With $1.7 Billion Net Worth, Gurhan Kiziloz Adds Blockchain to His Portfolio

The decision by Gurhan Kiziloz to commission a bespoke digital ledger for his Nexus International conglomerate is being read in the City not as a speculative technology play, but as a direct response to the friction costs that have begun to drag on the group’s profitability. With a personal fortune now estimated at $1.7bn, the British entrepreneur has formally unveiled BlockDAG, a proprietary Layer-1 protocol engineered to unblock the transactional arteries of his sprawling gaming empire. 

The launch marks a critical juncture in the evolution of Nexus International. While the group successfully posted $1.2bn in revenue for the 2025 fiscal year, the figures revealed a stark operational reality: the business missed its internal revenue target of $1.45bn. More troubling for the board was a 7 per cent contraction in profit margins, a variance attributed significantly to the escalating costs and latency associated with third-party payment rails and legacy blockchain networks.

Gurhan Kiziloz’s move to bring infrastructure in-house represents a classic exercise in vertical integration. By effectively becoming his own central banker and clearing house, he is attempting to insulate Nexus from the inefficiencies of the broader crypto market. The rationale is clear: for a high-volume gaming operator, reliance on public chains like Ethereum, where gas fees can spike unpredictably and settlement times lag, is no longer a viable commercial strategy. 

BlockDAG is the proposed antidote to this structural vulnerability. Unlike traditional blockchains, which process transactions sequentially, creating the familiar “bottlenecks” seen during periods of peak demand, the new protocol utilizes a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) architecture. This allows for concurrent block processing, theoretically offering the “industrial-grade” throughput required to stabilize the group’s margins.

The strategic urgency behind BlockDAG is linked directly to the launch of Spartans.com, the group’s aggressive new challenger brand in the online casino space. Unlike sports betting, which can tolerate minor settlement delays, the “casino-first” model relies on high-frequency, instant-gratification loops. In this sector, latency is a churn driver. 

By controlling the underlying layer, Nexus aims to offer a user experience that competitors relying on public infrastructure cannot match: near-zero transaction fees and instant finality. This capability is viewed internally as a vital “moat,” securing the ecosystem against the kind of operational drag that contributed to the 2025 revenue miss.

For Gurhan Kiziloz, the transition from application-layer executive to infrastructure architect is a significant escalation of ambition. It suggests a belief that the “blockchain trilemma”, the notorious difficulty of balancing security, scalability, and decentralisation, must be solved internally if his business is to scale beyond the $1.2bn mark. The heavy R&D investment required to build a proprietary chain is afforded by the founder’s unique capital structure. With zero venture capital backing and full equity control, Gurhan Kiziloz has the latitude to divert resources into long-term infrastructure projects that public shareholders might balk at. 

As Nexus prepares for the 2026 fiscal year, the message to the market is unambiguous. The group is no longer content to rent its digital real estate. By launching BlockDAG, Gurhan Kiziloz is signaling that the path to restoring his 7 per cent lost margin lies in absolute sovereignty over the code, the coin, and the network itself.