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EXPLAINER

Can this casino pay you? What hot-wallet reserves show — and what they don't

Deposit-volume headlines are mostly guesswork about labels. Measured hot-wallet balances are the honest number — as long as you know what they leave out.

Dave WaskyAUG 25, 2026 · 6 MIN READon-chainreservesexplainer

Every crypto casino tracker wants a big headline number. The favourite is "deposit volume": billions flowing into Stake, Roobet, BC.Game and the rest, refreshed monthly, quoted everywhere.

The problem is that most of those figures are not measuring deposits. They are measuring transfers into a handful of publicly labeled addresses, and then calling whatever arrives a deposit. That is a different thing, and the gap matters if what you actually want to know is the question that matters to a player: if I win, can this casino pay me?

This explainer walks through how casino funds actually move on-chain, where the public labels come from, why "deposit volume" numbers overstate and mislabel, and why we think a directly measured hot-wallet balance is the more honest headline — with a caveat we will not let you skip.

How a crypto casino moves money

Almost every crypto casino runs the same plumbing as a centralised exchange.

When you deposit, the site gives you a personal deposit address. It is one of thousands the casino controls. Custody providers describe the next step as a "sweep": the platform periodically consolidates the balances sitting in those per-user addresses into a designated central account, usually only once the amount is worth more than the network fee to move it.

That central account is a hot wallet — a wallet whose keys are online so the casino can pay out withdrawals around the clock. The bulk of a well-run operator's money should not be there. It sits in cold storage, offline, and gets topped into the hot wallet as the payout float runs down.

So a casino's on-chain footprint has three layers: many deposit addresses nobody labels, a few hot wallets that both receive sweeps and send withdrawals, and cold reserves that may never be labeled at all.

Where the labels come from

Casinos do not publish their account numbers. The addresses trackers rely on come from open datasets that anyone can inspect.

Etherscan attaches public name tags to addresses whose ownership has become common knowledge; it lists a "Gambling" label category, and addresses tagged "Stake.com" sit in it. Dune's Spellbook — an open-source dbt project on GitHub — maintains a labels.addresses table built from manually curated seed files, automated contract analysis, ENS resolution and community contributions, with categories such as cex. Arkham Intelligence labels entities behind addresses on its free tier, using a mix of machine learning, in-house analysts and paid community submissions.

None of these datasets claims completeness, and none of them audits the casino's books. They record what has become known. Gambling Insider's July 2026 investigation put it plainly after watching Gamdom's public Ethereum tag "go silent" in mid-2025 and spotting what looked like a Stake Ethereum rotation in early July 2026: a wallet list is a snapshot of a moving target.

Why "deposit volume" misleads

Gambling Insider's method is worth reading because it is the honest version of what most trackers do quietly. Using free-tier tools — Arkham labels to identify wallets, Dune's free tier to sum the flows — the magazine tracked 29 labeled hot wallets across 12 casinos on Ethereum, BNB Chain and Tron, published both Dune queries, excluded transfers between a casino's own labeled wallets, and declared its blind spots. Its 2025 total: $22.7 billion of inflows, $15.2 billion of it to Stake.

Even done that carefully, "inflow to a labeled wallet" is not "player deposits", for three reasons.

First, the labeled wallets are mostly the payout side. An address gets a public name tag because it interacts with thousands of players — and the address every withdrawing player sees is the one that paid them. Sweep destinations can be rotated quietly; payout wallets are the ones that become common knowledge. So what you are counting is money arriving at the wallet that sends withdrawals.

Second, a lot of what arrives there is the casino's own money. Hot wallets are refilled from cold storage. A $30 million top-up from an unlabeled treasury address looks identical, in a Dune query, to $30 million of player deposits — and unless the treasury address is also labeled, the "exclude internal transfers" filter cannot catch it.

Third, the coverage is uneven in ways that flatter some brands and hide others. Bitcoin and Litecoin deposits are invisible to the address-label technique, Solana is only partly covered, payment-processor flows never touch a labeled wallet, and Tron — the biggest stablecoin rail in this industry — has no public directory tagging any major casino. A tracker that ranks operators by "deposit volume" is largely ranking them by how many of their wallets happen to be labeled.

None of this makes the flow data useless. It makes the word "deposits" wrong.

Why reserves are the better headline

A hot-wallet balance is a different kind of number. It is not an inference about what a transfer meant. It is the amount of money sitting at a known address at a known moment, readable by anyone with a block explorer.

That is the number that connects to the question players ask. Casinos pay withdrawals from hot wallets. If the tracked hot wallets hold $80 million, then at that instant the operator had at least $80 million of liquid, on-chain, player-facing money. It does not tell you the casino is solvent. It tells you the float is real.

The 2023 Stake incident shows why the float matters. On or about 4 September 2023, attackers made unauthorised transactions from Stake's Ethereum, BNB Chain and Polygon hot wallets, taking roughly $41 million — about $15.7 million in ETH and $25.6 million across BSC and Polygon. The FBI later attributed the theft to North Korea's Lazarus Group. Co-founder Ed Craven said private keys were not compromised, that Stake keeps only a small portion of its reserves in hot wallets for exactly this reason, and that the loss did not materially affect operations. Stake said user funds were unaffected and that anyone who transacted during the incident would be reimbursed, and withdrawals resumed within hours.

That is what a real reserve looks like under stress: the hot wallets were drained, cold storage refilled them, players got paid. A casino without that depth would have told a different story — and its hot-wallet balance, tracked hourly, would have shown it before any announcement did.

What a reserves number cannot tell you

The caveat, stated as bluntly as we can: a reserves figure covers labeled wallets only.

A low number means low tracked reserves. It does not mean insolvency. The casino may hold most of its money in cold wallets nobody has identified, on chains nobody is watching, or with a payment processor. Equally, a high number is not proof of solvency — it says nothing about liabilities, about how much of that balance is owed to players, or about whether the operator will honour a large win. On-chain balances are one input, not a verdict.

How to read a reserves number

  • Ask which addresses are counted, and check that the evidence for each label is published.
  • Ask when the balance was measured. A monthly snapshot can miss a drain and a refill.
  • Compare a brand against its own history, not against a brand with more labeled wallets.
  • Treat a sudden drop as a question, not a conclusion. Rotations and cold-storage moves look the same as trouble until you check the destination.
  • Ignore any number that calls an inflow a "deposit" without saying how it knows.

What 99Gamblers publishes

We publish live hot-wallet balances for the casinos where we have labeled wallets — currently around 37 addresses across nine brands, roughly $80 million in tracked reserves, with Stake the largest. Balances are measured hourly, and every address's evidence is published on the casino's profile so you can check the label yourself.

We describe movements only as wallet inflow and wallet outflow. We never call them deposits or withdrawals, because on-chain data cannot tell us which they are. We also do not test payouts, and we do not claim that a tracked balance proves a casino can pay. What we can show you is the money we can see, where it is, and how that changes hour by hour. That is the honest version of the number — and it is more than most headlines give you.

Sources

99Gamblers is funded by affiliate commission from casinos we list. It never buys a rating — the scoring firewall is published with every ranking. 18+ · play responsibly.How we score →

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