iGaming Weekly: Stake's Alberta launch, Stake Brasil's reprieve, CFTC's swaps ruling

This week at a glance:

• Shuffle CEO Noah Dummett pays Jack Doherty to stay off the internet for six months
• Stake wins Alberta iGaming license, launches October 12 in Canada's gray market
• Sao Paulo judge lets Stake Brasil keep operating until October 25 under 12 conditions. This was then reversed.
• CFTC rules casino and sportsbook wagers aren't swaps, proposes event contracts count as swaps

Crypto Casinos

• A São Paulo federal judge let Stake Brasil keep operating despite Brazil's betting ban until October 25 under 12 conditions, making it the only licensed operator to win such relief. This was later reversed.
• Stake won an Alberta iGaming license from the AGLC and is set to launch October 12, with H2 Gambling Capital putting its FY2026 Canadian gray-market revenue at CA$921 million.
• Roobet turned eight as the second-largest crypto casino on FairGambling's deposit tracker, with almost $4.9 billion in on-chain deposits in the 12 months to October 8, behind only Stake.
• JACK Casino says it added crypto-to-bank-card withdrawals, two days after it launched prediction markets on sports, politics, crypto, weather and more.
• Housebets says its on-chain rewards claim tool scanned more than 500,000 wallets in under 48 hours, and its founder added friction after warning of bot farms and fake VIP scammers.
• DegenCity launched V2 with a rebuilt interface, a Vault that locks away part of a player's balance, and leaderboards paying $1,000 a day and $10,000 a week.
• Whale says it switched to a new sportsbook provider and told users that every existing bet remains safe.

Latest Originals

• Gamba launched Marble Race, a new real-time Original where players pick a marble and bet on the race.
• Dicey is pushing TYPER, a new Original where each typed letter raises the multiplier until you cash out, plus a $1,000 TYPER Challenge.
• Stake showed off a reworked Mines Original with a 367,735x hit and new controls.
• Housebets says a batch of Housebets Originals is quietly going live one by one, promising two or three new house games a week.
• Gamba upgraded its Keno Original with new 50-, 60-, 70- and 80-tile board options.
• Housebets put live Hubie's Road, a house game built around its AI mascot, where players jump sharks.

Third-Party Releases

• Nolimit City released Gator Hunters 2, a 6x5 scatter-pays sequel with multiplier bullets and a 30,000x max win, live on Rollbit, Duelbits, Thrill, Betsio, Qzino and wild.io.
• Hacksaw Gaming released Demonic Dolls, a 5x5 cluster-pays horror slot with additive Wild Rattle multipliers up to 100x and a 10,000x max win, live on wild.io.
• Hacksaw Gaming released Wicked Grin, starring its character Boney Bill, with no mechanics or max win stated in the launch post.
• AfterHoursSlots' music-driven Cockpit, KnockoutLabs' Roid Rage and Degen Lab's Hecate appeared as Only on Stake Titles. All are now live.

• Lucky Labs' Wukong's Wrath and Massive Studios' Grannies VS Aliens went live on Roobet
• wild.io listed Belatra's Coins Blast, TaDa's Egg Eruption, 1spin4win's Frozen Coins 243 and BGaming's Red And Hot Chilli as new drops.

Latest Drama

Shuffle CEO @noahdummett on X pays @dohertyjackk on X to get off the internet

@noahdummett confirmed that @dohertyjackk signed a Shuffle contract barring him from posting online for six months. Doherty says he didn't fully read it, and his lawyers are now pressing to have it scrapped.

• @noahdummett: "yes it's real … money well spent to get this mf off the internet."
• The contract is not public, so the clause's scope and enforceability are unknown.

Gamdom accused of refusing to release @TheGambler1999 on X as @TheGoobr on X says hate-watching him brings joy

@TheGambler1999 went silent for almost a week while reportedly trying to leave his Gamdom deal. On his return he said he can't pay his wager-competition winners and asked Gamdom to cover them.

• A gambling streamer: "actively trying to leave Gamdom, but they refuse to let him out of his deal."
• Gamdom has not responded publicly.

Housebets founder @p0rchy on X vs. the casino's own AI mascot, then a DDoS

@p0rchy admitted AI mascot @HousebetsHubie on X sometimes promises bonuses it never credits, which Housebets turned into a mock defamation case. After an October 11 DDoS outage, he jokingly asked @StakeEddie on X to stop "hitting refresh with 450,000 devices."

• @p0rchy: "We are unsure if it's a bug or he's just fucking with the users."
• There is no evidence linking Stake to the attack.

Industry & Trends

• Informa agreed to buy Clarion Events, owner of the ICE and iGB L!VE gaming shows, for £2.24 billion, or 11.1 times projected 2027 EBITDA, with closing expected in Q4.
• Sportradar is selling Atrium Sports to an undisclosed buyer for $170 million in cash, five years after acquiring it, while keeping its core betting, gaming and media products.
• Midnite replaced Paddy Power as the NFL's official betting partner in the UK and Ireland on a three-year deal running through the 2028-29 season.

• Kaizen Gaming's betting brand Betano extended its partnership with European football body UEFA, which makes it an official sponsor of the Euro 2028 tournament.

Regulation & Enforcement

• The Michigan Gaming Control Board sent cease-and-desist letters to 33 unlicensed offshore operators, including crypto-friendly BitofGold, Cryptoplay and mBit Casino, warning that offshore sites ignore its self-exclusion list.
• Online betting and casino demand in Brazil fell 78.2% in the week to October 4 as the nationwide ban approached, per Blask, while offshore brands' share rose from 3.7% to 18.1%.
• FinCEN withdrew its 2020 rule that would have required reports on self-custody wallet transactions over $10,000 and its 2023 crypto-mixer special measure, saying the mixer rule risked chilling legitimate activity.

• Greece filed a criminal complaint against 18 influencers with 3.6 million combined Instagram followers for promoting 11 unlicensed gambling sites, with the finance minister saying "popularity doesn't grant immunity."
• Thailand's digital ministry plans a working group to pass public tips on online gambling to Meta, TikTok and the police, after blocking more than 945,000 gambling links in a year.
• Cambodia will send joint teams of police, immigration officers and prosecutors into licensed casinos in 16 provinces from October to check none still run online gambling, with offenders facing criminal charges.
• Brazil's Attorney General's office asked the Supreme Court to uphold the betting ban, hold a public hearing and reject operators' compensation claims.
• Denmark tabled a bill to tighten gambling advertising, including a ban on marketing during live sports, with the reforms phasing in between January and October 2027.

Related News

• Ledger confirmed an unauthorized hardware implant while investigating drains of more than $86 million from wallets sold by Southeast Asian reseller CryptoBilis, and told recent buyers not to set up their devices.
• ZachXBT detailed going undercover as a client of a Chinese laundering syndicate he says moved over $1 billion for North Korea's Lazarus Group, fronting $349,700 of his own funds.
• Kick, the Stake-linked streaming platform, claimed a 35% market share against Twitch and over 1 million average live viewers, though no independent figures back the claim.

• Robinhood has put about $25 million of bitcoin on its own balance sheet, a crypto executive said at a Singapore conference, though no filing has confirmed it yet.

Prediction Markets

• The CFTC issued an interim final rule saying casino games and sportsbook wagers are not swaps, plus a proposed rule defining sports, political, cultural and weather event contracts as swaps.
• The NFL filed a Supreme Court brief backing New Jersey in Flaherty v. KalshiEX, arguing sports event contracts are gambling rather than swaps, and 145 tribal organizations filed their own brief against Kalshi.
• Coinbase agreed with Michigan regulators to stop offering sports event contracts and close Michigan positions by October 10, while its Sixth Circuit appeal stays paused.

• Kalshi partnered with four tribes to launch tribe-owned prediction apps, but the California Nations Indian Gaming Association says the apps violate federal gaming law.
• Polymarket will start opening new markets on rebuilt Protocol V2 contracts on November 2, with a single dollar token as collateral and Chainlink joining UMA to resolve outcomes.
• A Bloomberg analysis found longshot bets, which lose about 98% of the time, make up the bulk of trading on Kalshi and Polymarket.
• Blockchain.com applied to the CFTC for designated contract market and futures commission merchant licenses so it can offer prediction markets and crypto derivatives to US users.
• Kalshi launched US500PERP, which it calls America's first stock-index perpetual future, a no-expiry cash-settled contract on the MerQube US Large Cap Index that the CFTC approved October 3.

Next week

Stake goes live in Alberta on October 12, one day before the province's 90-day grace period for gray-market operators ends, and CoinPoker's $5 million The One plays Day 2 the same day.

FairGambling Analytics Spotlight

Deposits across the casinos FairGambling tracks on-chain came to $1.08B for October 5–11, down 6.6% week over week.

Top 10 casinos by deposit volume

Stake took $426.9M, 45% of the top ten's $951.1M; Rainbet was next at $106.3M. The biggest mover was Rainbet, up 42.0% week over week to $106.3M.

Chain dominance

Ethereum and TRON split the week almost evenly at 34% and 32% of deposits, with Solana third at 18%.

Coin dominance

USDT carried 58% of deposits, USDC 19% and SOL 11%; ETH was the fastest mover, down 17.3% week over week to $83.3M.

FairGambling tracked 45.26M bets from roughly 418,800 players, $5.53B wagered in total.

Top 5 casinos by wager

Stake handled $2.42B, more than half of the top five's wagers; Shuffle was next at $501.0M.

Top games and biggest bets

Blackjack led the week at $559.7M wagered, 2.2x the runner-up Crash at $260.0M. All five of the biggest bets were baccarat hands at Stake from one hidden player, between $2.8M and $3.1M; two of them won, the biggest paying $5.6M.

Biggest wins of the week

The top multiplier was 5,148,297× on Mines at Shuffle, turning a near-zero stake into $5K; none of the five biggest multipliers paid more than $20K. The biggest payout was $25.0M on Plinko from a $2K stake; the five biggest wins paid $48.3M 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.