Crypto casinos: on-chain study finds $5.7–11.4bn floor

A blockchain analysis of 12 crypto casino operators found a verifiable gross gaming revenue (GGR) floor of $5.7–11.4 billion for 2025. Researchers tracked deposits to 29 labeled hot wallets across Ethereum, BNB Chain and Tron and converted deposits to revenue using industry-standard ratios of 25 to 50 cents of GGR per dollar deposited. Total observed inflows to those wallets were $22.7 billion in 2025. One operator accounted for $15.2 billion, a second operator accounted for $4.2 billion, and five smaller sites in the sample took $151 million combined.

The analysis traced customer deposit addresses to central hot wallets used for day-to-day operations and aggregated inflows using public name tags, a commercial labeling service and publicly available query tools. The researchers excluded transfers between an operator’s own wallets to avoid double-counting and omitted transactions below $1 and above $50 million. The work used public blockchain ledgers, saved queries on a public analytics platform and a downloadable CSV to permit independent re-running of the numbers.

The study lists known blind spots. Bitcoin and Litecoin flows were not captured because older chains and some payment rails do not use reusable labeled addresses. Solana coverage was partial. Payments routed through third-party processors or moved off-chain do not appear on the tracked addresses. Wallet rotations and the disappearance of public tags mean any wallet list is a snapshot. The authors describe their result as a conservative floor rather than a full market total.

A separate estimate by Yield Sec put crypto gambling at $81.4 billion in 2024. That figure is derived from web-traffic monitoring multiplied by proprietary assumptions about the value of each visit and uses a broad definition of crypto gambling that includes sports betting, products that mimic financial trading, prediction markets and other services that use the crypto label. Ismail Vali, founder of Yield Sec, defended the methodology and said the estimate allocates 58% of the total to crypto casinos, equal to about $48 billion, with sports betting at roughly $18.7 billion, fake financials $6.5 billion, prediction products $5.7 billion and smaller categories making up the remainder.

The two methods use different inputs and cover different activity. The on-chain approach provides publicly runnable queries and raw deposit data on three networks. The web-traffic approach relies on proprietary inputs about user activity and value per visit that are not directly verifiable on public ledgers. If the $81.4 billion figure were accurate, activity invisible to the blockchain analysis would need to be several times larger than the observed on-chain flows. On-chain data in the sample did show rapid growth for some operators, including a doubling of monthly inflows on one network for a major operator during the second half of 2025.