There’s another wave of hype for crypto in 2025 causing millions of dollars spent on sponsorship deals and tens of crypto-related projects being built around the sports industry. Most major sports-related brands invest into crypto startups to stay on top of the trend and keep up with the younger audience. Nike developed SWOOSH to work with Web3 collectibles and NFT drops. Formula 1 built a blockchain game called F1 Delta Time to entertain the fans and keep the brand on top of the play-to-earn trend, while 777 bet invested hundreds of thousands into developing sports-related slot games and encouraging their player base to enroll in betting on sports events.
Brands realized that crypto is here to stay and invest heavily into building infrastructure and securing their spots for advertising. But what about the general audience? Does crypto become a thing for sport bettors that simplify the betting process or it is not that big yet?
Drawbacks of Traditional Payments
Unlike traditional payment methods, crypto transactions often have a bunch of cons. Regular bank transfer can take hours if not days, especially when you live in a country where the banking system is underdeveloped and relies on SWIFT or SEPA. Another pain that bettors frequently face is when their transactions get rejected because their banks flag them as “gambling-related”. On one hand, it is positive that you can’t top up the balance on your favorite betting platform in one or two clicks of the mouse because it prevents younger audiences and those with gambling addiction problems from being involved in betting too much. On the other hand, it creates lots of hassle for regular users because they are forced to search workarounds and sometimes even pay high commissions to 3rd party services that make it possible to top up the balance right before the sports event.
Withdrawals are as cooked as top ups because in most cases banks will trigger additional security checks and even freeze the account when they see “suspicious” transactions. Banks rely on AI heavily and it can flag even a small transaction making it impossible to use your winnings right away in many cases. Not only is the processing cooked, the speed of withdrawal is another pain in the ass, same as the additional fees related to receiving payments via SWIFT or SEPA.
Why Crypto is Used in Fight Betting
With crypto, everything is different. Sending money in Bitcoin, although can be a bit pricey because of the high transaction fees, is super fast and can not be controlled by any bank or organization. Stablecoins like USDT and USDC are very fast and usually quite cheap if you send them from your Binance or OKX account. Usually, it takes less than 5 minutes to top up the balance using stablecoins and 1-3 hours when you decide to withdraw your winnings using this method.
With crypto, you can move your winnings to another platform in minutes, deposit right away to catch the changes in a fight, and avoid problems with banks and governmental institutions. Even cashout is streamlined so you don’t have to wait days till your winning land on your account. For live betting, these options are hard to overestimate.
Privacy is another important angle that pushes crypto to #1 solution for betting payments. While millions of people place bets online, not all of them want this to be visible to their friends, families or even colleagues. Government employees and politicians can harm their career, frequent players may look unreliable to colleagues, your bank can flag you as an unreliable client and cause you problems when you apply for car loan or mortgage. Even your personal life can be affected when someone knows that you like placing bets on boxing matches or MMA results. That’s why people don’t want their bank statements showing betting transactions. These are the basic reasons why people tend to move away from traditional fiat payments to using crypto in betting.
As you can see, crypto is very handy when it comes to cross-border transactions and betting platforms. But think of it from a different perspective, that crypto allows betting on fights from all over the world, even from the jurisdictions where placing bets are banned or even penalized. Sometimes people cannot access bookies and bet with fiat money because of the local limitations. If you’re living in a country where placing bets on boxing is prohibited, just like other types of gambling, your local banks will highly likely to ban any payment and any transaction that is related to offshore platforms. This is especially relevant for those who live in Brazil, Nigeria, Turkey, Thailand, and even Indonesia.
Southeast Asia, Middle East, and Latin America are known for their strict regulations in gambling laws preventing people from using online platforms. But Web3 innovations are here to help and make your betting experience even better and involving less transactional fees and even let you to have bigger bonuses and loyalty points because betting platforms in most cases encourage people to switch from fiat currencies to crypto because it’s beneficial not only for players but for the platforms themselves.
One of the ways how crypto is positively impacting the boxing betting industry is that it allows micro-betting or betting with higher frequency. With blockchains like Polygon it is possible to send small transactions that allow you to place your bet frequently because you don’t have any fees or they are close to nothing.
2030 Perspective
It is highly likely that we’ll see the traditional payment system will be highly disrupted by crypto by 2030. Because of AI, Bitcoin, and Web3 infrastructure, we see that there are big possibilities for sport books, companies, and online platforms to gather more audience when it will be possible for them to place their bets without restriction.
With crypto, you can top up the balance or make a withdrawal in a matter of minutes from any country in the world. And this really breaks boundaries. If betting platforms will introduce micro-betting on smaller events like who wins the next round, or will the fight end in the next 60 seconds, or will there be a knockdown in the next 30 seconds, this can turn any fight into an entertaining one.
