SBC Summit Americas 2026 wrapped on June 11 at the Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, three days into a show that pulled roughly 10,000 industry people to South Florida under the banner “Connecting Worlds Through Gaming.”
Prediction markets grabbed the headlines, the World Cup loomed over every sportsbook conversation, and the exhibition floor did its usual job of being loud.
But walk that floor with a product person and you hear a different show. NuxGame CPO, Denis Kosinsky, came back from Fort Lauderdale with a notebook full of observations that had less to do with the keynote stage and more to do with what serious operators were asking at the table. We sat him down to unpack them.
SBC Americas: You’ve done a lot of these shows. How did this edition feel on the ground?
Denis Kosinsky (DK): Quieter, and I mean that as a compliment. Foot traffic was lighter than some previous editions – fewer people drifting past the stand collecting tote bags. But the people who did sit down were serious operators with real intent, and that changes the entire texture of the day. Less “what do you guys do,” more “here’s my problem in three states, can your platform handle it.”
That is the trade I’ll take every single time. A busy floor flatters your ego; a focused floor fills your pipeline. The show is clearly evolving into a place for targeted conversations with decision-makers rather than a turnstile count. And honestly, that maturity matches where the products themselves are heading. When the small talk drops out, you get to the real questions fast, and that’s where a serious platform gets to prove itself.
SBCA: What was the dominant theme of the US conversations?
DK: Sweepstakes. Nearly every meaningful US conversation found its way back to the model in some form, whether the operator was already running it, exiting it, re-platforming it, or building a hedge against it.
You could see it baked into the agenda. There was a dedicated Stage Two session, “Clearing the Air on Sweepstakes: Navigating Regulation and Opportunity,” and a separate compliance-track panel, “Crackdown on Unregulated Gaming: Where States Draw the Line,” the day after. The organizers even ran an intimate Inner Circle – thirty minutes for attendees to keep digging into sweepstakes after the main session. When a topic earns both a main-stage panel and a small-room follow-on at the same event, it has graduated from niche to center of gravity.
What struck me is that the model has clearly moved past the “interesting side experiment” stage. A full ecosystem is forming around it (operators, platform providers, payments, fraud, content, legal) and that ecosystem was physically present in Fort Lauderdale.
The numbers tell the same story: Gold Coin purchases reached as much as $10.6bn in 2024, projections for 2026 sit somewhere around $12–13bn, and there are still over 140 platforms live in the US even after a brutal year of legislation. Nobody hires a fraud team and a bench of lawyers to babysit a fad.
SBCA: That legislation has been relentless. Did the regulatory pressure dominate the mood, or did operators seem past it?
DK: Both, and that contradiction is the whole story. Nobody is pretending the last twelve months were gentle. By June 2026 the model is banned or heavily restricted in something like thirteen states, with a long line of others weighing bills. California’s AB 831 took effect on January 1 and knocked the country’s most populous state out of the market in a single stroke. New York followed at the end of last year.
The crucial detail, the one that made every compliance officer in Fort Lauderdale sit up straight, is that these laws no longer stop at the operator. AB 831 extended liability down the chain – to payment processors, geolocation providers, content suppliers, platform providers, even media affiliates. The whole supply line is on the hook now.
So the serious operators had no appetite for eulogies. The question on the table was how you build something that survives the next bill nobody’s read yet. And the honest answer is architecture. You cannot tape compliance onto a product after launch and expect it to hold when a state moves the goalposts on a Tuesday afternoon.
The industry trade body repositioned the whole category as “Social Plus” late last year for a reason: partly optics, partly because the smart money is building platforms that can run full dual-currency sweepstakes where it’s legal and drop cleanly into social-only mode where it isn’t, all on one backend.
That switch was the thing half the floor was shopping for. Good sweepstakes casino software lives or dies on whether it can geofence a jurisdiction within hours of a law passing and flip a state from full sweepstakes to Gold-Coins-only without a redevelopment project. Anyone can animate a coin in the lobby; the hard part is what happens when the law changes.
And the morning AB 831 landed, operators who’d only built for dual currency found out the hard way that a single-mode platform is a liability wearing a logo.
SBCA: Your second observation was about payments. What did you see?
DK: This was the one that told me the sweepstakes vertical is here to stay. We saw payment solutions built specifically for sweepstakes: stacks designed around how this model moves money, positioned openly as alternatives to the traditional providers. For once, nobody was bolting a sweepstakes checkbox onto a gambling processor and calling it a day.
That matters more than it sounds. For years, sweepstakes payments were a hand-me-down problem: operators borrowed real-money casino rails and prayed the underwriting team understood the difference between a Gold Coin purchase and a deposit. Now you’ve got players like PayNearMe positioning themselves as end-to-end hubs for social and sweepstakes gaming (cards, ACH, cash, wallets under one roof) precisely because their risk teams already speak the language.
When a model grows its own dedicated payment layer, the financial system has decided you’re a real category worth underwriting. PayNearMe was all over Fort Lauderdale – exhibiting on the floor and putting its VP of product on a payments panel.
And the timing is not a coincidence. The moment AB 831 made processors directly liable, the generic “we’ll take anyone” payment relationship became radioactive. Operators need partners who understand the compliance shape of the vertical, because most first launches stall at the payment processor.
A respected attorney signs off, the state review goes fine, and then the PSP rejects the same paperwork on a risk framework that’s almost always stricter than the law’s. A dedicated sweepstakes payment stack closes that gap before it costs you three months.
SBCA: Your most surprising note was about acquisition mechanics. Tell me about the mystery boxes.
DK: This was the fun one. There was clear, serious interest in non-standard formats, and the example that kept coming up was mystery-box experiences built around collectibles. Think trading cards with assigned rarity and value, where what you collect can convert into playable, redeemable currency. Collectibles culture and gamification are merging into one of the stickiest retention mechanics going, and the smart operators have already clocked it.
You don’t have to imagine it, because it’s already live. Look at Card Crush, which launched in the final days of 2025, right as California’s ban bit. Tellingly, when McLuck pulled out of the state, it emailed its California players pointing them straight at Card Crush – the same operator routing its own customers into the workaround it had quietly built for exactly this moment. It sidesteps the Gold-Coins-plus-Sweeps-Coins structure that California and New York outlawed: a single redeemable currency, Mystery Coins, alongside collectible Cards with rarity tiers, stats, and player-versus-player battles, all wrapped in a season-and-leaderboard progression loop that would feel familiar to anyone who’s played Hearthstone.
Why does this work? Because it answers two problems at once. It threads the regulatory needle in states where dual currency is dead, and it scratches an itch that slots alone never will: collecting, completing, climbing. Players raised on mobile games don’t separate “casino” from “collection.” They want a deck that improves, a tier that levels up, a box that might hold something rare.
Bolt that onto compliant economics and you’ve got an acquisition and retention engine that doesn’t depend on the one thing regulators keep taking away. That’s why operators kept circling back to it in Fort Lauderdale: it’s retention they get to keep when the rules change.
SBCA: You keep coming back to retention. But sweepstakes pulls players in cheaper and faster than almost anything in gaming. Why isn’t that the win?
DK: It looks like the win: that’s the trap. Here’s the math that should reframe everyone’s strategy. Sweepstakes brings players in at roughly three times the rate of real-money casinos, because there’s no deposit at the door. One industry study clocked sign-up growth at 16% month over month against five percent for online casinos. Sounds wonderful, until you see that conversion to a paying player sits around 12% in that same study – against 51% for the real-money sites. For every hundred sign-ups, the high eighties never spend a cent.
So your problem was never traffic. It’s retention. Especially now that acquisition got harder: Google reclassified uncertified sweepstakes ads as gambling content, which torched a lot of cheap paid channels overnight and pushed everyone toward influencers on Twitch and Kick, Telegram communities, and organic affiliate content. When the front door narrows, the room had better be worth staying in.
That’s where missions, daily rewards, VIP tiers, tournaments, and yes, collectible progression earn their keep. Operators running a full gamification stack see materially stronger thirty-day retention than the ones offering a bonus banner and a balance at the top of the screen. A leaderboard is cheaper than a reacquisition campaign, and it works while you sleep. If 88 of every 100 players are going to leave, the entire commercial question is how many of them you can keep entertained long enough to become the 12.
SBCA: Where does NuxGame sit in all of this?
DK: Comfortably, because we didn’t arrive at this conversation last week. We built our sweepstakes casino stack from the ground up rather than rebranding a real-money casino and hoping nobody noticed the seams. That decision (dual-mode operation, state-by-state compliance, real payment orchestration, designed right from the start) is exactly what the Fort Lauderdale conversations kept coming back to.
When an operator at the stand described running across a dozen states with different rules in each, I didn’t have to improvise. Our backend switches between full sweepstakes and social-only mode by jurisdiction, the geolocation and exit controls are part of the architecture, and the gamification suite (missions, tiers, leaderboards, the collectible-style mechanics we’ve been investing in) plugs into CRM and segmentation so growth and player protection live in the same control room.
Two years ago that conversation would’ve been about coin animations and welcome bonuses. In Fort Lauderdale it was about geofencing and exit architecture. And that shift is the whole thing. These events are where you find out whether your wiring holds up to the questions you couldn’t rehearse for, and the ones on the floor came sharper than I’ve ever heard them.
Last year operators asked me whether sweepstakes had a future. This year they walked up shopping for the platform to carry it. That is the whole story of the show, in one sentence: the model already took the head of the table, and the only thing left to settle is who gets to sit beside it.
