What Happens After We Ban Online Gambling in the Philippines?
CRYPTODAY 147
A few days ago, Senator Migz Zubiri filed a bill imposing a nationwide ban on online gambling. Although a bill like this takes many months to go through the various readings and reviews, affected industries are already anticipating the bill’s successful passing. When I say “affected industries,” I’m not just talking about the fintech industry. I’m talking about everyone from the billboards on EDSA to the influencers on Tiktok to the 32,000 people currently employed by the online gambling providers. It’s like the 2024 POGO ban all over again, but even more intense: POGOs only catered to overseas gamblers, while this new bill seeks to ban online gambling for Filipinos. Recall that the POGO ban was first discussed publicly in July 2024 and formalized by the President in November. The deja vu in 2025 is palpable.
Many have talked at length about the consequences of gambling addiction and its social harm, so I won’t spend much time discussing that angle here. I’ll just say that I am generally against online gambling, and I think that celebrities and influencers who use their reach to promote it should rethink their life choices. Moral outrage aside, promoting online gambling is like promoting cigarettes — eventually you run out of customers because they don’t tend to survive very long. But let’s dive in to the analysis!
PAGCOR brings in about ₱100B a year in online gambling tax revenues, which is roughly the size of our national budget for the Department of Transportation (₱120B). It’s not a massive amount in the grand scheme of things, as our national budget is in the ₱6T range, but the new bill doesn’t really propose any ideas for how to make up for this lost revenue. One of its main talking points though is that the funds lost by citizens to gambling addiction could have been used for household spending, which also implies some tax revenue generation. (Mall operators like SM claim that they’ve observed lower-than-average spending over the last year, allegedly due to online gambling.)
In the Philippine stock exchange, Digiplus’ price chart is looking like a rug pull, dropping 40% since the month began. They own BingoPlus, ArenaPlus, and GameZone, amongst others, and are responsible for 60% of the local online gambling tax revenues. You would think that the casino stocks like Bloomberry (Solaire) and Belle (City of Dreams) would be the biggest beneficiaries after Digiplus’ apparent demise —they would be amongst the last gambling strongholds in the country— but their stocks aren’t doing well either. To be fair, they both also own some lesser-known online venues, so it’s likely that they’re being sold off by portfolio managers in a category-wide de-risking. Why isn’t Digiplus dropping further though? They coincidentally announced a ₱6B share buyback program on the same day as Senator Zubiri’s press junket to boost investor confidence in their stock. (Additionally, they had plans to expand overseas to Brazil, which may now end up becoming their life raft.)
Where does crypto become relevant here? Before we had Bingoplus, Bet88, King.ph, etc., the only way to gamble online if you were a Filipino was through overseas platforms. I’m not going to list the names of the biggest ones here, but let’s just say it’s a $78B (₱4.4T) industry globally. The average Filipino had no direct path to get their money on to these platforms, so for a long time, cryptocurrencies were one of the few ways to do it. Of course, any regulated crypto exchange already knows that letting their customers deposit directly to the wallet addresses of overseas gambling platforms is not a great idea — the proposed bill prohibits this without mentioning crypto specifically.
So what happens instead? Well, this is where the black market takes over. In the late 2010s, there was a thriving cottage industry of crypto vendors here in the Philippines whose sole purpose was to get your pesos on to these overseas platforms via stablecoin. A few of them are the same folks powering the popular P2P crypto marketplaces today. I suspect that a nationwide online gambling ban will breath new life into this old activity. Instead of transferring your pesos to a local online gambling platform, you’d be sending it to Some Guy on Viber, who would then transfer stablecoins to your overseas gambling account. It’ll cost more (probably over 5%), and there’s some probability of scams and fraudulent vendors, but that’s the consequence of prohibition.
Does all that make the ban useless? No, not really. Prohibition generally works because it makes non-compliance very expensive, so a nationwide ban will drastically reduce online gambling volume in this country. It will just never completely eliminate it; the Internet itself makes this an impossibility. That being said, the biggest boon to online gambling here in the Philippines has always been its ease-of-use, so maybe it’s enough that this bill is removing its most convenient on-ramps.
Of course, we don’t know if the bill will pass, but if the POGO experience last year was any indication, the chances are good. This administration doesn’t seem to like the gambling industry, and the business sector is already repositioning itself in anticipation of the change. It’s going to be a fascinating second half.
Stay safe out there, cryptofam!