Crypto Platforms Feel Like Gambling Due To High-Risk Users
When Kim Kardashian was fined in 2022 for promoting a crypto token without disclosing she was paid, and Matt Damon appeared in a cryptocurrency ad saying “fortune favors the brave,” it became evident that crypto had entered mainstream pop culture.
Beneath the celebrity glitz and Super Bowl commercials, something more familiar emerges.
Crypto trading platforms, where millions buy and sell digital currencies, don’t just resemble casinos—they often operate like them. Behind the charts, tokens, and talk of innovation lie systems that encourage risky bets while quietly profiting from users’ losses.
These platforms aren’t just for trading digital assets; many blur the line between investing and gambling, making money directly from user losses.
Based on recent research by Concordia University-affiliated researchers (including us), we explore how crypto platforms actually function. These exchanges mix financial tools with game-like elements to turn high-risk speculation into entertainment, while downplaying how their systems work and how they profit from users.
An Example Of Platform Design in Practice
Take BitMEX, a prominent exchange known for offering up to 100x leverage on crypto trades. This allowed traders to control large positions with minimal capital, much like making big bets using borrowed chips.
While the risks are clear, the platform’s design makes trading feel like a fast-paced game with the lure of a big reward. Its sleek interface, real-time data, visual cues, and feedback loops all encourage users to keep engaging.
BitMEX illustrates how crypto platforms transform financial risk into an engaging experience. Although its market share has declined, its impact remains. The gamified designs, leverage options, and social features it popularized are now standard across many exchanges.
These elements aren’t just surface-level; they’re deeply embedded in platform architecture and key to turning trading activity into profit.
Much like casinos depend on frequent bets rather than player wins, crypto platforms often make money from market volatility and trading volume rather than users’ successful investments.
When Speculation Turns Into a Necessity
Financialization describes how financial market rules and priorities increasingly shape many aspects of economic and social life—from retirement planning to investment accounts and even student debt, which is treated as a wager on future earnings.
Within this framework, crypto emerges as a natural extension. It offers individuals a sense of control over their finances amid widespread uncertainty. For those excluded from traditional finance or disillusioned by established institutions, cryptocurrency promises access, independence, and potential transformation. Users are seen as entrepreneurs of themselves, taking risks in hopes of rewards.
However, financialization also deepens inequality. Those who already possess capital benefit from compounding returns, while those without are encouraged to get in early speculate on tokens, and HODL through downturns—often shouldering greater risks.
Crypto exchanges operate within this system and are far from neutral trading tools. These platforms shift risk onto users while capturing the value for themselves. As users continue to trade, the platforms earn revenue from every transaction. The more trading activity there is, the more the platforms profit—regardless of whether users win or lose.
Gamblification: Transforming Risk Into a Game
Gamblification refers to the process where non-gambling activities adopt the look, mechanics, and psychological appeal of games of chance.
This concept is key to understanding how crypto exchanges keep users engaged even when they face losses. Our research reveals how elements like real-time leaderboards, visual effects, and meme-driven communities turn trading into a shared, entertaining experience. Even significant losses are often shared with humor and irony.
This mindset fosters a culture where failure is seen not as a systemic problem but as part of the “game.” Taking risks becomes a mark of pride, and traders are labeled “degen,” a term that ironically celebrates self-destructive investing.
Within this setting, addictive behaviors are reinforced, and financial losses are reframed as participation in a wider social experience.
Crypto platforms capitalize on this cultural trend. By making high-risk speculation feel like a game, they boost user convenience and promote ongoing activity. This is intentional—an engineered dynamic designed to increase trading volume, visibility, and ultimately, profits.
The Paradox of Crypto Platforms
When financialization and gamblification combine, they create a system akin to casino capitalism. Users are drawn into high-risk behaviors not just through deception but through structures that promise freedom and participation while extracting value from their actions.
This leads to a contradictory experience for users. They feel empowered—making choices, chasing profits, and being part of a cultural movement—yet they are involved in systems that earn the most when users lose. The rhetoric of innovation, autonomy, and financial revolution masks this reality.
Our research indicates this resemblance to gambling is more than just metaphorical; it’s structural. Crypto platforms are designed to monetize user risk in ways very similar to casinos, relying on opaque mechanisms, uneven information, and engagement loops that profit the platform regardless of individual user outcomes.
The Bigger Picture
The convergence of financialization and gamblification is significant not only for cryptocurrency users but for anyone concerned about the future of financial systems. As traditional finance increasingly incorporates gamified elements, the boundaries between investing, speculating, and gambling become increasingly blurred.
This gamblification normalizes high-risk behavior and shifts the burden of economic outcomes onto individuals rather than platforms. It weakens the case for regulation and collective safeguards, treating market volatility as unavoidable instead of a product of structural forces.
Grasping these dynamics is crucial for policymakers, educators, and designers. Cryptocurrency isn’t just a new asset class; it serves as a testing ground for new methods of exchange, extraction, and control.
By examining crypto through the lenses of financialization and gamblification, we gain clearer insight into the cultural and economic implications of digital finance.
While cryptocurrency may promise decentralization and innovation, in reality, it mirrors broader systems of dispossession and speculative risk—encouraging users to engage in a rigged game where platforms consistently come out ahead.
Read the original article on: Tech Xplore
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