SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Cryptocurrencies’ increasing role in the iGaming sector has been a noticeable trend in the past five years amid increased adoption of decentralised tokens by both businesses and customers.
With the average consumer becoming more open to decentralised transactions, this change could have industry-defining implications, understanding cryptocurrency and its role in the sector is crucial to keeping up and not being left behind.
That’s why Jovana Popovic Canaki, CEO of iGP, took time in Episode Three of Dear CEO, a limited series from iGaming Daily and iGP, to educate listeners on the importance of crypto and how it could impact the sector in the years to come.
iGP has spent over two years investing resources and time into developing its crypto solutions, and the company is ready to roll out a plethora of these products to its clients throughout 2025. That is despite Popovic Canaki not initially being a big believer in crypto.
“When crypto came about, I was one of the first people who predicted this would be just a one year, maybe two year, novelty. But here we are. What is it? 15/16, years later and it’s part of our lives,” she joked.
Finding crypto’s intersection with iGaming
Answering the first audience question, iGP’s CEO was tasked with identifying the intersection between crypto and iGaming and where this could perhaps evolve in the medium-term.
But Popovic Canaki has already identified an evolution in how crypto is being utilised in gaming. Once used merely as another payment method, crypto is now becoming much more powerful.
“It started as a payment method, and nothing else. This then invited, or attracted the crypto user segments into the iGaming sector. This user segment is very different from the regular, traditional, fiat player,” she explained.
“They’re much more tech savvy than a regular player the industry knew up until that point. They’re used to speed, they’re used to transparency and then we saw the crypto originals games, and so on. Just by looking at the past, we see that this intersection between the crypto and iGaming is becoming larger and larger and into the further decentralisation of the infrastructure itself.”
How can the iGaming industry make money from crypto?
The second question from the audience did not beat around the bush. The listener wanted to know how crypto can be taken advantage of to generate revenue and – more importantly – profit, despite largely fluctuating values.
“I love elephants in the room. This sounds like one,” said Canaki.
Ultimately, making income is why we are all in the sector or indeed why most people are in industry. And the very fact that crypto is being widely adopted in the iGaming sector is indicative of operators’ bullishness towards the tech.
For iGP’s CEO, the key to making money is being able to process instant payments.
“For this, we must go back to one of the basics of the crypto world – speed. It’s all about speed. So one of the solutions is real time conversion to secure that value. There are quite a few payment providers that offer this instant crypto to stablecoin settlements. It’s just one of the ways (to make money). But then it allows the company to run their PnLs on Fiat or stablecoin and still manage their margins in a more controllable, more predictable way.”
Can we trust crypto after the FTX crash?
The reputational damage that the crypto sector faced during the so-called crypto winter of 2021-2022 was unavoidable. After many popular cryptocurrencies crashed and the FTX exchange crashed too, some were hesitant to return to the sector.
Yet crypto has bounced back and become ever more in the mainstream.
To continue the mainstream rollout of crypto, and to bring more people to interact with these assets, Popovic Canaki said that transparency is key.
Noting that the FTX crash was over two years ago and that the industry has bounced back, Canaki remarked: “Running a sustainable business is all about trust. It’s about knowledge. Or maybe a better word would be education, and this takes time.”
In that regard, it is not unlike several other aspects of the iGaming sector such as the fairness of slot games running on RNGs. Games in most markets must be certified to demonstrate the fairness of them, and Popovic Canaki posited that crypto solutions could face a similar fate.
“Maybe we need some sort of certification, some sort of seal of trust, for crypto solutions. But to make that happen, I want to emphasise that we need to work together. All of the parts of this puzzle need to come together.
She added: “I look at it more as a collaboration between the parties, not the competition, because this is new. We need to come together to build the new crypto product and to bring it into a reputable future. At iGP, we are, we’re definitely making all these different pieces of the puzzle and understanding how we can jointly bring it forward.”
*Listen to the full episode of Dear CEO by using the video player on this screen.
**Dear CEO offers listeners the chance to ask their burning questions to Jovana Popovic Canaki, CEO of iGP. A true expert in the iGaming industry, Jovana has decades of experience and has plenty of insights to share. Keep an eye on the iGaming Daily LinkedIn page so you don’t miss out on the next opportunity to ask Jovana a question.
