Online gambling 10 years ago used to be slots, table games, and live poker – pretty much what you’d find at any land-based casino.
Nowadays, there are more ways to gamble than you can imagine, with online casinos allowing you to bet on a coin toss from space, shooting fish, and defusing bombs.
And while at it, you can place your bets using cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and even NFTs.
In this guide, we will take a look at the 7 hottest gambling trends that are expected to explode in the following months and years.
Metaverse Casinos (Virtual Reality)
We’re starting off with the biggest one.
Metaverse casinos are expected to start opening up in the following years.
And we’re not talking here about casinos that work on Web 3.0 technology and allow you to deposit using NFTs – we’re talking about real Metaverse casinos where you put on a VR headset and virtually walk into a casino and play.
The way this is expected to work is that there will be casinos in the open Metaverse world, which you can walk into and play many different types of games with crypto or NFTs.
This is not possible right now, but it will definitely be among the biggest innovations once it does hit the mainstream market.
Ethereum Gambling
Bitcoin casinos have been going strong for over 10 years now, but it’s just this year that Ethereum gambling sites are starting to make some real noise in the industry.
Why? Because ETH is generally a much better cryptocurrency to use for gambling than Bitcoin. For starters, Ethereum’s block time is currently about 12 seconds, which compared to Bitcoin’s block time of 10 minutes is much faster.
This makes ETH withdrawals at online casinos near-instant – which is why many players are making the switch.
Sweepstakes and Social Casinos
Sweepstakes casinos have been going strong for over 6 years now – and they are expected to become the go-to gaming sites for US players without access to legal online casinos.
These types of “casinos” allow you to play casino-style games for free, with a catch. To understand this catch, you need to understand the difference between Gold Coins (GC) and Sweep Coins (SC).
Gold Coins are given to you upon registration, and they are a virtual currency that you can use to play games. If you run out of GC, you can purchase a package to get some more.
This is where Sweep Coins kick in. With every GC package, you get a certain amount of SC for “free” – usually the same amount of dollars you spent to buy the package.
Then, players can use the SC to play games and convert their winnings to cash prizes if they win. A pretty ingenious way to circumvent some of the US gambling laws.
Instant Games
Okay now, hear us out. It’s 2023, and you can gamble on basically anything you can think of.
Somehow, online casinos have managed to find a way to convert every childhood game we love into something you can bet real money on.
You can place real money wagers on Plinko, Minesweeper, Monopoly, and many other social games. One of the most popular games right now is Crash, which involves a rocket or a plane that flies until it blows up.
The point of this game is to place a bet and cash out before the inevitable crash occurs – which could be at any given moment.
Inclave Login Casinos
The need for convenience and easy access has paved the way for Inclave casinos, which are basically regular online casinos that use the new Inclave login method.
Inclave was first introduced in 2022, but it wasn’t until a few months ago that many casinos decided to include it on their website.
It’s a password management solution that allows you to log in using your fingerprint, face ID, or simply 1-tap. The bottom line is that if you have an account with Inclave, you can join any casino that works with this login method without having to create a new account.
eSports Betting
As video games like CSGO, League of Legends, and PUBG are reporting record-breaking numbers of new players, one can only expect that the eSports scene will get much more competitive and that betting on it will hit the mainstream.
As of right now, LoL has 117 million active users, while PUBG is leading the race with over 270 million. The US eSports market alone is worth 0.93 billion as of 2023, as shown in a report by Statista.
With these huge numbers and the rise of competitive video game tournaments, sportsbooks have started offering odds and allowing eSports fans to bet on these games and tournament winners.
In the following years, this gambling market is expected to experience rapid growth.
Online Poker
Poker is one of the oldest and most popular card games, but it’s still very much worthy of mention.
Why? Because no matter how big online poker seems to get, it manages to surprise everyone and crash those numbers just a few months later.
We’ve seen over 200,000 active users in one single moment when playing at GG Poker, and we can only guess that the number isn’t too different at other poker giants like Pokerstars.
Because of this, online poker tournaments are now offering GTDs of above $1,000,000 on the regular, with some massive events sometimes even eclipsing $10 million.
On top of this, poker is gaining massive popularity among young adults who frequently play home poker games.
Final Words
Slots are still staying strong as the most popular way to gamble online – but we can’t deny all of the innovations and new gambling options available to try.
We really can’t wait to see what will happen with Metaverse casinos and how they are going to shape the industry in the future – but there are probably at least a few years before we see the first one go live.
Until then, you can explore all of the other online gambling trends that we’ve discussed.
Thanks for reading!