iGaming Operators are Paying for Chargebacks Twice, but Platforms like OpenPayd are Changing That.

The online gambling business generates considerable revenue, but it carries with it a payment problem that most operators want to avoid or are not willing to quantify. To put things into perspective, for every $100 in chargeback, most iGaming platforms incur around $207 (once fees, refunds, and dispute overhead are factored in).

That ratio, documented across operator datasets, means a platform disputing $500,000 in chargebacks annually isn’t losing half a million but close to a million dollars.  The broader context makes the numbers even worse as gambling and betting sites have reportedly lost more than $1 billion to fraud in 2024, with instances of such issues only rising ever since.

If that wasn’t enough, for iGaming operators classified as high-risk merchants, processors routinely withhold up to 10% of gross merchandise value for up to 180 days as a reserve. On $50 million in annual processing volume, that’s $5 million in working capital unavailable for six months, generating no return and providing no operational flexibility.

Exposing the Real Cost of Running on Card Rails

The chargeback problem in iGaming is structural, not just operational, given that card payment networks have been built on the assumption that buyers need a recourse mechanism. In most commercial contexts, that’s a reasonable design, but when it comes to iGaming, it creates a specific and repeatable exposure where a player deposits, wagers, loses, and files a dispute claiming the transaction was unauthorized.

The operator has no reliable path to recovery, even when the dispute is clearly fraudulent. Not only that, the entire process costs time and fees, and enough of them in a billing cycle can trigger card network flags that threaten acceptance privileges entirely.

Bonus abuse adds another layer of complexity to all of this, accounting for roughly 63% of fraud incidents in operator datasets and consuming up to 15% of revenue in the worst cases. In sum, fraud-related losses can eat 10 to 20% of an operator’s marketing budget, which is a particularly painful outcome since the marketing spend was the mechanism that brought those players in.

What Stablecoins Actually Change

From the outside looking in, stablecoin transactions work differently from card payments at the infrastructure level because blockchain transactions are irreversible once confirmed on-chain. To put it simply, a player depositing via USDC cannot file a chargeback through a payment processor, as the dispute pathway that costs iGaming operators a significant share of revenue is absent from the transaction structure by design.

Settlement speed follows the same logic as traditional cross-border transfers for iGaming platforms, which settle in one to five business days, creating liquidity gaps for platforms processing withdrawals across multiple regions simultaneously. Stablecoins allay these issues by settling transactions in minutes, around the clock, and without dependency on banking hours or correspondent intermediaries.

That said, stablecoins alone don’t solve the problem since an operator accepting USDC deposits without on/off-ramp capability, compliance tooling, and fiat rail integration simply replaces one problem with several. To help allay these bottlenecks, platforms like OpenPayd have devised stablecoin payout suites as an enterprise capability.

To elaborate, the platform’s architecture routes transactions across fiat, alternative, or blockchain rails based on cost and settlement speed at the time of execution, so operators don’t have to choose between stablecoin efficiency and fiat flexibility. Moreover, compliance is also embedded directly in the payout flow, with sanctions screening, chain analytics, and processes aligned with the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, all being taken care of seamlessly.

For iGaming platforms operating in jurisdictions that now require full identity verification before deposit, such an infrastructure is ideal since it not only takes care of any operational risks but also licensing demands.

Also, it bears mentioning that to date, OpenPayd has processed $180 billion in annualized transaction volume across more than 1,000 clients, with reported uptime of 99.99%. The company’s client list includes Kraken, Bitfinex, OKX, and Wirex, all platforms that operate in environments where payment downtime carries real financial consequences.

From a regulatory standpoint, OpenPayd holds licenses across multiple jurisdictions, including the UK FCA, Malta MFSA, and Canadian FIN-TRAC, something that, for iGaming operators expanding into new markets, matters a lot.

The Future is Already Here

Earlier this year, a Bloomberg report noted that stablecoin transaction volumes had risen to a record $33 trillion, while monthly flows too had stayed on track to hit $1 trillion by the end of 2026. In all of this, gaming operators utilizing infrastructures to handle both fiat and stablecoin payments through a single provider have emerged as forerunners and are shaping the ecosystem in real time.