Crypto or Fiat? The Economics Behind Online Casinos
A debit card deposit made on a Friday evening can take until Tuesday to reach the operator’s bank. The player sees the balance at once, because the operator has fronted it, and in between a card network, an acquirer, an issuing bank, and a fraud-screening vendor have each taken a sliver. Players compare crypto and fiat by speed and convenience at the deposit screen. The finance team sees a different comparison.
What fiat actually costs
Interchange, the fee the merchant’s bank pays the cardholder’s bank, has been capped at 0.2 per cent of a debit transaction and 0.3 per cent of a credit one since December 2015 under Regulation 2015/751. Those caps did not cover the fees the schemes charge, though, and the Payment Systems Regulator’s market review of March 2025 found that Mastercard and Visa had raised core scheme and processing fees by at least 25 percent in real terms since 2017, at a cost to UK businesses of at least £170 million a year. Interchange between the UK and the EEA went from 0.2 to 1.15 per cent on debit and from 0.3 to 1.5 per cent on credit during 2021 and 2022.
For a casino operator the percentages sit alongside fraud screening, chargeback handling, and e-wallet fees negotiated case by case. What fiat buys for the money is a dispute process, a counterparty with a banking license, and rails every customer already has in their pocket.
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What crypto changes
A stablecoin transfer removes several of those parties and settles at weekends. The Bank for International Settlements, in its 2025 annual report, cited an estimate that a $200 remittance from sub-Saharan Africa costs around 60 percent less over stablecoins than through conventional channels. Visa extended its USDC settlement to US issuing and acquiring banks in December 2025, on seven-day settlement windows against the usual five business days, and Samsung is putting USDC transfers on Galaxy phones for US users, so the rails are turning into ordinary consumer infrastructure.
The same BIS chapter notes that stablecoins have “seen substantial deviations from par,” and an operator holding a float in one carries that exchange risk until somebody converts it.
Regulation has an economic cost
In a licensed market the payment rail does not decide the compliance bill. The Gambling Commission requires age verification before a customer can deposit a penny, requires customer funds to sit in a separate client bank account, and requires any new payment method, crypto included, to go through a fresh money-laundering risk assessment and a notification to the regulator. Those costs do not fall because the deposit arrived on a blockchain, and the Commission’s guidance names price swings against fiat and the anonymity of some coins as risks a licensee has to show it has dealt with before it switches a crypto option on.
When one payment system serves multiple products
Because the compliance bill is fixed per customer, it can be spread across multiple products. A sportsbook and a casino can share an account, identity checks, and payment infrastructure, allowing an operator to generate revenue from two products without duplicating every part of its payments and compliance setup.
Betway illustrates this multi-product model, with casino and sportsbook operations under the same UK Gambling Commission license. Its parent company, Super Group, has taken different approaches to digital currency across its markets while retaining that broader operating structure. In November 2025, the group launched a rand-backed stablecoin on Solana for South African customers, issued by a division holding two FSCA crypto licenses, with reserves held at a local bank. In Britain, Betway accepts debit cards, e-wallets, and open banking, while credit cards are prohibited for gambling under UK rules.
The real business question
Put like that, “crypto or fiat” is the wrong question for an operator. The useful one is which rails a given market’s customers, banks, and regulators will accept and what each costs per transaction once compliance is counted. In Britain that second question is still open at the top: the Bank of England’s November 2025 consultation on systemic sterling stablecoins proposes a £20,000 holding limit for individuals, and the bank’s own view is that the predominant use of stablecoins today is buying and selling other cryptoassets.