Crypto Gambling in 2025: Winners, Scandals, and the Rise of 100% RTP Games

The crypto casino segment has clearly matured in 2025. The industry now looks less like a chaotic experiment and more like a competitive market with its own leaders.

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Who Controlled Crypto Gambling in 2025

Data from Tanzanite shows a top-heavy landscape where one operator still towers over everyone else, even while challengers expand around the edges.

The main takeaways from the annual leaderboard:

1. Stake stayed miles ahead, taking 56.04% of market share, with $17.3B in deposit volume and 21.7M deposits, plus 3.4M new depositors.
2. The next tier remained competitive and included Roobet (12.17%), BC.GAME (6.73%), and Shuffle (6.46%) that formed the core of the chasing pack.
3. Fresh names pushed into the top ten over the year, including Rainbet (1.97%) and Duel (0.86%), while legacy brands fought to protect their positions.

The same statistics also highlight critical scale differences. Shuffle, for example, generated 2.7M deposits, while Roobet had fewer than a million, despite a much larger share. These gaps usually hint at different player profiles, product mix, and retention mechanics.

Productivity in 2025 did not come from a single strategy. Two of the year’s most discussed climbers used completely different approaches, and both found a path to visibility.

Duel: Growth Through Player Economics

A user-first value offer became the brand’s defining tool. The platform leaned into conditions that feel unusually generous for a casino environment. The centrepiece was 100% RTP on originals, supported by 50% rakeback and large-scale tournaments designed to keep the community active. This strategy essentially tried to remove the usual “house edge frustration” barrier and replace it with constant reasons to return.

Rainbet: Visibility First

Media weight was the brand’s main fuel. The platform ran a hard promotional push with major streamers and online personalities. Its reach transformed into credibility faster than traditional channels usually allow. That approach also helped Rainbet compete with older names that already had strong recognition in crypto circles.

Stake as the Industry’s Main News Engine

Stake received both popularity and profitability in excess. Some stories strengthened the brand’s reputation as an innovation machine, while others pushed it straight into controversy. Either way, the operator remained the year’s biggest conversation starter.

Stake’s Infrastructure that Changed Game Development

A major product launch reshaped how many studios think about the release of games inside crypto casinos. Stake Engine positioned itself as a fast route from idea to live title, and early adoption was massive.

What the platform gave developers in practical terms:

• game maths and core logic tooling;
• analytics and performance tracking;
• marketing support inside the ecosystem;
• faster publishing and visibility on the platform.

Developers kept 90% of their share of GGR, with no hidden cuts in the background. In roughly three weeks, 4,000+ providers joined the platform. Those were small independent teams and larger studios. Early results were loud as well, and as a result, Stake Engine games reportedly brought in over $3.3B in revenue during the first weeks.

Stake’s Public Controversies

A wave of viral content on X created a strange marketing loop around the company’s logo. Users kept spotting the branding in memes, sports images, and random posts, often followed by community notes pointing out the platform’s restrictions on gambling promotion. Instead of killing reach, the public correction became part of the story and pushed engagement higher and kept posts visible in recommendation feeds.

At one point, the issue escalated enough that Elon Musk publicly demanded the removal of the advertising. The spam-like flood of logo posts only faded in March 2025, but by then the topic had already drawn extra attention from regulators and watchdog groups.

Another incident turned into a serious reputational blow. A video with adult actress Bonnie Blue, which included Stake branding, triggered backlash from British public organisations. The criticism centred on social responsibility standards, and the UK regulator sided with the complaints. As a result, Stake lost its British licence, and the story became one of the year’s most cited examples of how “edgy exposure” can cross into regulatory risk.

Other Headlines of the Year

Key developments that defined the broader narrative:

1. BC.GAME expanded legal reach, secured a licence in Kenya, extended a sponsorship deal with Leicester City, and added CS stars s1mple and electroNic to its team.
2. Rollbit continued with FaZe Clan and raised sponsorship payments from $1.75M to $3.25M per month.
3. Streamer Adin Ross switched from Stake to Rainbet.
4. Telegram banned many casino bots and apps in February and made projects such as Whale and Jetton move to web platforms.

Casino Tokens in 2025

Platform-linked assets did not evolve in one direction as a category. Sentiment and performance depended heavily on exposure, narrative, and whether the market felt a reason to hold the asset beyond speculation.

Primary development path for casino tokens:

1. Recovery after decline. Rollbit’s $RLB managed to rebound after a summer drop. A strong brand and continued activity pulled a token back from weakness.
2. Stagnation through silence. A very different picture followed $SCS (Solcasino). The token trended down throughout the year, and the project barely appeared in mainstream crypto gambling discussions in 2025.
3. Steady growth with clear utility. Shuffle’s token $SHFL showed consistent upward movement over time. That stability matched the brand’s broader momentum and helped reinforce a perception of progress rather than hype.

Originals with Near-100% RTP as the Defining Trend

The biggest product shift of 2025 was originals with RTP values close to 100%, which sounds almost absurd by traditional casino logic.

These are simple in-house titles such as plinko, mines, or limbo. They are easy to iterate, fast to ship, and fully controlled by the operator. Crypto casinos already save money with card processing costs, and they also reduce dependence on external game providers. That combination leaves room for extremely thin margins, or even “break-even” positioning that turns the game itself into marketing.

Some projects treated high RTP as a feature. Others turned it into a structured growth mechanism that supported tokens, retention, or community identity.

The most notable cases each used a different model:

Metawin: Asset Burn Instead of Casino Margin

The brand launched the $NAVI token alongside an originals title called Navigator, set at 100% RTP. On top of that, 1% of each wager went toward token buybacks and burns to reduce supply and support the asset’s price logic for holders.

Duel: the Edge for Players

The brand pushed the idea even further. Beyond 100% RTP in its originals catalogue, the operator returned $588,000 to users. That figure represented what the casino would have kept as its tiny share under an RTP model like 99.9%, where the house edge is just 0.1%. The move worked as a statement. Fairness became part of the brand identity, not only a technical metric.

Shuffle and Origami: Genre as a B2B Product

The company treated originals as a business line rather than a feature. The brand launched Origami, a separate B2B provider focused on originals development for crypto casinos. That structure turned internal expertise into a sellable product, which also strengthened Shuffle’s position as more than “just an operator”.

Whale: NFTs, Scarcity, and Revenue Sharing

The provider linked originals to a token narrative through NFTs. Before listing $WHALE, the project introduced an NFT mechanic for its Crock Dentist release. Supply was capped at 1,000 tokens, and the price was increasing by $50 per day. NFT owners received the casino’s share from the game directly into their balances, paid in $WHALE tokens. In simple terms, gameplay became a distribution engine for token-based rewards.

Stake: First and Still Leads

The originals concept is not new for the gambling tycoon, and that head start shows in user behaviour. Stake’s founders worked on the format under the Easygo umbrella even before the casino became what it is today, and those titles now generate a huge part of engagement.

SEO specialist Wooden analysed activity inside Stake’s lobby and found a striking split. Out of 49,090 active users, 20,416 played Stake originals, which is 41% of total traffic, even though Stake had only 21 titles of this kind. For contrast, 617 Pragmatic slots drove 32% of online activity, while 122 Hacksaw games contributed 11%. The result we all see is that a small set of in-house titles can outperform massive third-party catalogues when the operator controls the loop and pushes it with the right incentives.

The Main Things about Crypto Gambling in 2025

This year showed that the casino industry is constantly evolving. Particularly, cryptocurrency gambling is no longer a niche playground. It is a structured market where scale, visibility, and product mechanics decide who grows and who fades.

Key events over 2025:

• Stake kept a crushing lead on the annual leaderboard, even as new challengers climbed faster around the edges.
• Duel and Rainbet proved that growth still happens, but only with a clear infrastructure (player economics or aggressive media reach).
• Stake Engine shifted the development narrative with a faster route to launch and a revenue split that looks hard to ignore.
• Some casino tokens had a smooth recovery with a strong brand after a drop, others suffered a decline with low visibility, and others continued their steady growth.
• The loudest trend was originals with RTP near 100%, used as a practical acquisition tool instead of a simple technical flex.