Methodology

The primary ranking signal

Deposit volume. That is the whole ordering rule.

We use it because it is the least gameable number available. Deposits settle on public blockchains, which means they can be observed rather than claimed. An operator can buy a five star review, a streamer campaign and a place at the top of somebody else's list. Moving hundreds of millions of dollars through a wallet is considerably harder to fake.

Volume also correlates with things a large player actually needs. Scale usually means liquidity. Liquidity usually means your withdrawal is not the one that empties the hot wallet. Sustained volume usually means the business will still exist in eighteen months.

What volume is not

It is not proof of safety. It is not proof of solvency. It is not proof that you will be paid.

An operator can be enormous and still be a poor place to keep a balance. Scale tells you a business processes a lot of money. It tells you nothing about how it behaves when a payout costs it something, and history in this sector is full of large operators that turned out to be worse propositions than their volume suggested. That is why standing exists as a separate axis.

Standing

Applied before ranking, based on operating history and verifiable licensing.

State	Criteria	Treatment
Listed	Twelve months or more of operating history, verifiable licence, no unresolved regulatory or court findings on player payment	Full profile, affiliate link enabled
Watchlist	Under twelve months of history, or recent ownership or licensing change, or a licence whose issuing authority is formally disputed	Full profile, link enabled, reason stated on the page
Flagged	Documented court or regulatory findings on non payment, or unresolved solvency question	Profile with the evidence, real volume and rank shown, affiliate link removed
Delisted	Ceased operating, or evidence of active player harm	Removed from rankings, profile kept as a dated archive

A watchlist marker is not an accusation. It is a statement about how much record exists. Three of the nine operators we currently rank sit there because they hold Anjouan licences, which is a licensing question rather than a conduct question.

What never affects rank or standing

Cost per acquisition, revenue share, hybrid deals, listing fees, banner spend, bonus size, sponsorship, exclusivity, or whether an operator returns our emails.

The safeguard is architectural. Commercial terms live in /data/partners.json. Rank and standing are computed from casinos.json and rankings.json only. The ranking build does not read the partners file at all.

How we handle evidence

Four categories, kept visually distinct throughout the site, because collapsing them is how affiliate content becomes worthless.

Blank fields

Where we could not verify something to a citable standard, the field says so. You will find that on several profiles, including operating entities and licence numbers we could not confirm. We would rather publish a visible gap than a plausible guess, and a page with gaps is more useful than one without because you can see where our knowledge ends.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and date the change. Operators have a right of reply and we publish it where one is given.