WHICH AND HOW MANY?
If someone asked me before I did this research how many different cryptos are offered across online casinos, my answer would have been "around 20, maybe 30’, followed by the thought that I probably can’t name nearly as many. One hundred analysed casinos together offer 74 different cryptocurrencies! And we have to take into account that these are only from casinos and not primarily sports betting sites, where some of the bigger ones are known to even include tokens like Barcelona Fan Token (BAR), Juventus Fan Token (JUV) and many others. One would assume that the majority of coins offered in casinos fall in the top 100 by market cap, but surprisingly only 64% do. That means that over a third of all cryptos offered are either really small or relatively new, and certainly not well-known.
Casinos offer anywhere from one to over 50 different cryptos, with the majority having between two and 10 different cryptocurrencies. The top most offered crypto is of course Bitcoin, followed by Ethereum and Litecoin, both crypto veterans. The rest of the top places are occupied by Bitcoin Cash, Tether and Dogecoin.
The top 11 coins also include their rank on the market cap. You can see that some casinos go to such lengths as to include the Party Of The Living Dead coin - whatever that is.
CASINO TYPES
Because crypto gambling has evolved quite significantly since the beginning, it is appropriate to make a finer segmentation of casinos to see their differences. So we distributed casinos into the following four groups:
-Blockchain casinos: casinos that use blockchain technology for their services apart from accepting crypto payments (provably fair games, their own coins/tokens)
-Crypto casinos: casinos that offer only crypto payments, but other than that don’t include blockchain technology
-Hybrid crypto casinos: casinos that offer both crypto and fiat services, but focus primarily on crypto
-Hybrid fiat casinos: casinos that offer both crypto and fiat services, but focus primarily on fiat
There were a few hybrid casinos that seemed to show equal affinity towards fiat and crypto, and were thus included in both categories.
The above chart nicely shows that the online gambling market is still mostly represented by Hybrid fiat casinos, offering five or six different cryptos on average. But the next in line are already blockchain casinos, offering on average 11 different cryptos and having a much wider distribution when it comes to how many coins they offer. This could indicate that there’s a fair share of crypto players who prefer the tailored services provided by blockchain casinos.
Most new casinos that have opened their doors for the first time in the past two years are still hybrid fiat casinos, targeting mostly fiat players while the majority of the blockchain casinos was established between 2017 and 2018, after the first "Crypto Boom’, and basically didn’t exist before 2013.
Note that the few casinos which existed before 2010 didn’t initially accept crypto, because it didn’t exist yet, but started accepting at least Bitcoin somewhere on the way.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Some crypto casinos already started creating their own coins or tokens what seems to be the next step in the online crypto gambling scene. The first ones were simply a replacement for the casino’s internal currency to be used as complementary points or a play-for-fun currency. But lately casinos have been developing full-stack coins that can be bought, sold, mined and in some cases even exchanged in some crypto exchanges.
We’re still waiting for a casino to make a breakthrough with its coin and join the mainstream cryptos, which could open the online gambling market to many new people and opportunities.
