UX-rated: why crypto gambling products are at the forefront of innovation

“The product is a better experience. The bonuses are better. The VIP service is better,” insists Nigel Eccles, founder and CEO of crypto operator BetHog, when discussing why customers choose to play on crypto casinos. It’s a topic that has been hotly debated throughout the industry of late, be it in industry circles on LinkedIn or in person when navigating the vast halls at ICE Barcelona in January.

In a LinkedIn article published last year, online casino consultant Brendan Tinnelly noted that an increasing number of gamblers were turning to crypto casinos for their innovative games and active communities, supported by unique marketing strategies. On top of that, he wrote, the customer journey comes with fewer friction points than the regulated space. He explains to EGR: “If I go to sign up with a UK online casino, I need to share my passport, proof of address. I need to share a photo or live video of my face. I can’t use my credit card. There’s a lot of restrictions in terms of opening an account.”

It’s a stark contrast to signing up to a crypto casino, Tinnelly continues: “You can go sign up with your Facebook account to [crypto casino] Stake in two clicks, easily find the games you want to play, and play them. There’s a big difference between that and the traditional, regulated industry.” It’s a USP for an increasing number of players, leaving the regulated side of the industry in a battle to keep not only its existing customers but also attract the younger, tech-savvy adult consumer primed to enter the world of online gambling. Tinnelly goes on to describe the crypto gambling space as “lively, interactive and vibrant”, as crypto operators are increasingly evolving and offering products and games that resonate with their audiences, rather than serving up the ubiquitous wall of slots in the casino lobby.

In a bid to appeal to younger adult males, themes are edgier, too – one example being Snoop Dogg’s Hotbox on crypto casino Roobet. This twist on the crash game format sees the rap artist smoking ‘the infinity blunt’ on a world tour while players try to cash out before it’s extinguished. Another wildly popular crash-style game on Roobet involves navigating a chicken across a busy road in Mission Uncrossable. Add in the ways in which they can market themselves, such as sponsorship deals with influencers who connect with Gen Z (those born after 1997), and the reasons become clearer as to why the gambling industry is debating the future of crypto operators and whether they will be given a seat at the regulated table.

Pedal to the metal

Tom Waterhouse, a former bookmaker in his native Australia and now founder and chief investment officer at Waterhouse VC, shared with business and finance media outlet ausbiz in January that innovation is why crypto operators are making waves. He highlighted that crypto gambling firms are putting money behind suppliers creating “innovative technology”, and are “really putting their foot down on spending on innovation” to differentiate.

It’s a belief shared by Eccles, who co-founded FanDuel and launched BetHog in November 2024, albeit with jurisdictional restrictions, including the US and UK. “Innovation is nearly all coming from crypto,” Eccles states. “I’m seeing more of that coming out of crypto casinos than I am seeing with the regulated market.” He points to crash games as an “incredible innovation”.

Born from the crypto gambling space, Spribe’s Aviator is the market’s biggest crash title; worldwide stakes on the game hit $14bn in December 2024 alone, the supplier revealed in January. For Tinnelly, the products that particularly stand out for him are instant games, alongside turbo and crash games. While turbo and instant games are similar in that they offer fast-paced action that feature rapid betting rounds, instant games are typically single-round content with immediate wins and losses such as scratchcards or dice games. “While underneath the hood, it’s still an RNG that’s deciding the outcomes, the way that they’ve packaged up that mechanic and presented it to users; it’s not a five-reel slots game like every other online casino but a really intuitive and fun, video game-like experience,” he says.

Another operator giving players an innovative experience is MyPrize, which bills itself as a crypto and multiplayer casino. Launched in May 2024, the platform lets players gamble alongside their favourite creators. Eccles calls it an “interesting concept” and the evolution of the bet behind feature with live blackjack. BetHog recently launched its own multiplayer game called Hogger, its version of the aforementioned Mission Uncrossable, where instead of a chicken, the player tries to navigate a hog across a busy road. If played by a streamer, viewers can take part, with their bets represented by a virtual ‘piglet’ that follows the main hog across the screen.

Eccles says: “It creates funny content, certainly in the Hogger format because you’ll basically have all the pigs following the hog, and then they’ll all get wiped out at the same time and [players] blame the streamer.” On that point, Alexis Zamboglou, co-founder of Web3 sports network Blockasset, believes the multiplayer aspect of gambling works. In other words, a large part of the success of crypto operators is down to having “a community that is passionate about your brand”. When the topic of product innovation is brought up with Zamboglou, he namechecks BetHog and fellow crypto casinos Shuffle and Rollbit as “all developing their own versions of what they believe casino customers want in Web3 and crypto”. Rollbit, for instance, boasts its own tokens, Rollbit Coin.

Pressed by EGR for an example, Zamboglou describes the way customers are rewarded when playing with crypto sites compared to traditional operators. He points to how the launch of Blockasset’s rewards programme took three months, something that would have taken “12 to 16 months at least” at his former employer, evoke. Blockasset’s boss also highlights crypto operators being able to produce their own tokens as another example of innovation. “That’s kind of like Flutter owning their own version of the pound,” he says. “We can obviously use that token to reward customers for playing and betting in casino. I think that’s something that is unique to crypto gambling.”

Watch and learn

Another unique part of crypto gambling is the use of celebrity partnerships and endorsements, with crypto operators taking the promotion of their brands and products to a new level. While the regulated world has every traditional channel available to them, from print media to digital, certain crypto operators harness the likes of streaming platform Kick, which is owned by Stake’s parent company, Easygo. “Stake.com can’t advertise on Google or Facebook,” explains Tinnelly. “They’ve had to find new ways of reaching a customer. What they quickly landed on was streaming content, influencer sponsorship and non-traditional sponsorship as well.”

Stake’s name crops up on several occasions during conversations with industry experts as a crypto operator that has managed to launch in several regulated markets via M&A, including Brazil, Colombia and Italy. Regulus Partners said in a February flash note that it estimates Stake’s annual revenue to be $6bn, which the independent research firm acknowledged was “a guesstimate given the opacity and largely upward volatility of crypto assets”.

“Stake is obviously leading the way in crypto gambling,” says Zamboglou. “They’ve looked at partnerships and streamers like no other operator has done before.” The biggest example is Stake’s collaboration with Drake. According to a Financial Times article in 2022, the operator was paying the hip-hop megastar $100m annually for the partnership. Yet its brand promotion goes beyond rappers and influencers, which regulated operators in markets like the UK are limited to use due to rules that ensure the celebrities chosen don’t appeal to children and young adults. For example, in the UK, the Committee of Advertising Practice states “celebrities popular with children must be used with a due sense of responsibility”.

Stake also announced that same year it had been named the main partner of Premier League side Everton as their front-of-shirt sponsor (worth a rumoured £10m a season) and in January 2024 secured the naming rights for Alfa Romeo’s Formula 1 team for the 2024 and 2025 seasons – becoming the Stake F1 Team. “You have a lot of gambling companies like FanDuel and DraftKings gravitating towards sports organisations,” Zamboglou says when discussing the role celebrities have played in the rise of crypto operators, “whereas in crypto, gambling is personality driven rather than more corporately driven.”

He also notes that messaging apps Discord and Telegram are playing a “huge” role in the rise of crypto operators. “One of the things that doesn’t exist in Web2 gambling is communities.” Using his own background as an example, the former evoke exec explains how historically the relationship between bookmaker and bettor has been adversarial. “They look at the bookies as, ‘I’m against you’. With crypto gambling, in most cases, people feel like they’re part of a community.” Within six months, Blockasset had built a Telegram community of 10,000 people, something Zamboglou says he simply wouldn’t have been able to do with evoke.

The rise of these communities, including on streaming platforms, is what Tinnelly calls “restrictions breeding innovation”. “If you’re a streamer, you’re showing the game and the experience of playing. You’re not just hitting someone over the head with a bonus – you’re showcasing the actual experience and the product you’re asking people to sign up and pay for.” Though he’s unsure of whether that was an intentional choice or a natural byproduct of advertising constraints, it has certainly made a lasting impact.

A rallying cry

There appears to be no sign of traditional gambling companies embracing bitcoin and alt coins as a form of payment anytime soon, though. For example, in July 2023 the UK rejected calls from its Treasury Committee to regulate crypto, but there’s a belief among some that crypto gambling will soon be considered simply gambling. “I just don’t think there will be a distinction,” Eccles remarks. “Regulated operators will, in time, adopt crypto as payment. It’ll be a slow and difficult adoption because they have to learn a lot.” Explaining why, the BetHog founder says that if a player deposits in bitcoin, they will want to hold it in bitcoin and not convert it. He goes on to predict how long it could take for this transition to happen. “It may take longer than five [years], it may be 10. What we’ll see over the next five years is crypto gambling will continue to take market share and grow very rapidly. After 10 years, I don’t think we will talk about it anymore.”

Crypto operator Whale.io, which began life as a Telegram casino, offered a glimpse into its own rapid growth by revealing in a clip posted on LinkedIn that its user count rocketed from 140,000 at the start of 2024 to 14.5 million by the end of the year. Likewise, Zamboglou also believes crypto gambling will become more mainstream. Admitting it currently has a “very bad reputation” in the industry, he highlights a “lack of responsibility and ethics” in terms of how some of the brands operate. “Stake’s withdrawal from the UK was a really good example of that,” he explains, referring to the operator’s exit from the market in March following an investigation by the Gambling Commission into a Stake-branded video featuring a porn actress. 

“I think as more experienced people come in from traditional gambling into crypto and can bring more of that responsibility that does exist in regulated markets like the UK, it starts to create a much more sustainable long-term growth for the crypto industry itself.” As will Donald Trump being president, given Trump’s administration is very much pro-crypto (crypto prices surged in early March when he said he would like bitcoin and lesser-traded tokens to be part of a new US strategic crypto reserve). “More people are aware of it, more people will start to buy into it,” says Zamboglou. “So, your capture area for recruiting and acquiring customers is much bigger than it is at the moment. I can only really see crypto getting bigger now.”

Tinnelly agrees, as he says Trump’s second term in the White House could lead to a “tailwind” for crypto. But he also looks at the other side of the coin. “It’s not really clear to me how it’s going to play out. Are we going to see this welcoming of crypto casinos into the regulated world? On the other hand, are we going to see this backlash, like the Gambling Commission for example, starting to put pressure on suppliers of unregulated websites?” He concludes: “It’s probably one of the biggest questions facing the industry at the moment.”