Spoiler, on 28 September 2026, Georgia switched its International iGaming License from pilot mode to full rollout and started pitching itself as the grown up alternative to Curaçao and Anjouan....... The offer is simple. Pay GEL 100,000 a year per permit (roughly $36,000), hand over 6 percent of gross gaminig revenue, never accept a Georgian player, and in return get a Georgian bank account and a card merchant account coded for gambling.
For real, notice what is missing from that list. Crypto. , Stablecoin settlement is still sitting in draft legislation in Tbilisi..... Which means the newest offshore license on the market was built for operators whose main probem is Visa and Mastercard declines. For a crypto casino, that is a very expensive solution to a problem it does not have.
What is Georgias International iGaming License?
The license comes from an amendment to Georgias Law on the Organisation of Lotteries, Gambling and Prize Games, introduced by five MPs from the ruling Georgian Dream party, adopted on 25 June 2026 and in force from 3 July. A soft laucnh ran through July and August under Random Systems Georgia, the body handling the operator facing side of the rollout, while the Revenue Service keeps licensing and technical monitoring. , Full operation was announced on 28 September.
The core terms, as published at launch:
Five year permits. Separate permit types exixt for online casino games, slots and sports betting.GEL 100,000 annual fee per permit.... Paid in full before the first permit is issued, then yearly. Missing a payment or a compliance obligation costs a GEL 20,000 fine.
5 percent GGR tax plus a 1 percent monitoring fee. Paid monthly. Domestic operators serving Georgians pay 20 percent, so the export rate is less than a third of the locl one.
One domain per permit. The old regime allowed two. The new one allows exactly one. On the other hand, No Georgian players. Only foreign citizens and stateless persons can play. Georgian citizens are blocked by design.
In practice, light substance requirements.... No physical office or local staff.. A director, a local address and backup servers in the contry are the main obligations, and onboarding can be done remotely. Marketing material promises approval in 14 to 30 days.
Plot twist, vakhtang Katamadze, a supervisory board member at Random Systems Georgia, has framed it as a country level ecosystem rather than a standalone licensing jurisdiction. Translation: the license is the entry ticket, and the real prodcut is the banking bundled with it.
Why would a country that banned gambling ads want offshore casinos?
Because Georgia has spent four years squeezing its domestic market and needs the revenue to come from somewhere else... In March 2022 it raised the legal gambling age to 25, cutting roughly 1.5 million citizens out of the market overnight, and banned almsot all gambling advertising. Domestic tax rates went up in 2023. A 2024 reform then let operators split traffic into a domestic domain and a foreign facing domain with preferential tax treatment for revenue from overseas players.
The new license finishes that split.... Georgians get one of the strictest regimes in the region... Everyone else gets a 6 percent jurisdiction with a Georgian flag on it. The sponsors openly cite Malta, Gibraltar and the Isle of Man as the model... Which is ambitious for a regulator that has not yet named a single licensee under the new framwork.
Georgia vs Curaçao vs Anjouan: how do the fees compare?
On paper Georgia looks cheap next to Malta, where a B2C operator pays a €5,000 application fee, a €25,000 annual license fee and a GGR scaled compliance contribution of €15,000 to €600,000. But Georgia is not competing with Malta for crypto operators. It is competing with Curaçao and Anjouan, and that comparason is much less flattering.
| Term | Georgia (International) | Curaçao (CGA) | Anjouan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up front cost | GEL 100,000 per permit (about €33, 370) | €4, 592 application fee | About €17,800 all in for year one |
| Annuall fee | GEL 100,000 per permit | €47,450 for B2C | About €13,300 renewal |
| Levy on GGR | 5% tax + 1% monitoring fee | None | None |
| Extra domains | Each needs its own permit | €250 one off per domain | Two included, then €500 each |
| Card merchant accounts | Bundled (MCC 7995) | Operators probem | Operators problem |
| Crypto settlement | Draft law only | Widely used by licensees | Widely used by licensees |
The table hides the part that actually hurts the GGR levy. , Curaçao and Anjouan charge a flat fee no matter how much a casino wins. Georgia charges a flat fee and then takes 6 percent of everythig on top.
What does a Georgian license actually cost a mid sized crypto casino?
CryptoCasino.Vegas ran the year one regulatory bill for a typical offshore casino offering table games and slots on a single domain. Under Georgias published permit structure that means two permits, so GEL 200,000 (about €66,740) in fees before the 6 percent levy... Curaçao is the €4,592 applicaton plus the €47, 450 annual fee. , Anjouan uses the commonly quoted €17,800 first year package.... Company formation, legal work and audits are excluded for all three.
| Annual GGR | Georgia | Curaçao | Anjouan | Georgia vs Curaçao |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| €1 million | €126, 740 | €52,042 | €17,800 | 2.4x more |
| €5 million | €366, 740 | €52,042 | €17,800 | 7.0x more |
| €20 million | €1, 266,740 | €52,042 | €17,800 | 24.3x more |
At €20 million in GGR, Georgias efective regulatory cost is 6.33 percent of revenue. Curaçaos is 0.26 percent.. , If Georgia ends up letting a single permit cover both casino games and slots, knock €33,370 off every Georgian figure.... The conclusion does not move, because at any real scale the 6 percent levy is the bill and the permit fee is a rounding error.
The domain rule makes it worse for one specific buisness model. Plenty of offshore brands run a main site plus a handful of mirror domains to survive blocking orders. Ten domains under Curaçao cost an extra €2,250 once. Ten domains under Georgias one domain per permit rule, with two permits each, cost GEL 2 million a year, or roughly €667,000 before a single bet is taken. The mirror site model does not survive that, and that is clearley the point.
So who is the Georgian license really for?
Operators whose players deposit with cards.... The launch marketing claims weakly licensed casinos see card decline rates of 20 to 40 percent. and the whole pitch is built around fixing that with Georgian corporate banking and MCC 7995 merchant accounts for Visa and Mastercard. Treat the decline figuer as a sales claim rather than audited data, but the logic holds. If a third of your deposits bounce, paying 6 percent of GGR to make them clear is a bargain. Even so, A crypto first casino runs the opposite calculation. Its deposits arrive in USDT, BTC or SOL and settle on chain whether a bank likes the license or not. Card acceptance is a nice extra, not the bottleneck. Until Georgias stablecoin settlement law passes, a crypto operator would be paying a premium for a paymnet rail its players mostly ignore....... while giving up the flat fee economics that made Curaçao the default in the first place.What does a Georgian license mean for players?
If you see a Georgian international license number in a casino footer over the next few months, here is what it does and does not tell you.
Spoiler, card deposits should clear more often. that is the core promise, and if the bankng bundle works as advertised it is a genuine improvement over offshore sites where deposits fail at random.The license maps to one site. Because each permit covers a single domain, a license number shown on a mirror site that is not the licensed domain is a red flag. That is easier to check than under regimes where one license quietly covers dozens of URLs.
Naturally, dispute handling is unproven. The lauch material is detailed on fees, taxes and banking. It says very little about player complaints, alternative dispute resolution or how frozen withdrawals get escalated. A regulator with no announced licensees also has no enforcement record to judge.
Georgian residents are out. Expect strict geo blocking and ID checks tied to citizenship, which also means KYC at these sites will not be optional.
