Stake and the new money laundering blind spot
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23 Dec 2025 •
Reading time: 3 minutes The new internal cryptocurrency exchange function introduced by gaming platform Stake, presented as a simple convenience tool for users, is now raising major questions among anti-money laundering experts. Not because it is illegal per se, but because it profoundly alters the way in which financial flows can be understood, monitored and reported to the authorities.
A technical innovation that changes the flow of funds
Stake now allows its users to convert one cryptocurrency directly into another within the platform itself. A bitcoin deposit can thus be converted into USDT or ether without going through an external exchange. This functionality relies on a third-party service provider, Swapped com, and is designed to be fast, inexpensive and transparent for users.
Before this development, the pattern was simple: the asset deposited was, in the majority of cases, the asset withdrawn. Reading the blockchain made it relatively easy to link the point of entry and the point of exit. With internal exchange, this thread is broken. The conversion takes place out of sight of external observers, and it is only at the point of withdrawal that the operation becomes visible, in a profoundly altered form.
In the fight against money laundering, the coherence of the financial narrative is central. Banks and platforms must be able to explain where the funds have come from, how they have circulated and why these movements are economically plausible.
Internal trading blurs this narrative. When a financial institution receives funds from Stake, the identified counterparty is the platform itself. The previous path of the assets disappears behind this single label: ‘funds from a casino’. Is this enough to understand the real risk?
Gaming platforms: an already high risk
Cryptocurrency gaming platforms have long occupied a sensitive place in the risk matrices of financial institutions. They combine several aggravating factors: high volumes, high transaction speeds, cross-border circulation of funds, relative pseudonymity of users and historically heterogeneous customer knowledge practices.
Adding an internal asset conversion layer to this environment is tantamount to multiplying the blind spots. The problem is not the existence of an internal register, but its integration into an ecosystem that is already considered high-risk.
Stake as a narrative anchor
Once the funds have left Stake, they carry a powerful label: that of a well-known gaming operator. This institutional recognition is not anecdotal. Some digital banks, such as Revolut, explicitly include Stake in their menus for selecting the origin of funds. This operational detail transforms the perception of risk.
When the user chooses this option, the narrative becomes fluid, almost automatic. The receiving institution sees funds coming from Stake and activates standardised procedures, without necessarily going further back, unless a specific alert signal is triggered. Internal conversion, although a determining factor, remains out of the picture.
The major trading platforms, starting with Binance, are exposed to the same phenomenon. When an asset arrives from Stake, the visible history begins at that precise point. If the nature of the asset has changed between the initial deposit and the withdrawal, tracing the entire path becomes much more complex without the active cooperation of the originating platform.
In practice, this cooperation is only sought when anomalies have already been detected. A system of implicit trust is then established: downstream players assume that the controls have been carried out upstream.
Reduced costs and increased speed, a signal not to be overlooked
The internal exchange function is inexpensive. However, when it comes to risk analysis, the level of costs is never neutral. Cheap conversions encourage repetition, speed and optimisation of flows. Both criminal networks and highly active legitimate players are sensitive to these parameters. A fast, inexpensive infrastructure integrated into a recognised platform is automatically a point of attraction.
No accusation is necessary to justify attention. The risk lies in the very design of the system. Reducing transparency where it is crucial, while simplifying the narrative for downstream players, constitutes a structural imbalance. And it is precisely this kind of imbalance that regulators and banks can no longer afford to ignore.