Crypto in a sweepstakes operation

Two directions, two different answers

Crypto in this business is two separate questions that get asked as one. Money coming in and value going out are different rails with different owners, and the answer is not the same for both.

Why payouts are the exception

Crypto needs no merchant account and no acquirer. Every other rail in this business requires somebody to underwrite the operator first, which is why no supplier can hand you one. A crypto payout requires an address and a network. That is the entire reason this rail can be ours and the others cannot — it is structural rather than commercial, and it is why the exception has stayed exactly one rail wide.

Payouts run in USDT and USDC on the networks in common use. Which networks are enabled is settled when the account is set up, because the answer depends on where an operation's players are and what they already hold.

What is still yours

Everything else in the money flow, on both routes. Enabling a crypto payout rail does not move any of it.

• The acquiring behind every coin purchase, and the relationship that sits behind it.
• Retry, cascade and whatever orchestration you run across your payment providers.
• Chargebacks and disputes, including the ones that arrive months later.
• Identity verification before value leaves, on both routes.
• Which states are open, and what the per-state rules say.

The acquiring half of that list is the one operators underestimate: how this model is underwritten is a conversation nobody can have on your behalf.

What crypto does not fix

Operators arrive at this page hoping it solves the payments problem. It solves one direction of one rail, and it is worth being blunt about the rest.

• It does not change what your product is. A dual-currency product paying prizes in stablecoin is the same product with a different payout rail.
• It does not change a single state obligation. The map does not have a crypto column.
• It does not remove verification. Value leaving is what triggers the check, not the form the value takes.
• It does not help with coin purchases at all. The hard payments problem in this business is money coming in, and crypto payouts are the other direction.

What it costs you in irreversibility

The cost is that there is no path back. Every other payout rail has some route to recovery, however slow and however annoying. This one has none, and that changes what a support process has to catch before a payout goes rather than after.

How each rail fails, and what a recipient needs for each one, is set out on the payouts reference. The crypto row is the one to read twice before enabling it.

Which route you need for this

The managed platform. This is the one place on the site where choosing a route has a concrete consequence rather than an architectural one: the crypto rail is ours to run, and on an API integration there is no payout rail of ours for it to be.

What the managed platform operates is set out on the managed platform page, and the capability split between the two routes is on the platform page, row by row. Turnkey and white label sit on the managed platform too, so the same answer applies there.