Reference

Glossary

The terms this index uses, defined in plain language. Where a word is used loosely elsewhere, the definition says which sense we mean.

30 terms

Bankroll: The capital a casino puts at risk against players, from which wins are paid. In a custodial operator it is an internal ledger entry; in an on-chain one it can be a contract whose balance and permissions anyone can read. A bankroll too thin for the variance of the games is the most common reason an otherwise honest operator stops paying.
Block explorer: A public website that lets anyone read the contents of a blockchain: addresses, balances, transactions and contract code. It is the tool that makes an on-chain claim checkable without the operator's cooperation. Every reading we publish records the chain, the block or transaction, and the date it was taken.
Cap: A published rule that reduces a score after the five sub-scores are summed, applied in a fixed order and never able to raise a total. There are three: dark operators lose survival entirely, custodial operators at T2 or below have transparency limited, and anything we have not deposit-tested is held below the top of the scale.
Claimed tier (the question mark): A tier written with a question mark means the operator asserts it and we have not confirmed it, or asserts the rung above while we record the lower one. We keep claims as claims, with the date we read them. A confident description is not evidence.
Client seed: The part of a provably fair input that the player controls. Most sites generate one for you and let you replace it, and most players never do. Setting your own is what stops the operator from having chosen both inputs to the function that decides your results.
Commit-reveal: A two-step scheme where a party publishes a hash of a secret first and the secret itself later, so the value cannot be changed in between. Anchoring the commitment in a contract makes its timestamp public rather than asserted. It is the mechanism underneath classic provably fair systems.
Custodial: An arrangement where the operator holds player funds in its own wallets and credits an internal balance. Withdrawal is a request the operator approves, which is where identity checks and limits are normally applied. It is the model behind almost every large crypto casino and the source of most frozen-balance complaints.
Dark operator: An operator that has closed, become unreachable or stopped paying. Its survival sub-score is set to zero, it is removed from the live ranking and it is kept in the graveyard with its other sub-scores intact. Keeping the record is how anyone can check later whether our earlier reading held up.
Deposit test: Funding an account or wallet with our own money, playing, requesting a withdrawal and reconciling what came back. It is the step that lifts the cap on a total and changes a status to tested. No operator in this index holds that status yet.
Geo-block: A restriction on access based on where a user appears to be, imposed because of licence conditions, a payment partner or regulatory exposure. It is enforced separately from identity checks, at the door or at the point of withdrawal. Which restrictions apply to you depends on your jurisdiction and the operator's; we do not publish ways around them.
Graveyard: Our record of operators that went dark, kept published because survival is a scored criterion and a comparison built only from survivors teaches the wrong lesson. Each entry keeps the date it stopped, the cause as far as public reporting supports it, and what the case shows.
Hot wallet: A wallet whose keys are held on an internet-connected system so it can sign transactions automatically — the address deposits land in and withdrawals leave from. Balances there are normally kept low on purpose, because it is the most exposed part of an operator's setup. Reading one tells you about flow, not about depth.
House edge: The structural advantage built into a game's rules, expressed as the share of wagered money the operator expects to keep over the long run. It is a property of the terms, not of the honesty of the draw: a perfectly verifiable game still returns less than it takes. We record a published figure as a claim and never estimate one ourselves.
KYC (know your customer): The identity verification an operator carries out on its users, typically documents and proof of address. On crypto casinos it is most often risk-based: nothing is asked at signup and a check is triggered by thresholds or signals, which in practice means at withdrawal. Where the thresholds sit is rarely published and the operator can move them.
Non-custodial: An arrangement where funds stay in the player's own wallet and settlement happens through a contract, so there is no balance for the operator to release. It removes the most common failure mode in crypto gambling and moves every key-management risk onto the player. It does not remove geographic restrictions, contract bugs or admin keys.
Nonce: A counter that increments with every bet in a provably fair session, so one seed pair can produce a different result each round without a new commitment. It is the third input, alongside the server seed and the client seed, to the function that derives an outcome.
On-chain: Executed by a smart contract on a public blockchain, so the result can be recomputed by anyone from chain data alone. In this index it refers to the parts of a casino that decide an outcome — the wager, the randomness and the payout — not to the cashier. A site whose deposits and withdrawals touch a chain while the games run on private servers is a crypto casino, not an on-chain one.
On-chain tier (T0–T4): The five-rung ladder we use to describe how much of an operator's stack runs on a public chain, from T0 (unmeasured) through T2 (crypto cashier, private games) to T4 (logic, randomness and payout all in contracts). The tier describes architecture, not quality, and does not feed the total directly. It does cap what transparency can score for a custodial operator at T2 or below.
Proof of reserves: A published attestation that named addresses hold a stated amount at a stated time. It proves control of assets at that moment and nothing more. Without a matching commitment to the liability side it cannot show solvency, and balances can move immediately afterwards.
Provably fair: A commitment scheme in which the operator publishes a hash of its secret seed before you play, then reveals the seed so you can recompute each result. It proves a result was not altered after the bet was placed. It proves nothing about the odds built into the game, nor about whether the operator will pay you.
Rakeback: A share of the operator's margin returned to a player based on volume wagered, usually continuously rather than as a one-off bonus. It reduces the effective cost of play without changing the odds of any individual game. We score it under value only where the terms state figures rather than adjectives.
Seed grid: Our published scoring grid in its current state: five weighted criteria filled in from public evidence, with no operator deposit-tested. Every total it produces is provisional and capped, and every row carries a SEED badge. It is a starting point we intend to replace criterion by criterion with readings we have taken ourselves.
Seed score: A total assembled from public evidence rather than from a deposit test, capped at 85 for that reason. It is a reading, not a rating, not a recommendation and not a prediction that an operator will pay. Quoting one without its date and its seed caveat misrepresents it.
Server seed: The random string an operator generates and keeps secret during a provably fair session, committing to it up front by publishing its hash. Rotating your seed forces the operator to reveal it, which is what makes verification possible. If the revealed seed does not hash to the value published at the start, the commitment was broken.
Smart contract: Code deployed to a public blockchain that executes exactly as written when called, with its state and history readable by anyone. In gambling it can hold a bankroll, verify a randomness proof and pay a winner without a human decision. Readable does not mean fixed: check whether it is upgradeable and who holds the admin key.
Treasury: The address or contract holding an operator's operational funds and revenue. When it is published, anyone can read its balance and history on a block explorer, which turns a claim about funds into an observation. It shows assets only: the liabilities owed to players are almost never on-chain.
Verified payout: A withdrawal we hold the transaction hash for, with its chain, amount, asset and date, and which we have reconciled ourselves. We publish hashes, not durations we cannot evidence. Our payouts page is empty until that work is done, rather than filled with figures taken from elsewhere.
VRF (verifiable random function): A function that produces a random value together with a cryptographic proof that the value was derived correctly from a key whose public counterpart is known in advance. On a public chain the proof is checked by the contract before the value is used, so nobody has to trust the operator's own records. It is the strongest commonly used source of randomness in on-chain gambling.
Wagering requirement: The volume a player must wager before bonus funds, or winnings derived from them, can be withdrawn. It is the term that decides whether a bonus is worth anything, and it is frequently stated far from the headline offer. Restrictions on eligible games and maximum bet sizes usually sit alongside it.
Watchlist: A status for an operator that is listed but young, thin on public information, or changing quickly. It is not an accusation; it is an instruction to treat the seed score as weaker than usual. A row can leave the watchlist in either direction.

Related guides