Every crypto casino lists the same eight or twelve coins on its deposit page. What none of them publish is what a deposit actually costs you in network fees, and how long the operator takes to credit it once your transaction confirms. So we measure it. This page reads the snapshot of network fees pulled from mempool.space, public Ethereum and Solana gas oracles, and routing fee surveys from Lightning routing nodes every Monday at 09:00 UTC, then matches that against our own deposit tests across 24 reviewed operators.
The numbers below are this week's. Last snapshot: 2026-06-01 at 09:00 UTC. Test deposit size: $500.
Cost to deposit $500, by rail
| Rail | Fee at snapshot | Cost as bp | 5-week fee history | Credit time | Accepted at |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin (L1) Bitcoin | $0.42 | 8.4 bp | 12 min | 22/24 | |
| Bitcoin Lightning Bitcoin (Lightning) | $0.01 | 0.2 bp | 1 min | 8/24 | |
| Litecoin Litecoin | $0.03 | 0.6 bp | 6 min | 19/24 | |
| USDC on Ethereum Ethereum | $0.14 | 2.8 bp | 4 min | 21/24 | |
| USDC on Solana Solana | $0.0020 | 0.0 bp | 2 min | 14/24 | |
| USDC on Base Base (Ethereum L2) | $0.0050 | 0.1 bp | 3 min | 9/24 | |
| USDC on Polygon Polygon PoS | $0.0040 | 0.1 bp | 4 min | 11/24 |
Per-rail notes
Bitcoin (L1)
Cheapest fee environment since 2022. Mempool below 5 sat/vB at snapshot time.
- Network fee
- $0.4200
- Credit time
- 12 min
- Success rate (30d)
- 99.8%
- Operators accepting
- 22 of 24
Bitcoin Lightning
Sub-cent fees, sub-minute credits. Only 8 of 24 operators support it. Failed-route rate is the real cost, not the fee.
- Network fee
- $0.0100
- Credit time
- 1 min
- Success rate (30d)
- 96.4%
- Operators accepting
- 8 of 24
Litecoin
The forgotten rail. Cheap, fast, accepted at most crypto casinos, almost nobody uses it.
- Network fee
- $0.0300
- Credit time
- 6 min
- Success rate (30d)
- 99.9%
- Operators accepting
- 19 of 24
USDC on Ethereum
L1 USDC has been sub-$1 for most of 2026. Most operators credit after 12 confirmations, which is the real wait.
- Network fee
- $0.1400
- Credit time
- 4 min
- Success rate (30d)
- 99.9%
- Operators accepting
- 21 of 24
USDC on Solana
Cheapest stablecoin rail by an order of magnitude. Most operators credit within 2 minutes.
- Network fee
- $0.0020
- Credit time
- 2 min
- Success rate (30d)
- 99.5%
- Operators accepting
- 14 of 24
USDC on Base
Native USDC, no bridge wrapper. Cheapest Ethereum-aligned rail. Only 9 operators support it because most still gate behind L1 USDC.
- Network fee
- $0.0050
- Credit time
- 3 min
- Success rate (30d)
- 99.7%
- Operators accepting
- 9 of 24
USDC on Polygon
Cheap and fast. Wider operator support than Base but slower withdrawals due to manual review at some sites.
- Network fee
- $0.0040
- Credit time
- 4 min
- Success rate (30d)
- 99.6%
- Operators accepting
- 11 of 24
Brands that accept USDC on Solana
Cheapest rail this week. These reviews cover the full deposit and withdrawal experience, not just the network fee.
Methodology
Network fees come from public APIs, not estimates. For Bitcoin L1 we pull mempool.space's recommended fee rate, multiply by a 140-vB standard transaction size, and convert at the spot BTC price. For Ethereum L1, gas units are 65,000 (the canonical USDC transfer) at the prevailing gas price from the Etherscan oracle. Solana, Base, and Polygon are pulled from public RPC endpoints. Lightning median fees come from 1ml.com's aggregate statistics.
Operator credit time is the wall-clock interval between our deposit transaction being broadcast and the operator marking the deposit as credited in our test account. We log it from real deposits we run weekly across the reviewed brands. We do not include a rail in the 'credit time' column unless we have at least one successful deposit test in the last 30 days.
Success rate is the share of deposit attempts in the trailing 30 days that credited without manual intervention. It excludes attempts where the operator's deposit address generation failed or where we cancelled before broadcast.
What this page does not measure: slippage at the on-ramp, spread on the operator's internal price feed (some operators credit BTC at their own rate rather than spot), and KYC review times triggered by deposit size. Those live in the individual brand reviews.
Why we publish this
The fee a sportsbook quotes in its terms is rarely the fee you actually pay. Lightning is sub-cent at the routing layer and credited in a minute, but a third of crypto casinos still do not support it. Solana USDC is two-tenths of a cent and the operator credits in two minutes, but on a Sunday night during volatility you can hit a failed transaction and have to retry. The right rail depends on the operator. The cheapest rail is rarely the one the casino front-pages, because the front-paged one is whichever the operator's payment processor pays the lowest commission on.
We refresh this every Monday morning. If a rail moves materially, the snapshot date above shifts.