Bitcoin and Ethereum have slumped to their lowest levels in years since early 2026, driven by weak market demand, corporate selloffs, and institutional money shifting toward AI.
For the major crypto gambling operators that have built substantial businesses around digital currencies, the question is whether this sustained downturn represents a genuine threat to revenues.
David Barkwith, who analyses crypto flows at Czech blockchain intelligence business Podproza, told NEXT.io that player behaviour remains fairly inelastic overall despite the price pressure.
He said: “Generally most punters that we see are depositing in GBP or USD or CAD – they use crypto more for the ease of getting the payments onto site.”
Barkwith added: “[Players] have a budget in mind of what they spend in a week or a month and they stick to it. If their money is worth slightly less then they need to deposit a bit more, but it doesn’t have a massive effect.”
Open-source data from crypto casino analytics platform Tanzanite supports this view, showing deposits on Stake.com rose from $1.82bn to $2.54bn between November 2025 and January 2026, before falling back to $1.59bn shortly afterwards.
Stake.com’s nearest competitor Roobet showed more stability during the same period, with deposits declining modestly from $428m to $378m.
Crypto expert David Bartram explained that player sensitivity to crypto price movements has changed dramatically over the last decade, previously following a counterintuitive pattern.
He outlined: “What we would always see is when the crypto price went up it would actually decrease volumes on crypto casinos because people basically didn’t want to gamble an asset that was already making them good money.”
Bartram added: “Inversely, when the price came down people valued it a bit less in their minds and were more willing to actually use it.”
The shift toward stablecoins such as USDT and USDC now accounts for the majority of deposit volume, meaning players are significantly less sensitive to cryptocurrency price swings than they once were.
On the operator side, Barkwith noted that larger, more professional casinos have put structures in place to limit their exposure to volatile crypto assets, including working with payment providers offering price protection services.
He stressed: “It’s a massive question for gaming companies – how much crypto they can stomach holding.”
Bartram agreed that sophisticated hedging tools have made the risk manageable, saying: “It’s not hard any more to run a business that isn’t going to get wrecked because the price goes down – it’s easy enough to hedge.”
A broader concern, however, is that falling crypto prices have dampened enthusiasm for crypto gambling more widely, making it a “harder sell” across main acquisition channels on X, according to Bartram.
Bartram noted that many recent gambling innovations, from crash games to prediction markets and perp contracts, have emerged directly from the crypto ecosystem, making overall market sentiment highly relevant to the sector.
He summarised the current mood bluntly: “The thing with crypto at any point is that either people are up and optimistic, or they’re down – and right now people are pretty down.”
Beyond market sentiment, a potentially more serious threat emerged this week at the Lord’s Liaison Committee meeting on the social and economic impacts of the gambling industry.
Ex-evoke executive Vaughan Lewis specifically named Stake and Rainbet as black market brands of particular interest to young people during that session.
With governments, regulators, and the wider industry increasingly aligned in targeting unregulated operators, the long-term regulatory environment may ultimately pose a far greater challenge to crypto casinos than any price downturn.
