Major crypto gambling operators are much better hedged than they used to be – but are greater threats on the horizon?
Crypto has seen prices slump since early 2026, with both Bitcoin and Ethereum down to their lowest levels in years. The decline has been driven by weak market demand and corporate selloffs, as well as heavy institutional investor interest in AI, which has sucked away a lot of previously crypto-focused money. For the big crypto casino operators, is this a problem?
The first aspect of this is whether a decline in the crypto price has affected customer willingness to gamble their coin. David Barkwith, who analyses crypto flows at Czech blockchain intelligence business Podproza, told NEXT.io that player behaviour is fairly inelastic overall.
He said: “Generally most punters that we see are depositing in GBP or USD or CAD – they use crypto more for the ease of getting the payments onto site.
“[Players] have a budget in mind of what they spend in a week or a month and they stick to it. If their money is worth slightly less then they need to deposit a bit more, but it doesn’t have a massive effect.”
This is a trend that is borne out by open-source data, which shows limited correlation. According to crypto casino analytics platform Tanzanite, deposits on Stake.com rose from $1.82bn to $2.54bn from November 2025 to January 2026, before again sinking to $1.59bn a couple of months later.
Stake.com’s smaller competitors remained more stable during this time, with deposits to its nearest challenger Roobet falling from $428m to $378m.
Crypto expert David Bartram says player behaviour towards changing crypto prices has changed significantly over the last decade, after previously having a “big impact,” albeit in a somewhat counterintuitive pattern. He outlined: “What we would always see is when the crypto price went up it would actually decrease volumes on crypto casinos because people basically didn’t want to gamble an asset that was already making them good money.
“Inversely, when the price came down people valued it a bit less in their minds and were more willing to actually use it.”
However, Bartram pointed out that the days of people depositing wildly fluctuating Bitcoins are over, with the majority of volume now being stable coins, primarily USDT or USDC. This has meant players are much less sensitive to price pressure than they were in the past.
Put it all on black
However, even if players are not responding hugely to the slump, the price downturn could still have a negative impact on the crypto casinos themselves, which often hold a lot the stuff.
According to Barkwith, however, the knock-on effect for larger, more professional casinos is limited. He added: “Some of these are unregulated operators and they have to make business decisions around how much exposure to volatile cryptocurrencies they’re willing to accept.”
The analyst highlighted some operators accept crypto payments themselves, while others work with payment providers who offer services to protect the operators from fluctuations in price. “It’s a massive question for gaming companies – how much crypto they can stomach holding.”
Barkwith pointed out operators work to hedge their exposure by holding stable coins and in some cases buy specific financial instruments to manage the risk.
Overall, this appears not to be an especially difficult task for the larger operators. Bartram added: “It’s not hard any more to run a business that isn’t going to get wrecked because the price goes down – it’s easy enough to hedge.”
Despite the limited effects the falling crypto prices have for operators, it might be an issue more generally if crypto interest falls out of the zeitgeist. Bartram pointed out the falling Bitcoin price has dampened enthusiasm for crypto gambling more broadly, with it becoming a “harder sell” for the main acquisition channels on X.
He pointed out that many of the innovations in gambling in recent years have developed from crypto: from crash games to prediction markets and even in the new perp contracts – that is open-ended trades on fluctuations in cryto prices – that are being offered by Kalshi.
However despite this, for now crypto seems somewhat out of fashion. Bartram continued: “The thing with crypto at any point is that either people are up and optimistic, or they’re down – and right now people are pretty down.”
Even as the enthusiasm for crypto more generally slumps, operators might find they have an even bigger threat on the horizon.
At this week’s Lord’s Liaison Committee meeting on the social and economic impacts of the gambling industry, ex-evoke executive Vaughan Lewis specifically named Stake and Rainbet as black market brands of interest to young people today.
With grey markets becoming an artifact of a younger, more fly-by-night gambling sector, major businesses will find themselves increasingly in the firing line from an industry, government and public aligned in crushing unregulated operators.
Ultimately, the increasingly harsh regulatory environment will likely represent a more intense threat than any crypto price swing.