Most crypto casino Originals return 98% to 99%, and Duel badges its Originals at 100% within a daily allowance. Studio slots return about 96%. Slots still fill most of the lobby and most of the prize promotions. We compared the price, the rewards, the prize money and the checks behind both kinds of game, and looked at what comes next for Originals.
- Price: on $1,000 of bets a 99% Original keeps $10 on average. A 96.5% slot keeps $35.
- Rewards: Shuffle credits a 99% Original at a quarter of the rate of a 4% slot. BetPanda counts provably fair games at 1% towards its welcome bonus. BC.Game counts its Originals at 5%.
- Prize money: Pragmatic Play’s Drops & Wins pays over €25,000,000 from March 2026 to March 2027. Thrill’s Halloween leaderboard for Originals: a $4,000 pool, 26 October to 2 November 2026.
- Checks: a test lab works out a studio slot’s RTP from its paytable and source code. A seed check on an Original proves one round. In October and November 2026 an auditor found two Originals that took more than the advertised edge: Towers through its payout table and Gamdom Crash through its crash point formula.
- Data: no public figures split crypto casino bets between Originals and studio games. Aggregator figures cover studio games only.
Alex Jovanovic: “I play both. Originals are where my money lasts longest. Slots are where the casino pays me to stay. Most players chase the rewards and never work out what the games cost them.”
Originals are the cheaper bet
RTP is the share of all bets a game pays back over a very long run. The rest is the house edge, and that is the price of each bet. On $1,000 of bets a 99% game keeps $10 on average and a 96.5% game keeps $35. A single session can land far from these numbers in either direction.
A 100% RTP badge means the house keeps nothing on average over a very long run. It does not promise a win. Any single session can end at zero, and the badge does not change the size of the swings.
Duel’s 100% has a condition. Its Zero Edge FAQ says the Originals carry a 0.1% base edge, and within a daily zero edge allowance Duel pays that 0.1% back as instant rakeback. Above the allowance the 0.1% edge applies until it resets the next day. The page does not state the size of the allowance.
| Game | RTP | Average cost per $1,000 | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Duel Originals | 100% within a daily allowance | $0 | Original |
| Thrill Blackjack | 99.48% | $5.20 | Original |
| Stake Dice | 99% | $10 | Original |
| Thrill Moles | 98% | $20 | Original |
| Pragmatic Play slot, top version | about 96.50% | $35 | Studio slot |
| Nolimit City San Quentin 2 | 96.13% | $38.70 | Studio slot |
| Rainbet Mines | 96.00% | $40 | Original |
| Pragmatic Play slot, lower version | 94.50% | $55 | Studio slot |
Two things blur the picture. Some Originals are expensive. Mines returns 99% at Stake, Shuffle and Housebets and 96.00% at Rainbet. And one slot can come in several RTP versions. Pragmatic Play’s provider page at the aggregator IOP says selected RTP configurations are available on request, with its approval. Gates of Olympus, for example, exists at 96.50%, 95.51% and 94.50%. The casino runs the version it picked, and the info screen inside the game shows which one you are on.
Thrill makes this visible. Its casino menu has a Boosted RTP shelf with slots that run a raised setting. On 2 November 2026 it listed nine slots from 97.29% to 98.13%. Read more in our Thrill review.
A studio can offer a lower RTP version and nobody notices, because the slot looks the same and the info screen is the only place that shows it. An Original carries the casino’s name. When an auditor finds a payout table that takes more than the advertised edge, the casino answers for it in public. After the Towers report, one player on X asked how he could gamble at the casino “with the trust now”.
Casino rewards pay more for slot bets
The low edge of an Original is also why many casinos count it for less. Bonuses, XP and rakeback are paid out of the house edge. A game that keeps 1% leaves less room for them than a game that keeps 4%.
| Casino | How Originals count | Our review |
|---|---|---|
| BetPanda | No VIP XP. Provably fair games count 1% towards the welcome bonus in its help centre. Rakeback on them starts at Gold level | BetPanda review |
| BC.Game | BC Originals count 5% towards wagering. Slots count. Table and live games count 0% | BC.Game review |
| Shuffle | Wagering counts by house edge divided by 4%. A 1% Original counts at a quarter of the speed of a 4% slot | Shuffle review |
| Thrill | 1.5 XP per $1 at 97% RTP or lower, 1 XP from 97% to 99%, 0.5 XP above 99% | Thrill review |
| Duel | Instant rakeback on slots at half the house edge. Originals carry a 100% RTP badge within a daily allowance | Duel review |
Here is how it adds up on Thrill. $1,000 on a 96% slot earns 1,500 XP and costs $40 on average. The same $1,000 on a 99% Original earns 1,000 XP and costs $10. On Blackjack at 99.48% it earns 500 XP and costs $5.20. On the slot you pay $30 more for 500 more XP. That is a good trade only if the next VIP level is worth more to you than the extra cost.
Alex Jovanovic: “Read the contribution table before you clear a bonus on Dice. At 5% you need twenty times the turnover. At 1% you need a hundred times.”
Studios bring the prize money
Pragmatic Play’s Drops & Wins is in its seventh season, from 4 March 2026 to 3 March 2027. It pays over €25,000,000 in more than 5,000,000 prizes across 60+ slots a month. The studio says it has paid out more than €100,000,000 since 2020. The weekly wheel pays up to 100,000x, capped at €100,000, and daily tournaments pay up to €3,000.
That money comes from the studio and runs at every casino that carries the games. A casino pays for its own Originals promotions, so the pools are smaller. Thrill’s Original Nightmares leaderboard for Plinko, Dice, Moles and Limbo: a $4,000 pool, open from 26 October to 2 November 2026.
Prize drops change how people play. SOFTSWISS reports that a jackpot drop on its games lifted the number of bets by 40% and the money staked by 68% in the first month.
Graphics, stories and bonus rounds
A studio slot is built to be watched. Each studio draws its own art, animation and sound, and a big release looks like a short film. Some studios license stories from well-known films and TV series, so a player meets characters and scenes they already know on the reels.
The bonus round is where the tension sits. Free spins, growing multipliers and extra symbols can turn a quiet session around in a few spins, and every spin before the bonus feels like it might be the one. Where the law allows it, a player can buy the bonus round outright and skip the wait.
Nolimit City publishes the odds for San Quentin 2. It returns 96.13%, the top win is 200,000x and lands about once in 1.5 million spins, free spins come about once in 299 spins and 26.90% of spins win something.
In Originals you set the risk yourself. In Crash you pick the cash-out point. In Mines or Moles you pick how many traps or hits. Thrill Crash Witching Heights caps at 1,000,000x, and by its 99% formula a round reaches the cap about once in 1,010,101. The cap is five times the 200,000x top win of San Quentin 2. The screen around it is simple: a number going up, a grid of tiles, a board of holes. Some houses dress their Originals for the season, as Thrill did with a Halloween theme for Moles and Witching Heights. The maths stays the same under the new skin.
Originals can be harder to put down than slots. A round of Crash or Dice takes a few seconds, there is no animation to wait through, and the next bet is one click away. You also pick the risk yourself, so a losing streak invites a bigger target or one more mine. Set a time limit and a loss limit before you start.
Who checks the maths
A studio game goes through a test lab before a licensed casino runs it. Gaming Laboratories International (GLI) works out a slot’s RTP from its paytable by evaluating or simulating every combination. Under its GLI-19 standard the lab receives the source code and checks that the build matches it. The casino system then keeps each paytable with its theoretical RTP.
An Original is usually checked by its own players. Provably fair seeds let you rebuild a round and confirm that the result was fixed before your bet. They say nothing about whether the payout table matches the advertised edge. ProvablyFair.org, a firm that sells fairness certification to casinos and also tests casinos’ games without being hired, put it in one line: “Provably fair proves the outcome, not the odds.”
Disclosure: ProvablyFair.org lists Duel among the casinos it certifies, with 11 games. Duel is first in our casino ranking. We cite its reports because they publish the data and code behind each finding, so anyone can re-run them.
| Question | Studio slot | Original with seeds |
|---|---|---|
| Who sets the RTP | The studio, in versions it approves | The casino |
| Who checks the paytable | A test lab, before release | The casino, and sometimes an outside auditor after release |
| What you can check yourself | The RTP version on the info screen | Each round with the seeds, and the payout table against the advertised edge |
500 Casino Towers. On 29 October 2026 ProvablyFair.org published an investigation into Towers. The game advertised a fixed 5% edge. The edge was taken again on every row, so it reached 40.13% at row 10, where the game returned 59.87%. Every seed check passed: 33 of 33 games and 53 of 53 tiles. The iTech Labs certificate covered the random number generator and did not assess the paytable.
500 Casino confirmed the error and fixed Towers and HiLo on 30 October. It says it refunded $1,741,242 to more than 35,800 players, 10% on top included. That is the casino’s own figure. ProvablyFair.org re-tested on 31 October and found the 5% edge on all three modes. Its estimate of extra player losses over three years, $3.5 million to $21.6 million, is a model, and the report says so. 500 Casino’s own refund total, $1.74 million, came in below the bottom of that range.
Gamdom Crash. On 1 November ProvablyFair.org published a second report. Gamdom advertises a 1% edge on Crash. The formula in Gamdom’s own public verifier gives 1.67% at a 1.5x cash-out, 2.00% at 2x and 2.98% at 1000x. Seeds let a player rebuild each round, but the report also found that the game moved to a new hash chain in October with no published commitment, and calls Crash “not provably fair as implemented”. It found no proof that Gamdom picked a biased chain. Its cost estimate, about $1.58 million from January to October, is extrapolated from 44 hours of bets.
Gamdom also runs Zero Edge, which it says returns 100% on the first $5,000 wagered each day. The report found that rakeback on the tested account was a flat 1%. That lifts the return at a 2x cash-out from 98% to 99% and at 10x from 97.21% to 98.21%.
Gamdom founder Felix Römer answered on X under a post by xet, founder of the data site Gamstat. That post quoted the report and questioned its sample size. He wrote that “this is complete slander” and that Gamdom is “running above 100% rtp this year overall on originals”. That figure covers all Originals over a year. The report measures the edge at each cash-out target. The account @gamdom_beekay replied to ProvablyFair.org that Gamdom would issue a public statement and “make it right for everyone affected”. We found no official statement on Crash by 2 November. Our Gamdom review will follow the case.
Alex Jovanovic: “Towers passed every seed check and still took eight times the advertised edge. Someone found it by doing the maths on the payout table. Any player with a calculator can run that check on a ladder game in five minutes. I show how in the checklist below.”
One game, many casinos
A studio slot runs at every casino that licenses it. If you like a slot, you can take it to a new casino, check the RTP version and play the same game. Originals belong to one house, and the size of the shelf varies a lot. These are the counts from our Originals hub and reviews.
| Casino | Originals in the lobby |
|---|---|
| BC.Game | 73 in the side menu |
| Stake | 31 |
| Shuffle | 17 |
| Rainbet | 16 |
| Thrill | 14 |
| Duel | 13 |
| Gamdom | 11, in a lobby of more than 8,000 games |
| Vavada | None |
Names repeat across casinos, and the games behind them differ. Mines returns 99% at Stake and 96.00% at Rainbet. A studio slot under the same name has the same rules everywhere. Only the RTP version can change.
What the market numbers show
No public dataset splits crypto casino bets between Originals and studio games. The figures that exist measure other things.
- SOFTSWISS, a game aggregator: slots took 85.56% of gross gaming revenue and of all bets on its platform in 2023, reported by Yogonet, and about 83% in early 2024. The average slot bet was €0.75. The aggregator carries studio games, so in-house Originals are outside these figures.
- SOFTSWISS: crash games made up 3.9% of games played in Latin America in the second quarter of 2024 and under 1% in Europe.
- CryptoManiaks, a crypto gambling affiliate: on its own site, crash took 16.65% of casino interest in 2025 and slots 16.42%, down from 35.11% in 2024. This counts reader interest on one site. It does not count bets.
- Kick: the Slots & Casino category logged 80.2 million watch hours from 1 to 24 September 2026, per Streams Charts data reported by influencers.network. The category does not separate Originals from slots.
Slots lead the SOFTSWISS counts of revenue and bets. The CryptoManiaks count puts crash slightly ahead, but it measures reader interest on one site. None of these counts includes Originals, so the real split at crypto casinos is unknown.
Originals and studio games side by side
How to pick: a player checklist
- Open the info screen of a slot and read the RTP. If it shows a lower version, look for the same slot at a casino that runs the top one.
- Read the game contribution table before you play Originals with a bonus. At 5%, $1,000 of bets counts as $50.
- Compare the XP or rakeback per $1 with the edge you pay. A cheaper game often earns less, and the trade can go either way.
- Test the payout table of an Original. Divide the second payout by the first. On a row with a 1 in 2 chance the answer should be 2.00. At 500 Casino Towers before the fix it was 1.90, a sign that the edge was taken on every row.
- Check that the advertised RTP is the same at every target or level. By the formula in its own verifier, Gamdom Crash pays back 98.33% at 1.5x and 97.02% at 1000x against an advertised 99%.
- Run the seed verifier after a big win or a strange loss. It proves the round was fixed before your bet.
- Set a loss limit before you start. A 1% edge still adds up over thousands of fast rounds.
What comes next for Originals
Originals have the best price in the casino. They lose on rewards, prize money and outside checks, and after October 2026 the checks matter most. This is where we expect the market to go.
- Public paytable audits become routine. Two reports within a week showed that anyone can test a game’s maths from outside. On X, players asked for the same test at other big casinos.
- Casinos publish their verifier settings. Thrill already serves a public verifier config with the RTP for Crash and Moles, and the 1,000,000x cap for Crash. Expect the edge per row and per target printed next to the game.
- Fast refunds set the bar. 500 Casino confirmed, fixed and paid back within a day of the report. Any casino caught with a wrong table will be measured against that.
- Studio crash games take more of the lobby. Studios already sell crash games. SOFTSWISS reports that Aviator by Spribe was the top game by revenue in South Africa in July and August 2024. SOFTSWISS also sells jackpot drops for crash games. Expect more lab-tested crash games with shared prize pools next to the house versions.
- Rewards follow the edge. As long as bonuses are paid from the edge, a 1% game earns less. Counting by edge, as Shuffle does, is the fair version: you earn in proportion to what you pay.
Alex Jovanovic: “My forecast for 2027: the Originals that last will show a public paytable, a verifier config and an outside audit on the game page. A 99% badge on its own will not be enough. Slots keep the prize money, and most players will keep switching between the two. That is my opinion, and I will check it in a year.”
FAQ
Are Originals better value than slots?
On price, usually yes. On average, a 99% Original costs less than a third as much per bet as a 96.5% slot. Bonuses and XP often count slot bets for more, so check what the rewards pay before you decide.
Does a 100% RTP game guarantee a win?
No. 100% RTP means the house keeps nothing on average over a very long run. A single session can still end at zero.
Why do Originals count less towards bonuses?
Bonuses are paid out of the house edge, and Originals have a small one. Shuffle counts wagering by edge divided by 4%. BC.Game counts its Originals at 5%. BetPanda counts provably fair games at 1% towards the welcome bonus.
Is provably fair the same as a fair payout?
No. Seeds prove that a round was fixed before your bet. They do not prove that the payout table matches the advertised edge. 500 Casino Towers passed every seed check while its edge reached 40.13% at row 10.
Can the same slot pay less at one casino?
Yes. Studios such as Pragmatic Play offer RTP versions of the same slot, for example 96.50%, 95.51% and 94.50%. The info screen inside the game shows the version the casino runs.
What happened with 500 Casino Towers?
ProvablyFair.org found that Towers took its 5% edge on every row. 500 Casino fixed Towers and HiLo on 30 October 2026 and says it refunded $1,741,242 to more than 35,800 players.
Did Gamdom Crash have a higher edge than advertised?
ProvablyFair.org reports an edge from 1.67% to 2.98% depending on the cash-out target, against an advertised 1%. Gamdom’s founder dismissed criticism of Crash as “slander” in a reply on X. We found no official statement by 2 November 2026.
Which is more popular, Originals or slots?
No public data answers this. One aggregator put slots at 85.56% of its studio game revenue and bets in 2023, but those figures do not include casino Originals.
Gambling is for adults only and can become addictive. Play only with money you can afford to lose, and read our responsible gambling guide if it stops being fun.
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Alex writes the house files on Crypto Casino Reviews. He plays the desks he scores and checks the offer, the cashier, and the licence before the long read.
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