SOFTSWISS was a pioneer in the online crypto-casino movement and continues to assert dominance in the arena now. Being the leader of a multi-metric solutions company focused on cryptocurrency gambling puts the company in a unique position to analyze the state of Coins in iGaming. In addition to more than a decade of experience, the company presumably has access to more data than anyone else on the subject through the provenance of its Game Aggregator and Casino Platform. The company has about 700 clients using one or both of those solutions.
In addition to annual reports, SOFTSWISS also publishes quarterly updates. While the just-in-time information is valuable, the annual reports tend to reflect longer-term trends better.
The current trends in digital coin gambling for the year 2022 compared to 2021 are not exceptionally rosy nor is the current trend toward returning to fiat currencies for online gambling seen recently. Caveats should be stated before digging into the numbers too deeply: All data comes from SS customers; partway through the year they introduced a coin-to-fiat converter and all bets placed in fiat currencies, even if the deposit and withdrawals were cryptos, were counted as fiat bets.
The value of Bitcoin and Ethereum which are the two biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap fell 65% and 67% year on year.
Overall, crypto betting fell nearly 15% but Ether increased its share of the total bets made against Bitcoin. We’ll dig into that in a moment as well.
Crypto trends in iGaming are inextricably tied to the macroeconomy and crypto’s place in it. That said, many players may have been reluctant to use digital currencies thanks to the chaotic events it was involved in including November’s FTX debacle. The overall crypto climate was basically unstable for most of the year, but gambling on the company’s platform did increase appreciably when taking fiat currency into account.
The company’s platform saw a 31% increase in total bets made in 2022 over those made in 2021. Gross Gaming Revenue (GGR) increased 36% over 2021 numbers.
The platform handled over 20 billion euros in bets during the second quarter alone last year including fiat and cryptocurrencies. That number continued to grow throughout the year. The average bet placed increased by some 35% in Q2 2022 compared to the same quarter in 2021.
Contributing to the rise in numbers may have been an increasing number of SOFTSWISS game aggregator clients, new partnerships with 18 game studios and three new providers accredited in Malta, and the consistent geographical expansion of existing clients.
GGR rose 36% in 2022 from 2.4b EUR to 3.3b – much of that might be attributable to the explosive Latin American market expansion with SS working steadily to help clients capture the nascent lucrative market.
Looking at the phenomenal growth of fiat betting as well as revenues compared to less-than-stellar crypto performance we see BTC and ETH moved in different directions. Bitcoin’s slice of the total crypto pie lost 7.4% percentage points over the year while Ethereum gained in popularity among players by 3.7%.
Chief Operating Officer at SOFTSWISS, Vitali Matsukevich commented: “The fact that we see an increasing number of new fiat projects does not diminish the power of the already established worldwide community of crypto players. There is still a strong drive for iGaming operators to implement and expand payment methods supporting digital coins. iGaming tech providers will still be focused on developing new crypto-centric tools. For example, we’ve launched the In-Game Currency Conversion feature allowing the crypto audience to enjoy all available games through automatic conversion of digital coin bets into fiat wagers.”
Fiat bets accounted for 76% of all bets on the platform by the end of 2022.
The top three digital currencies used along with their share of the total were
Bitcoin – 72.7%
Ethereum – 13.6%
Litecoin – 5.5%
DOGE picked up in popularity as did LTC while USDT nearly doubled its share from 1.7% of all crypto bets to 3.7%. Bitcoin Cash fell off the top six list and was replaced by XRP at an inaugural .7% share.
CEO Matsukevich expressed optimism for 2023 and asserted that players will not abandon crypto thanks to its decentralized nature, transaction speed, and anonymity.
He added: “Despite all digital coin fluctuations, crypto has already gained a significant share among players and operators and has become an integral part of the market. For this reason, SOFTSWISS continues to strengthen its partners’ projects, whether fiat or crypto, with new innovative tools and solutions, providing operators with security, reliability, and top-level service.”
Source: SOFTSWISS, an invitation to view the report, February 23, 2023