Closing the Gap: Between Offshore and Regulated

Higher taxes and unpredictable policy changes are already applying pressure on regulated operators. But there's another thing they need to worry about: players churning to play the games they see on their feed 24/7.

We joined the iGaming space a few years ago wanting to build something that'd last and compete with the biggest (Stake, Roobet, Gamdom to name a few). They all had something in common: Originals. Casino-branded, built in-house, sat on the top row of the lobby. Fast, intuitive, mobile-first. They looked and felt great.

Most in our position would look for third-party studios to fill this gap. Pragmatic Dice, Hacksaw Plinko and the other alternatives aren't branded, they're slower, they don't use provably fair, and they're missing features like side bets. There's a reason third-party instant games make up less than 5% of a typical crypto casino's revenue while house originals make up more than 50%. Players can feel the difference, which is why we built our own.

If every major crypto casino did this, we figured we needed to too. Once we did, and did a good job at it (we think better than most of the major crypto casinos), we saw why they all do it. Originals quickly became more than 60% of our revenue and our players loved them.

Which begs the question: why do most regulated casinos not run this playbook? The offshore brands collectively make billions in annual GGR from these games. Why don't the regulated players adopt them? The answer used to be "we have a different playerbase," but that's no longer true.

Three things have changed:

• Offshore casinos are arriving at the size of regulated players
• Offshore casinos have started entering regulated markets
• The next-generation of bettors in regulated markets are being inundated with content promoting offshore brands with offshore gaming content

Let's walk through each.

1. Offshore casinos are arriving at the size of regulated players

In 2020, Stake did $105M in GGR. In 2022, $2.6B. In 2024, $4.7B. For context, that's comparable to Entain's 2024 online GGR. One offshore brand now sits inside the same weight class as one of the largest publicly-listed gambling companies in the world, something that would have been absurd four years ago.

The offshore market has graduated from a regulatory footnote into a meaningful chunk of global iGaming spend. The "different playerbase" defence made sense when offshore was a few thousand degens trading dice bets in BTC. It doesn't hold when the same brands are running F1 sponsorships, UFC title deals and Premier League shirt fronts. The audience overlaps. The product is what differentiates.

2. Offshore casinos have started entering regulated markets

This is the part most regulated operators are underestimating. The offshore players aren't staying offshore. They're walking through the front door with full licenses, local offices and country managers.

• Stake holds regulated licenses in Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Mexico, with Brazil now its second-largest market globally.
• It acquired IdealBet to enter Italy.
• Denmark is live from March 2026 under a five-year Spillemyndigheden license.

Players who've been watching xQc, Trainwreck and Adin Ross, or seeing the Stake logo a billion times on viral clips in their feed, don't have to switch brands, change muscle memory, or learn new games. They're primed and ready for the offshore product experience. That's a UX moat the incumbents haven't priced in.

The question every regulated CEO should be asking: when X offshore brand keeps pulling your players away or even enters your market compliantly, what does your top-row lobby look like next to theirs? If the answer is "the same 15 slots every other licensee has," you have a problem.

3. The next-gen bettor is being inundated with offshore content

That problem compounds when you look at what those players are actually seeing before they ever land on a lobby.

Open TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts or Kick. The dominant casino content isn't a slot spin on Sweet Bonanza. It's a streamer cashing out at 1000x on Limbo. It's Adin Ross on a $500k Keno run. It's a clip with 5M views where the whole video is someone playing Mines and each anticipatory gem uncovered sends the PnL higher. That content is native to originals. Slots generally don't clip well (excl. max wins), they clip boring. Originals are built for 15-second attention economics in a way slots fundamentally aren't.

Aviator alone is live in 5,000+ casinos with 70M monthly players, and crash games now regularly represent over half the top ten most popular casino games globally. Half. Of the top ten. Worldwide.

Here's the uncomfortable part for regulated operators: every fiat brand has Aviator. All of them. Branded Spribe’s Aviator. When a player logs into your site and plays it, they're not building loyalty to you, they're building loyalty to Spribe. The game is the same game on every other licensee's lobby. You're paying a revenue share on a product that makes you interchangeable.

Compare that to an operator with house-branded originals. Every bet on their version of Crash, Plinko or Mines is a bet that deepens brand attachment. When that player idly logs into a competitor, they check the lobby and think "wait, where's Limbo?" The switching cost isn't regulatory, it's product-native. That's retention you can't buy with bonuses.

Regulated operators are offering this player a lobby that looks like 2018. So if you're a 25-year-old opening your first casino account in Brazil, Ontario or the U.S., the games you already know by name, the games your favorite streamer plays, the games in the clips that autoplayed into your feed for the last 18 months, are originals. You didn't learn to gamble on Starburst. You learned on Mines.

Why this matters now, specifically

A lobby that looks like 2018 might have been survivable at 2018 margins. It isn't at 2026 margins.

The UK doubled Remote Gaming Duty from 21% to 40% effective April 1, 2026. Factor in compliance (industry analysts peg it at 4-6% of GGR), affordability checks, single customer view and marketing restrictions, and many UK-licensed operators are now budgeting more than a third of their UK GGR to tax and compliance. Sky Bet has already relocated its HQ to Malta. The UK was the gold standard. If the gold standard just got this expensive, every mid-tier regulated operator globally is running the same math.

When your margin halves, two things have to happen: acquisition cost per player has to come down, and lifetime value per player has to go up. Originals help both.

On LTV: originals drove 60%+ of our revenue once they were live. Not because they cannibalized slots, but because they gave players a reason to stay in-session longer and return more often. The game loop is tighter, the bet frequency is higher, and the social/community layer drives retention in a way slots just don't.

On CAC: content marketability is the killer feature. A Crash win clips. A Mines streak clips. A 2,000x Plinko drop clips. Your affiliate partners, your streamers and your organic social all have something to work with. That's free distribution the slot-only lobby doesn't get as much.

The "but regulation won't allow it" argument

This is the first pushback we always hear. It's less true than people think.

The regulated versions are not identical to their .com counterparts - RTP ceilings, stake limits, spin speed floors all apply - but what we’re building is a major improvement on what’s available and closing the gap. Origami will launch with some of the largest regulated operators this year.

The harder truth: most regulated operators don't build Originals because the category wasn't strategically relevant to them five years ago and they've let aggregator-supplied third-party instant games fill the slot. That's fine when your moat is regulation itself. It's not fine when offshore brands continue eating share or are becoming regulated too.

What the next 18 months look like

Three things happen, in this order:

First, one or two tier-one regulated operators launch originals with a B2B supplier (like us) to white-label a branded suite. They win the first-mover advantage in their market the same way Stake, Roobet and Shuffle won it globally.

Second, the rest of the market follows on an 18-month lag, same as it always does. Originals become table stakes on the top row of every regulated lobby, the way live casino did between 2018 and 2022.

Third, the operators who didn't move get compressed between higher taxes on one side and offshore brands offering a better product on the other. Some sell. Some shrink. A few disappear.

The playbook isn't a secret anymore. Stake published it. We accelerated it. The numbers are in court filings and press releases. The only question left is how long regulated operators wait before running it.

Our bet: the ones who move in 2026 win the next decade.