Gaming Has Outgrown It's Payment Rails

Your players get paid in minutes. Your finance team waits days. New iGB research, produced with RYKI, shows why that gap is now a commercial risk.
It's Friday afternoon. A player has just cashed out in a few taps. On the front end, the money moved in seconds.

Behind the scenes, it's a different story. Your finance team is chasing a cross-border wire that left on Tuesday. It might land Monday. And when it does, the FX spread will have taken its cut along the way.

If that sounds familiar, you're not alone.

Same Day, Not Someday

International payments routed through correspondent banks can take three to seven days to clear, with FX conversion adding 50 to 100 basis points per transaction. Many operators pay that spread twice, settling in euros only to convert again into dollars. Meanwhile, the rest of the market has moved on. According to iGB's new intelligence report, How the stablecoin shift is reshaping crypto gambling:

• Crypto withdrawals typically clear in under ten minutes, against one to five business days for traditional bank transfers.

• Conventional card fees run at 1.5% to 3.5%. Crypto gateway fees sit between 0.5% and 2%, with multiple operators reporting cost reductions of 60–70%.

• Crypto-funded wagers now account for close to 17% of all iGaming bets globally.

Your players have noticed. The question is whether your back office has.

Speed Is A Choice

As RYKI CEO Lennon Sweeting puts it in the report: "Speed is an operational architecture choice, not just a crypto advantage."
In other words, slow settlement isn't a fact of life. It's a consequence of infrastructure that was never designed for how gaming businesses move money today. And a meaningful share of those savings, Sweeting argues, comes from removing unnecessary currency conversion, not from cutting corners on compliance.

That's exactly what we built RYKI's gaming service to do. Stablecoin rails. Same-day fiat settlement. One registered counterparty. You keep your own gaming licence. We provide the compliant payment layer beneath it, with no rebuild of your stack and none of the surprises.

What Else Is Inside

The full report goes much further. It explores:

• Why an operator taking deposits in a dozen currencies is "running a foreign-exchange book whether it intends to or not"

• What one of the world's most recognised online operators changed to swap multi-day timelines for same-day settlement

• Why RYKI estimates more than $50 billion in high-net-worth crypto holdings remains untapped by premium gaming venues

Same day. Not someday.

Download the report → Read the full iGB research and see what the stablecoin shift means for your business.