Built for deposits, not digital goods: the payments gap beneath America’s gaming-adjacent boom

The most interesting growth story in American gaming is not happening inside the seven states that have regulated online casino. It is happening in the gaming-adjacent economy: sweepstakes and social casino coin bundles, skill-based tournaments, paid-entry contests, prediction markets, in-game items and digital collectibles. These businesses do not accept wagers in the legal sense. They sell digital goods – and they sell an enormous quantity of them.

The numbers are no longer niche. Eilers & Krejcik Gaming tracked sweepstakes social casino revenue at roughly $6.9bn in 2025, up from $3.1bn in 2022, with gross coin sales forecast at $11bn to $14bn and prize redemptions at a further $9bn to $10bn. KPMG’s industry primer, drawing on the same research, puts category growth at a 60%-70% compound annual rate between 2020 and 2024. Whatever happens next at the state level – and plenty is happening – the consumer behaviour underneath is not going away. Tens of millions of Americans are now entirely comfortable buying small parcels of digital value, frequently, from businesses that look and feel like games.

A different transactional DNA

The transactional profile of these businesses is fundamentally different from regulated igaming. A regulated casino runs on the deposit: a player loads $100 into a wallet and the payments conversation is about approval rates and withdrawal speed. A digital goods business runs on the micro-transaction: $4.99, $9.99 and $19.99 bundles, purchased several times a week, initiated increasingly from a wallet – Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Cash App – with instant fulfilment and, on the sweepstakes side, a payout leg that customers now expect to settle in minutes rather than days.

Very little incumbent infrastructure was built for that. Mainstream ecommerce gateways were engineered for retail card-not-present flows: one basket, one authorisation, a dispute model designed around goods that ship. Point them at a high-velocity digital goods merchant and the seams show quickly. Velocity controls tuned for retail fraud flag legitimate repeat purchasers. Retry logic is naive about issuer behaviour. And wallet handling is where money quietly leaks: a network token passed through incorrectly – treated as a generic card credential rather than a device-bound token – can silently downgrade the economics of every wallet transaction. Across tens of millions of small tickets, 20 basis points of silent downgrade is not a rounding error; it is a seven-figure line item.

The wrong kind of high risk

The regional high-risk acquirers that historically banked gaming have the opposite problem. Their commercial models were calibrated in the large-ticket deposit era: fixed per-transaction fees, rolling reserves, settlement lags and underwriting cycles that made sense when the average ticket was $150. Apply a $0.30 fixed fee to a $2.99 coin pack and 10% of gross has gone to the processor before interchange. Apply a deposit-era chargeback model to a digital goods business with instant fulfilment and no withdrawal mechanic, and you are pricing risk that is not there while missing the risk that is.

The payout leg deserves its own scrutiny. Real-time rails – RTP, FedNow, push-to-card – have reset expectations for redemptions, and operators that still batch payouts overnight feel it in retention. Bank transfer pay-ins carry a subtler trap: an ACH debit is a promise, not a final payment. Returns can arrive days after the digital goods have been delivered and consumed. In a low-velocity deposit business, that timing mismatch is an inconvenience; in a high-velocity goods business, it is a structural working-capital and fraud exposure that has to be engineered around rather than hoped away.

What fit-for-purpose looks like

So what does modern infrastructure for this world look like? Less like a gateway, more like a routing brain. Authorisation decisions made per bin, per issuer and per ticket size, not per merchant account. The ability to cascade a declined transaction across acquirers in real time rather than losing the sale. Network tokenisation implemented properly across the credential lifecycle, so growing wallet share becomes a margin advantage instead of a silent tax. Payouts treated as a first-class product rather than a back-office batch job. And unified data across all of it – because in a business of ten million small decisions, the operators that can see are the operators that can act.

Payment infrastructure has always lagged product innovation; card rails chased ecommerce for a decade before catching up. The same lag is visible today beneath America’s gaming-adjacent boom, and it is closing. The operators who close it fastest will be the ones that stop treating payments as plumbing procured once a year and start treating it as product – measured, iterated and owned at board level. In a category growing this quickly, that difference compounds.

Alexander Rea is the founder and CEO of Fyntek, a payments orchestration platform built for igaming, sweepstakes and gaming-adjacent merchants in the United States. He previously held senior roles at Trustly, Nuvei and Esports Entertainment Group, and has spent his career building payment and gateway infrastructure across European and US gaming markets.