iGaming Weekly: Gamdom's breach relaunch, Shuffle's Doherty dispute, Stake's NZ license

This week at a glance:

• Gamdom confirms breach, loses funds, then relaunches with bonuses and a $50,000 giveaway
• Shuffle CEO says Jack Doherty failed to break his six-month posting ban
• Stake wins a New Zealand casino license as offshore rivals must exit by Dec. 1
• Turkish police detain HEX founder Richard Heart on a Finnish Interpol Red Notice
• Taiwan court lets regulators block Kalshi and Coinbase ahead of local elections

Crypto Casinos

• Stake won one of New Zealand's 15 online casino licenses at NZ$15 million each, and offshore casinos left out must stop serving New Zealand players from Dec. 1.
• Gamdom confirmed a breach after its hot-wallet holdings fell from $10.5 million to about $76,000 in a day, and founder Felix Romer put the loss at just over $3 million.
• Gamdom came back online after more than two days dark, paying Originals bets placed during the outage at 2x and leading its relaunch with leaderboards, a deposit bonus and a $50,000 giveaway.
• Stake lost its temporary right to operate in Brazil after a federal appeals judge ruled that one operator cannot keep taking bets while 188 licensed sites stay dark.
• MonkeyTilt stopped play and goes fully offline Nov. 9, with withdrawals routed through founder Sam Kiki's Pokémon card site Tilt Rips after more than $50 million in announced funding.
• Stake signed EveryMatrix as its casino aggregator for regulated markets including Italy, Denmark and Mexico, giving it more than 45,000 games from over 360 providers.
• Rainbet launched Rainbet.us, a free-to-play sweepstakes social casino with more than 7,000 slots.

• Shuffle's Thai geoblock became a political fight as a former MP alleged 118 million baht in on-chain flows and the accused MP said her husband holds only 1% of the gambling business.
• 1win opened a Solana sale of 130 million 1WIN tokens at $0.03 each for about $3.9 million at full allocation.
• Duelbits co-founder Joe says some funds from September's $7 million hot-wallet hack are frozen on exchanges and offered to let the hacker keep $2 million if the other $5 million comes back.

Latest Originals

• YEET launched ECHO, an autoplay-built crash-style Original with $1,000 and $2,000 bounties for first max wins.
• Gamba launched MOLES, a whack-a-mole Original where players slam casino founders, with a toggle back to classic moles.
• Housebets launched House Games Blackjack, its own in-house blackjack table, saying it has "a few tricks the big studios don't."
• Goated launched Coinflip, its latest Original, a heads-or-tails game with stacking multipliers.
• Overtime launched two original games, Cascade and Tumble, with cascading symbols and stacking bomb multipliers.
• Gamba extended Batch Bets to six more Originals, including Snakes, Darts and Baccarat, and says all Batch Bet games now support up to 100,000 bets per second.

Third-Party Releases

• Slotty Studio of Maxxi Labs released Rats vs Ravens Coin Grid, a very-high-volatility Hold&Win with persistent coins and 13,283x max win, live as a lifetime Stake exclusive.
• Nolimit City released Six Feet Under, live as an exclusive pre-release on YEET. Nolimit City also released Flight Mode Hijacked, live exclusively on Rainbet.
• Hacksaw Gaming released 3 Adventures of Alice, live in early access on YEET.

• Pragmatic Play released Sweet Loot, live as a pre-release on Rainbet.
• Keyframe Gaming released Broke Ronin, live as a Roobet exclusive.
• Wicked Games released DON'T DIE, live on Chips.
• Coreffect Interactive released Candy Swipe MatchWin, a 7x7 match grid where every bet is a swipe, with a listed 96.70% RTP and 4,999,995x max win, live on Stake.

Latest Drama

@noahdummett on X says @dohertyjackk on X lost his fight against Shuffle's six-month ban

Shuffle CEO @noahdummett says @dohertyjackk failed to break the contract barring him from posting for six months, in a post that drew more than 85,000 likes and 2.4 million views. The contract is still not public, and Doherty kept uploading earlier in the week.

• @noahdummett: "Jack Doherty's 6 month ban is confirmed, his lawyers couldn't fight their way out of this one."

@degencity on X and @DiceyHQ on X mock Gamdom while it's down, and @ToshiBet on X pushes back

While Gamdom was offline after its breach, rival casino accounts lined up to mock it. @ToshiBet said nobody should kick Gamdom while it was down, calling it fair game once it was back.

• @degencity: "how does it feel knowing Felix's little brother's casino is gonna be your downfall? 👀"
• @DiceyHQ mocked it with a parody of Shuffle's Doherty statement.

Duel owner Ossi Ketola reportedly offers to cover @stevewilldoit on X's unpaid leaderboard prizes

Duel and CSGOEmpire owner Ossi Ketola, known as Monarch, explained on video why Duel's and his own X accounts were banned. A gambling streamer says he then agreed to cover most of Steve's unpaid Roobet and Gamdom leaderboard winners.

• @krombet_ig on X estimates Duel's September deposits at $387 million, up 52.4%, crediting its Nazi-imagery shock marketing.

Industry & Trends

• Matchbook bought rival betting exchange Betdaq and will close Betdaq's markets on Oct. 21, with no account transfers and customers given until Nov. 4 to withdraw.
• Hacksaw shares fell more than 27% to SEK59.40 after it warned of Q3 revenue of €57.5 million to €58.5 million, growth of only 11 to 12% against its 30% target.
• BetMGM's Q3 adjusted EBITDA rose 112% to $86 million on net revenue of $710 million, but it now expects full-year revenue at the low end of its $2.9 billion to $3.1 billion guidance.
• Entain's Q3 net gaming revenue rose 2% as Brazil revenue fell 36% ahead of the ban, and it expects underlying EBITDA at the low end of £910 million to £960 million.

Regulation & Enforcement

• Curaçao's casino regulator scrapped its hacked licensing portal for good without providing a replacement date, and missed its own Oct. 9 deadline to publish a stopgap filing process.
• Philippine regulators moved against Coins.ph, the country's largest crypto exchange, over alleged offshore gambling payment links, though the company denies knowingly serving offshore operators.
• A Wyoming legislative committee unanimously backed a draft felony ban on online sweepstakes casinos for the 2027 session that would also reach payment processors, hosts and advertisers but exempt players.
• Internal records show iGaming Ontario kept a problem-gambling study confidential after high early results worried officials, who discussed a "gag order" for researchers and weighed election timing.

• Turkish police detained HEX founder Richard Heart in Istanbul on a Finnish Interpol Red Notice over tax fraud and assault allegations and seized $7.15 million in cash, six cold wallets and seven firearms.
• South Korea moved to block web access to 27 unregistered offshore crypto exchanges, including KuCoin, BitMart and MEXC, over registration and anti-money-laundering failures.
• The European Banking Authority named Circle's USDC the EU's first "significant" e-money token under MiCA, moving supervision of its reserves and liquidity to the EBA from Nov. 12.
• Wildz Group, operator of Caxino and Spinz, says Finland's police board approved it as the country's first online gambling licensee, with 74 more applications waiting before the state monopoly ends in July 2027.
• Ireland's draft EU budget text drops the proposed 1% levy on online gambling operators while keeping new taxes on tobacco, e-waste and big companies.
• A Peruvian bill would raise the online betting tax fivefold to 5% of every stake, and its authors admit players may end up paying it.
• France's ANJ found that high-risk players dominate niche betting such as Brazilian, Saudi, Japanese and Australian soccer, a finding it says could one day limit which bets sportsbooks may offer.

Related News

• Mastercard launched its Global Money Platform with BVNK, letting businesses hold stablecoins and issue stablecoin-linked cards, with gambling payments processor Nuvei among the first partners.

Prediction Markets

• A New Taipei court let Taiwan block Kalshi and Coinbase weeks before the Nov. 28 local elections, where Kalshi's Taipei mayoral market had logged more than 184,000 trades.
• The SEC approved Cboe event contracts on corporate KPIs for up to 100 contracts across 23 companies including Apple, Tesla and Nvidia, with Robinhood as the first retail broker.
• Underdog sued Tennessee's Sports Wagering Council after the state threatened fines of up to $25,000 per offense over its sports event contracts, its seventh suit against a state since September.

• Hacksaw launched a white-label B2B prediction-markets platform after Malta extended its supplier license to peer-to-peer Type 3 services, and its shares rose more than 3%.
• Esports and crypto prediction market Forkast.gg will shut on Nov. 9 after more than $100 million in volume across 1.6 million trades, canceling and refunding markets that resolve later.
• Polymarket is weighing an IPO or a native token as its next fundraising route, according to a Bloomberg report, though the company has announced neither.

Next week

Matchbook closes Betdaq's markets on Oct. 21, YouTube opens its Masthead ad slot to certified gambling advertisers on Oct. 21, and Evolution reports Q3 results on Oct. 23.

FairGambling Analytics Spotlight

Deposits across the casinos FairGambling tracks on-chain came to $1.11B for October 12–18, down 1.6% week over week.

Top 10 casinos by deposit volume

Stake took $470.7M, 48% of the top ten's $980.4M; Rainbet was next at $114.3M. The biggest mover was Duel, down 31.8% week over week to $59.8M.

Chain dominance

Ethereum led with 39% of deposits, ahead of TRON at 29% and Solana at 13%; the outlier was Solana, down 28.1% week over week to $144.1M.

Coin dominance

USDT carried 56% of deposits, USDC 21% and ETH 9%; BTC was the fastest mover, up 35.9% week over week to $17.6M.

FairGambling tracked 46.09M bets from roughly 359,600 players, $6.77B wagered in total.

Top 5 casinos by wager

Stake handled $3.39B, more than half of the top five's wagers; Gamdom was next at $1.17B.

Top games and biggest bets

Limbo led the week at $726.0M wagered, and the two Limbo games in the top five together took $971.0M. All five of the biggest bets landed at Stake, between $2.2M and $2.2M; five of them won, the biggest paying $2.5M.

Biggest wins of the week

The top multiplier was 5,148,297× on Mines at Stake, turning a near-zero stake into $13K; none of the five biggest multipliers paid more than $13K. The biggest payout was $18.2M on Sky Drop from a $12K stake; all five of the week's biggest wins landed at Stake, $53.1M between them.

That's the week. Follow @FairGambling on X for more weekly recaps, on-chain data and industry insights, or bring what we missed to the FairGambling Discord.

Treat gambling as entertainment you pay for. 18+, and if it stops feeling like entertainment, help exists at BeGambleAware and GamCare.