A relaxation in the laws around betting in the USA has seen a definite increase in interest just from an ambient point of view. If you watch sports, spend much time online or read the news, the rise of iGaming won’t have passed you by. So it will have been no surprise to many recently when it emerged that iGaming was setting new standards from a numbers point of view, and the latest figures show that in the first half of 2022, there was an increase of 46.4% in iGaming handle in the USA.
Interestingly, the innovation in sports and casino betting for an American audience is matched by a rise in cryptocurrency betting, as the study from SoftSwiss indicates. Along with the overall total iGaming take increasing, so did the share of such gaming that was done using cryptocurrencies.
In H1 of 2022, the total share of iGaming that used crypto was 34.8%, a 5% increase on the number in 2021. There are, no doubt, multiple reasons that this would be the case, but a few of those reasons are immediately apparent from a bit of research.
Crypto and betting have embraced one another
There has been no shortage of effort from Bitcoin holders and other crypto enthusiasts to implement ways for crypto to be used in conventional settings, but the enthusiasm has not always been reciprocated.
One of the reasons that you don’t need to search far for a Bitcoin casino is that betting as a sector has been receptive to crypto. The top crypto casinos make a particular effort to offer great deals to new customers, and, as a consequence, they see results in the uptake of new accounts.
Greater exposure in key markets
In 2022, New York has become more than ever a center of Bitcoin investment, with experts happy to tag NYC as the capital city of crypto. Not coincidentally, New York has also embraced betting with a vengeance, becoming the most active state when it comes to sports betting in particular.
It makes nothing but sense, then, that there has been an overall rise in Bitcoin betting, particularly when you consider that despite only legalizing betting in 2022, New York has already seen more overall betting handle than most states have in years of legal wagering.
Cryptos are showing versatility
If you want to use cryptocurrencies to bet, then you are going to find that they are increasingly versatile as a staking instrument. With the Merge happening imminently, Ethereum is set to become a coin of interest beyond the narrow parameters of the crypto community.
With the best crypto casinos allowing for the use of Staked Ethereum in betting, there is more than ever an opportunity for crypto enthusiasts to diversify their holdings and still enjoy their cryptocurrencies as a usable form of money. 2022 may seem from the outside to have been a rocky year for crypto, but we may look back on it as the year the market matured.