this venture and what has the first few months been like for you and the business?
After a lot of uncareful consideration, I had the crazy idea of founding Cubiq to function as a backbone. We are building a product-oriented Software Factory and a Backend-as-a-Service for Enterprises, Developers and Agents (and our own products!). Betizen is one of those experiments, in this case for the iGaming industry.

We plan to be the first Casino, Binary, and Forex listings site with the right incentives: karma, merit, and proof-of-work (values from the Bitcoin community), offering reliable, user-based and auditable listings and rankings for players, operators, and affiliate managers willing to gain visibility. It will be backed by Cubiq's APIs and auditable via blockchain (in the future), if I manage to find the investment needed.

With Cubiq, I try to re-connect to my coding roots, building professional services, products and APIs while supporting open, global and permissionless protocols (Bitcoin, MCP, Nostr, etc.). I am also planning to serve fellow affiliates with efficient solutions for setting up their sites (forget about costly and vulnerable WordPress. There are better, lighter, alternatives!)

Can you share the story of how your affiliate site Betizen began, what motivated you to start it, and how it has evolved since launch?
If you look it up on the Wayback Machine, you’ll see that Betizen started out as just another listing site. I did many things wrong, but I kept the project alive through all these years. Today, it’s become a much more ambitious project — focused on transparency, user-generated listings powered by “karma” distributions, and AI-generated quality content — all running on Cubiq’s B2B APIs and platform.

How does the Betizen ranking system works?
The world is being reshaped by technology once again — and the iGaming industry won’t be an exception. Prediction markets are just one example, and affiliation needs to evolve too.

I believe the industry needs greater transparency on many fronts. Affiliate managers should be able to check verifiable, real-time stats and buy visibility on demand. Users should be the ones shaping the listings with their votes — and trust them, because everything is transparent. They vote with their karma, and they earn it through proof-of-work.

Please tell us more about the relaunch of the site and the new “noble concept.”
I think what’s truly novel is the mix of concepts and technologies applied to an affiliate site. The idea is that users visit operators, spend time on Betizen, play games, and share their experiences — and those contributions return to them in the form of karma. They can use that karma to vote, share it with others, or influence the rankings.

Users who distribute the most karma rise to the top of the monthly leaderboard — and the top users get great perks: bonuses, free spins, jackpot alerts, special support, and more. That’s what we want to build: a community driven by contribution, transparency, and real rewards for top collaborators. It’s a fun experiment we are actively coding. If you’ve got ideas or want to join as a brand or sponsor, let’s talk! Even the code and roadmap are open! So the mechanisms are transparent.

What is the crypto, forex, binary market like these days and how has it changed over the years?
As I mentioned earlier, just look at prediction markets and the principles they’re built on. Big shifts are happening around trust and transparency — and we affiliates need to be ready to meet those new user expectations. This demand for verifiable transparency will only increase with each new wave of GenAi developments. That is where quality blockchains and tokenization have a place. That is also where stablecoins for agentic commerce also have a place. Just as the coding world changed forever so will these markets or their inner workings.

How do you balance managing the site with your work at Cubiq?
One milestone at a time. We have an ambitious roadmap for 2026 and 2027, ranging from payments, backend and AI services focused in LATAM, to apps and experiments like Betizen. Once we ship all milestones for this initial phase, we will just keep integrating Claude Code and OpenCode to our pipeline, building, pivoting and deploying great ideas.

What lessons from your early ventures would you say were the most influential in shaping your approach to affiliate marketing?
The idea that brands, affiliate managers, affiliates, and users together create a system of trust — or mistrust. And today, that system needs to be more verifiable and auditable than ever.

How important is content to driving traffic on Betizen? Can you share insights on organic traffic performance or audience engagement?
Betizen is transitioning from primarily LatAm traffic to a more global audience. We had solid numbers from Brazil, which dropped after recent events — but in hindsight, that was a good thing. It pushed me to rethink the whole concept of affiliation.

These days, organic doesn’t necessarily mean Google — less and less, actually. I think traffic will move from blue links in a search results page, to be embedded into life, with fewer devices interfaces, and AI as the backend.

So trying to build a reliable system of trust through a brand that delivers its simple promises, over time, I think it will be the key. For the moment, we keep having fun with over-optimizations and backlinks.

What’s your approach to SEO? How much time do you dedicate weekly to optimizing your sites?
That used to be the whole point of Betizen. But as I mentioned, the focus now is on building something genuinely useful and fun — a site powered by trust and verifiable transparency. A useful thing, you know.

How do you decide which games, casinos, or affiliate programs to promote? What makes a partnership successful in your view?
All partners are welcome to join — soon they’ll even be able to list themselves. From there, users will determine the rankings through their karma. Naturally, we’ll have sponsors and promoted partners too, all clearly labeled. So, come say hi!

Looking at the Latin American iGaming market today, what opportunities and challenges stand out most to you?
Legal uncertainty and responsible gaming, as always. For this reason, we are also including European markets soon. But this is also an opportunity, since it opens a space for affiliates to provide useful tools for players to make informed decisions on where and how to play — in our case, trusting what the market says with their votes and not the site owner.

What are the most significant regulatory obstacles you’ve dealt with in LatAm, and how do you overcome them?
Often, a poorly regulated market is worse than an unregulated, totally free market. Concentration is a problem. When it comes to discoverability, I believe in open systems where the market decides. And affiliates play a key role as facilitators, providing technology. The best possible solutions come from the market itself. Directly from the players experiences, for the players that need it.

If a brand is not delivering on its promise it should be downvoted, that vote should be in an open ledger (blockchain or not) in order to be verifiable. If a listing is trustworthy, if players are voting, you do not need anything else to choose a safe place to have fun playing.

Regulation, of course, covers broader issues — but for affiliation, the focus should be on discoverability and empowering players with tools and insights to make smarter decisions.

If a young entrepreneur wanted to start an iGaming affiliate site today, what advice would you give them?
Don’t build just another listing site. Be creative, use technology, experiment fearlessly — and be patient during the long walk through the desert. Most importantly, have fun!

Do you gamble yourself?
I really enjoy watching new products and innovations emerge, but I’m not a gambler myself. As the saying goes, there is a time for cumbia and there is a time for tango, so who knows, in any case, not yet.

Outside of work, what are your hobbies or interests? How do you like to spend your free time?
I’ve become mildly addicted to biking and running adventures. I recently finished tackling the Serra do Rio do Rastro climb in Brazil—it was an incredible bike trip that started in Uruguay, and training for my first marathon. I’ve also been diving into the underlying Bitcoin & Spark systems while keeping an eye on stablecoins progress for settlements while we build our payment technology — all fun challenges in their own way.

If someone were visiting you for 24 hours in your city, where would you take them and why?
In São Paulo, I’d take that poor soul to any Dogma Brewpub for a couple of Hop Lover IPAs. In Montevideo, we’d go for a walk along the promenade, share a mate, catch the sunset at Plaza Mateo with a few drinks, some deep house in the background, and a good chat about business!

If you could invite any five people, living or dead, to dinner, who would they be?
Tom Sowel, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), Naval Ravikant, Werner Herzog and Anthony Bourdain.

Name three things about you that most people wouldn’t know.
1. I’ll admit — I’m a terrible dancer, but that doesn’t stop me from doing it anyway when alone, often scaring surrounding neighbors (not sure if it’s the music or the moves).
2. I spend way too many hours listening to Lex Fridman podcasts.
3. I like pistachio ice cream more than I’m willing to admit ... oops!