According to Forbes, state gaming regulators at the National Council of Legislators from Gaming States conference are actively exploring cryptocurrency, specifically stablecoins, as a solution to a payments crisis. Credit card companies are banning use on online wagering platforms, and alternatives like wire transfers or ACH take days and only work during banking hours, which constitute just 23% of all hours. Paul Howard of Wincent points out that fiat transaction methods haven’t changed in 60 years, while crypto infrastructure firm ZeroHash, backed by Morgan Stanley and Apollo, is now attending gaming conferences to offer solutions. Interactive Brokers, through ZeroHash, already offers instant account funding via stablecoins for sophisticated US investors, highlighting a market where an estimated $200 trillion in cross-border remittances flows, with less than 1% currently using stablecoins.
The real problem is 60-year-old banking tech
Here’s the thing that’s so damning: the traditional system is basically offline most of the time. When Nic Carter points out that banking hours are only 23% of all hours, it sounds like a trivia fact. But for an industry that operates at 3 a.m. on a Sunday? It’s a fatal flaw. The committee’s own language is a dead giveaway—they talk about “payment modernization” to help the regulated market compete. That’s bureaucrat-speak for “we’re getting our butts kicked by illegal ops who already use crypto because it works better.”
And that’s the core of it. This isn’t about ideology or wanting to be on the cutting edge. It’s a pragmatic response to a broken system. Wire transfers feel absurd in 2025. Waiting days for settlement when a digital token can move in seconds? That’s not an innovation problem. That’s an institutional inertia problem. The gambling sector is just the canary in the coal mine because its needs—instant, 24/7, global—expose the limitations most brutally.
The “naughty” finance pattern
So why do these sectors adopt first? It’s not because they’re inherently sketchy. It’s because traditional finance discriminates against them, creating an artificial vacuum. Credit cards bail on gambling. Banks get squeamish. But the demand doesn’t vanish—it just flows to whoever can provide the rails. Stablecoins step in not as a rebellious choice, but as the only technically superior one available.
This pattern is repeating everywhere traditional finance feels icky or slow: prediction markets, certain brokerages, high-frequency trading. The narrative that stablecoins are only for the unbanked in volatile economies is incomplete, and frankly, a bit condescending. Look at Interactive Brokers and Public.com. They’re serving fully banked, sophisticated users who are simply choosing a better product. That’s a much more powerful adoption signal than crisis-driven use.
Legitimacy and the long game
Now, the involvement of a company like ZeroHash is critical. They’ve got the 50-state licensing, the BitLicense, zero enforcement actions in eight years, and backing from giant TradFi names. They’re the bridge. When they show up at a gaming conference, it’s not a bunch of crypto bros pitching magic internet money. It’s a licensed infrastructure provider saying, “We can solve your specific, regulated business problem.” That changes the conversation entirely.
But let’s be skeptical for a second. Regulatory acceptance is a double-edged sword. Once state gaming commissions really lean in, they’ll bring their own rulebooks. Could the compliance overhead eventually strip away the speed and cost advantages? Possibly. And the volatility risk of a stablecoin itself, while low, isn’t zero—just ask anyone who lived through a de-peg event.
What this really signals
The big takeaway isn’t that gambling will use crypto. It already does, on the unregulated side. The shocker is that the regulators themselves are now framing it as a competitive necessity. They’re openly discussing it at the NCLGS Winter Meeting. That’s a seismic shift in posture.
It proves the real use case isn’t speculation. It’s utility. It’s a better payment rail for sectors that the old rails abandon or serve poorly. While everyone watches bitcoin’s price, the boring, multi-trillion-dollar story of payments infrastructure is being rewritten in the most unlikely places. As the article notes, the narrative almost nobody covers is stablecoins solving real problems for industries traditional finance doesn’t want to serve. And when the regulated world starts adopting the tools of the unregulated to survive, you know the game has fundamentally changed.
