Ontario’s regulated igaming market processed $82.7 billion in wagers and generated $2.9 billion in gaming revenue in the 2024-25 fiscal year, according to iGaming Ontario’s own annual report, an increase of more than 30% in both figures over the prior year. More than 80 licensed gaming websites now serve roughly 2.6 million active player accounts in the province.
For a market growing at that pace, the absence of a payment method that already moves tens of billions of dollars a year elsewhere is worth a closer look. Nowhere inside Ontario’s regulated online casino system can a player fund an account with bitcoin, ether, or a stablecoin. The province’s gaming regulator ruled it out on paper, not the operators.
Since the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) and its operating arm, iGaming Ontario, opened the province to competitive online gaming in April 2022, growth has not slowed. Online casino products remain the biggest draw, ahead of sports betting and peer-to-peer poker, and the operator count has climbed past 80 as new brands seek an AGCO licence rather than serve the province from offshore. That scale is exactly why funding rules get scrutinized: a market moving billions of dollars a month needs payment infrastructure that regulators can trace end to end.
Ontario is not an outlier in that respect. The UK Gambling Commission and the state regulators overseeing New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan run their licensed markets on the same logic: card, bank, and e-wallet rails only, with crypto left to sites that operate outside any of those licences. What makes Ontario notable is the scale of the market applying that logic. Few regulated igaming jurisdictions process anywhere near $82.7 billion a year, which means few regulators have as much riding on getting the funding rules right.
The answer sits inside the AGCO’s Registrar’s Standards for Internet Gaming, which state plainly that cryptocurrency is not legal tender and shall not be accepted. The rule sits next to a broader funds-management requirement: every deposit must be verified and authorized through a financial services provider before it reaches a player account. A wallet-to-wallet crypto transfer, by design, does not run through the kind of intermediary that requirement assumes. So while other jurisdictions have left the door open, Ontario closed it at the regulatory level rather than leaving it to individual operators to decide.
In place of crypto, licensed Ontario operators lean on the same rails Canadian banking already runs on: Visa and Mastercard, Interac, and e-wallets such as MuchBetter and Payz, alongside prepaid options like PaysafeCard. Deposit ceilings vary by method rather than by brand: Interac tops out at C$2,500 per transaction at most operators, while e-wallets and prepaid cards commonly allow up to C$25,000. None of it is exotic, and that is largely the point. Players who want to compare regulated Ontario casinos side by side, including which licensed operators support Interac transfers versus straight card deposits, can do that before a banking detail is ever entered. The lineup looks close to identical from one AGCO-licensed brand to the next, because the Registrar’s Standards apply the same way to all of them.
Outside Ontario’s boundaries, the picture looks very different. Bitcoin.com News reported that the global crypto gambling market reached an estimated $81 billion in 2025 and could range between $65 billion and $81 billion in 2026, with dollar-pegged stablecoins such as USDT and USDC now the default chips at most crypto casinos. The appeal is less about crypto culture than arithmetic: a stablecoin holds its value through a betting session in a way bitcoin or ether cannot always promise.
Stablecoin regulation is moving in several places at once: the EU’s MiCA framework is now in force, and the United States is still working out reserve and reporting rules for issuers. None of that changes Ontario’s current position, which is written into the Registrar’s Standards rather than left to operator discretion, and would need a formal amendment to shift. For now, a player choosing between a stablecoin wallet and a Visa card is also choosing between two separate regulatory worlds.
Whichever rail a player uses, Ontario’s rules are explicit that the activity is restricted to those 19 and older, and that ConnexOntario (1-866-531-2600) is available to anyone whose relationship with gambling, crypto-funded or otherwise, is worth a second look. The payment method changes. The need to gamble within limits does not.
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