Nick Spanos urges operators to move on-chain settlement at Payment Expert Summit

Nick Spanos urged gaming operators to move settlement and affiliate payments on-chain during his speech at the Payment Expert Summit on October 2, 2026. He stated that a blockchain-based affiliate network could pay 700 people instantly when a bet is settled, compared to the 30 days many operators currently take to process those payments. Spanos closed his speech warning that the industry has not moved its liquidity on-chain and will burn competitive advantage if it does not, as some traditional payment providers are already experimenting with settlement in stablecoins.

Why he proposes on-chain settlement now

Spanos placed the proposal into practice: Bitcoin confirms blocks approximately every 10 minutes, and he proposes that operators run their own layer based on that to move large volumes of fast bets and reconcile against Bitcoin periodically. He said that Bitcoin's base can handle around six transactions per second and described it as "the most demonstrable chain," where the record remains "forever."

The operational argument was straightforward: operators can fund and control their own Lightning layer to execute thousands of bets at high speed, and then reconcile with the base chain at intervals, charging a fee for the internal service.

"You can make your own lightning layer and fund it, and then you can make commissions off your own bank on there," said Nick Spanos during his panel at the Payment Expert Summit.

On-chain settlement and affiliate payments: the time comparison

Spanos presented a concrete example to illustrate the operational advantage: an affiliate network built on a chain could pay 700 contacts instantly at the time of bet settlement. He compared this flow to conventional processes that take up to 30 days to complete affiliate payments. This difference, according to him, is one of the levers that could change the value chain for operators and affiliate networks.

Making payments on-chain reduces friction between the confirmation of the outcome and the cash flow to third parties. Spanos added that part of the movement is already happening outside of gaming: several traditional payment firms are migrating settlement to stablecoin rails market by market.

Technology, performance, and transaction capacity examples

Spanos contrasted the performance of different systems:

• Mastercard reaches approximately 60,000 transactions per second at peak, according to his estimate.

• The own chain that Spanos cited, cryptos.com, has recorded 12,000 to 18,000 transactions per second in a year of testing and has a design ceiling that he placed at 200,000 tps. Cryptos.com is in beta phase.

He referred to Solana as an example of a blockchain-based dice casino that shows fast transactions, stating that the combination of a proprietary Lightning layer and a secure base chain allows operation at both ends: speed in operational terms and verifiable reconciliation on the base chain every ten minutes.

AI agents, machine payments, and the role of crypto

Spanos went on to point out that the next generation of betting will involve artificial intelligence agents acting on behalf of human users. He explained that a player could give an agent a small crypto wallet, a strategy, and a loss limit; the agent would play autonomously throughout the workday.

He anticipated that these agents would prefer to settle with each other in crypto rather than go through the card gateway because card architectures assume human presence in the flow. Spanos summarized this preference with a straightforward phrase:

"The AI wants to use crypto because it's code to code," said Spanos.

According to him, machine-to-machine payments in crypto fit better with the automation coming.

Oracles, randomness, and the failure that exposed a real attack

Spanos, co-founder of the Zap oracle protocol, warned about the fragility of randomness in many games. He noted that most random number generators rely on a single oracle, typically one among two or three providers, and that this single point of failure allows an attacker to predict outcomes and drain a game without the operator detecting it.

He created the example of a real failure detected in hardware: Coinkite published on July 30, 2026, a vulnerability in its Coldcard wallet where the firmware had evaded the dedicated randomness function of the device for five years. TRM Labs and SelfCustody Labs estimated losses at approximately 1,816 BTC, equivalent to around $116m, extracted from more than 5,200 addresses.

Spanos used that case to emphasize that a single oracle source or a weak implementation of randomness can go undetected for years and cause massive losses.

What operators and payment providers should do now

Spanos recommended that operators and providers consider three concrete lines of work:

1. Evaluate the feasibility of an internally funded and operated Lightning layer to accelerate low-latency bets and reconcile against a base chain every 10 minutes.

2. Review the design of oracles and reduce dependence on a single provider of random data; adopt architectures with multiple oracles and external verifiability.

3. Prepare integrations for stablecoin rails where traditional providers are already experimenting with settlement outside the card gateway.

Payment providers who are already exploring stablecoin rails and integrations with crypto payments may find demand among operators looking to reduce their settlement cycle. B2B gaming operators should consider pilot tests and the design of custody and fees for private layers.[/b2b]

Spanos closed his presentation by stating that the industry operates with legacy infrastructures and that the adoption of on-chain settlement represents both a risk and an opportunity for those who implement it first.