Crypto Gambling Sector Sees Sweeping Changes as Licensing, Advertising, and Tax Reporting Tighten
This year's changes in crypto gambling have been significant and far-reaching, affecting several key areas including licensing, advertising, tax reporting, slot returns, and coin support.
The most notable change is the reform of Curacao's licensing regime. The old master-and-sublicence structure has given way to direct licensing under the Curacao Gaming Authority. Licensees now hold their own licence with named beneficial owners, pay real fees, meet local substance requirements, and answer to a functioning player-complaint channel.
The public licence register published in July carried around 660 entries with issue and expiry dates, including licences the regulator had revoked. This created an odd side effect: grandfathered sublicence holders who never completed the transition have been dropping off the register in batches, orphaning a cluster of white-label brands still trading with a seal that no longer verifies against anything.
The result is a stronger signal for verified Curacao licences and a weaker one for unverifiable ones. Licensing differences between regimes matter more as a result. Fake licence seals became the fastest-growing category of casino fraud this year, and Chainalysis recorded impersonation scams targeting crypto users growing roughly fourteenfold year on year through 2025.
Google spent the year narrowing who can promote gambling, with a definitional shift placing crypto casinos squarely inside the certification regime. The most consequential change was the tightening of certification requirements, including good-policy-health requirements and stricter domain ownership rules that exclude sites on free platforms or third-party subdomains.
The Cryptoasset Reporting Framework, known as CARF, took effect on 1 January, requiring crypto providers to collect and report user data. This increases visibility but does not create new tax obligations. In the United States, the federal deduction for wagering losses is now capped at 90% of those losses.
The UK Remote Gaming Duty rose from 21% to 40% of gross gaming revenue on 1 April, prompting operators to move standard slot configurations from around 96% toward 94%. This affects players as a lower number in an information panel with identical artwork and no announcement. The studio sets the versions while the operator picks between them.
Against this tightening, platforms continued adding assets through the year, including privacy coins in some cases. This trend ran directly counter to exchanges, which have removed privacy coins from EU listings since December 2024. Monero delistings alone recorded a high of 73 in 2025.