ICE Barcelona 2026: iGaming's "Same-Same" Era and the Next Wedge for Growth

Last week, Kacper (Head of Community at Surgence) and Tjaša (Head of Growth at Surgence) walked the halls of ICE Barcelona 2026 and got a clear reminder of just how massive and mature iGaming has become.

This was the second year at Fira Barcelona Gran Via, and it’s already bigger than the record-breaking 2025 debut. Over 65,000 visitors from 186 countries. More than 600 exhibitors spread across 100,000 square metres of exhibition space. A Regulatory Programme drawing around 400 regulators. 

The launch of Academia America Latina, a free seminar dedicated to the LatAm market, was conducted in Spanish and Portuguese. And Soo Kim, Chairman of Bally’s Corporation, delivered the opening keynote at ICE’s exclusive World Gaming Forum.

By every measurable metric, ICE Barcelona is the largest and most diverse gathering the global gaming industry has ever produced. And yet, beneath all the scale and the buzz, one thought kept coming back:

“iGaming is a huge niche… where most ‘innovation’ is small, incremental, and rarely changes the player’s lived experience.”

That’s not a critique from the outside. It’s exactly what you’d expect from an industry with strong demand, predictable acquisition channels, and an established supplier stack. But it’s also why there’s so much untapped potential out there, waiting for the operators willing to do what others won’t. Here’s what stood out, and where we believe the next leaders will come from.

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When an industry gets big enough, it develops gravity. Vendors and operators converge on what already works: the same acquisition playbooks, the same retention loops, the same product UX patterns, the same content supply chains.

ICE Barcelona 2026 made that convergence very visible. The show floor was packed with platforms, aggregators, payment providers, and “growth” solutions;  yet the dominant vibe across booth after booth was optimisation, not reinvention.

That’s not necessarily a problem. When demand is high and revenue is flowing, incremental improvements are often “good enough.” But it does mean the industry is quietly narrowing the window for anyone who wants to stand out on something other than a slightly better conversion rate or a marginally faster payout flow.

The operators who figure out how to break that gravity, without abandoning what works, are the ones to watch.

One of the most common realities in casinos is also one of the least discussed openly: players don’t “join a crypto casino” the way they join a brand. They jump.

Promotions rotate. Bonus offers change. Affiliates keep feeding players into new funnels. 

And many operators have quietly learned to accept churn as a cost of doing business, because acquisition remains strong and the market is crowded with comparable options. Player churn remains one of the most persistent challenges in online casinos, and most teams are still pouring budget into acquisition to replace lost players rather than rethinking why they left in the first place.

The result is a strange equilibrium. 

Operators treat retention like a lever and not a belief system; something to pull when margins need a boost, not something to build a strategy around. Players behave like deal-hunters, not fans. And “brand” becomes more of a logo than a culture.

This isn’t because teams aren’t trying. It’s because the incentive structure rewards short-term conversion more than long-term identity. When the next bonus is always one click away, there’s very little reason (from a pure business logic standpoint) to invest in making someone stay because they actually want to be there.

But that logic has a ceiling. And the operators who start building before they hit it will have a meaningful head start.

Let’s say the quiet part out loud: if you’re using the same major studios and the same aggregator libraries as everyone else, your “product” isn’t the games.

It’s everything around them.

Most casinos can offer thousands of titles. But from a player’s perspective, the selection often blurs together; same mechanics, same themes, same RTP debates, the same “new releases” carousel. The market now features over 25,000 games from 500+ studios, all funnelled through a handful of aggregators that have becomethe real power brokers of content distribution. 

More choice on paper. Less differentiation in practice.

Walking around at ICE Barcelona 2026, with hundreds of game studios and aggregators showcasing their latest libraries, this point became almost painfully clear. The content is everywhere. The differentiation is not.

So differentiation can’t come from content alone. It has to come from how you onboard, how you reward (and why), how you create belonging, and how you tell a story players actually want to identify with. Those are the levers that matter when the games themselves are a commodity, and right now, at ICE 2026 scale, they very much are.

Here’s one of the clearest missed opportunities Kacper and Tjaša flagged from the show floor: the crypto-native onboarding gap.

There is a massive and growing pool of users who already understand wallets, on-chain rewards, token communities, staking and incentives, and social-first coordination. Over 430 million people globally now own cryptocurrency, andcrypto is quickly becoming one of the fastest-growing trends in how iGaming operators handle deposits and payouts. 

These are not new internet users learning the basics. They are people who have already built habits around decentralised products, community-driven discovery, and identity-as-currency. 

And yet, very little marketing in iGaming is directed at them in a way that feels native to that culture.

Sure, some operators accept crypto payments. Some experiment with Web3 language. But overall, crypto users are still being treated like “a payment method,” not like a community with its own behaviours and distribution channels.

That’s a significant miss. Crypto-native growth isn’t mainly about ads or payment rails. It’s about creators and KOL-driven trust, community-led loops, status and identity, rituals, and reward design that people actually talk about in the spaces where they already spend time.

It’s not a technical problem. It’s a cultural one. Most iGaming marketing teams are built around TradFi acquisition logic: paid media, affiliate networks, SEO, and bonus-led conversion. That toolkit works well for the audience it was designed for. 

But crypto-native users don’t discover products the same way, don’t trust the same signals, and don’t respond to the same incentive structures. Reaching them requires a fundamentally different approach to distribution, one rooted in community entry points, narrative-led launches, and partnerships that match how these users actually find and evaluate new products.

If an iGaming brand built a serious crypto-native funnel, one that respects culture, compliance, and user psychology, it could unlock a meaningful new growth lane while everyone else keeps competing on the same bonus math. The gap is wide open. It won’t stay that way forever.

Pull all of the above together and you arrive at the same conclusion from multiple directions: when the product is commoditised, belonging becomes defensible.

Right now, the category’s default setting is sameness. Same games, similar UX, similar promos, similar affiliate plays. In that environment, the real moat isn’t a better algorithm or a faster checkout; it’s community.

The operators that break out won’t do it by tweaking button colours or adding another payment rail. They’ll do it by creating a product people feel part of, where staying is a statement, not a habit.

That means building culture intentionally. 

Clear positioning matters most: who this is for, who it isn’t for. Creator ecosystems built around genuine relationships, not one-off sponsorships. Social identity, levels, and status that carry meaning outside the app. Narrative consistency: a world, not a website.

And it looks like real community systems: moderators, rituals, events, the kind of shared language that only forms when people actually spend time together.

Yes, this work is harder than optimising a conversion funnel. But it’s also exactly why it creates defensibility. You can copy a bonus structure overnight. You can’t copy a community that took months to build.

Everything we’ve outlined above, the crypto-native distribution, the community-first growth, the culture over conversion mindset, isn’t theory. It’s the exact playbook Surgence Labs has been running across some of the fastest-growing projects in crypto. And a couple of them are directly relevant to where iGaming is heading.

Bluff Casino is the clearest example. It is a crypto-native casino platform built by veterans from Stake, bet365, FanDuel, and William Hill. We ran their entire go-to-market: creator ecosystem, growth strategy, and retention loops. 

The result was over 600,000 total signups and around 50,000 daily active users. The strategy wasn’t built around traditional affiliate funnels. It was built around creator-driven acquisition and product-aligned incentives, exactly the kind of approach we’ve been arguing iGaming needs more of.

Fast Protocol is a good example of what community-first distribution looks like at speed. This protocol is an MEV and RPC infrastructure network, and Surgence took them from zero to 65,000 followers on X in under 30 days. 

Not through paid spend. 

Through narrative positioning, creator-led education, and identity systems (Genesis SBTs) that gave early users something to actually feel part of. 90,000 Discord members followed. 

The point isn’t the infrastructure niche, it’s the method. 

That same playbook, community entry points, social proof tied to real participation, and creators who educate rather than just promote, translates directly into iGaming.

ORBT Protocol rounds it out. Surgence co-built the DeFi Score for ORBT, a product that turned wallet history into a shareable, on-chain reputation card. 70,000+ score cards shared. 200,000+ net new followers. 20M+ impressions. 

The mechanism was simple: give users something they could show off, something that meant something in their community. That’s reward design people actually talk about. And that’s the gap iGaming has been leaving on the table.

ICE Barcelona 2026 made one thing unmistakably clear: iGaming doesn’t have a demand problem. The 65,000 visitors, the 186 countries, the sheer volume of capital and attention in the room. Demand is not the issue.

The issue is differentiation. And for the first time in a while, the path to it feels genuinely open.

The crypto-native gap hasn’t been claimed. The community-as-moat playbook hasn’t been widely executed. The space between “lobby with a logo” and “brand people actually feel something about” is enormous and mostly empty. 

Meanwhile, the jump in ICE’s attendance from 59,101 unique attendees in 2025 to over 65,000 in 2026 tells you the market is still growing fast. Major crypto casino brands and sportsbook giants are actively consolidating and cross-selling, squeezing out smaller rivals, which means the consolidation is real, but it also means the door is still open for operators who can stand out on something other than scale. More players, more money, more attention. All flowing into an ecosystem that, for the most part, hasn’t figured out how to make any of them genuinely loyal.

The teams willing to build in that space, rather than just optimise within it, are the ones that will define the next phase of this industry. ICE Barcelona 2026 was a reminder of just how big that opportunity is. The question now is: who’s going to move first?

Surgence Labs works at the intersection of distribution, community, and product loops, with a specific focus on crypto-native markets. We’ve already built the playbook. We’ve already run it. And we’ve already seen what it does when it’s applied to iGaming.

The industry doesn’t have a demand problem. It has a differentiation problem. If you’re a founder or operator leader ready to do something about it, book a call with our team. We’ll run a free marketing audit on your current acquisition and retention playbook and show you exactly where the gaps are.

Book a call today and claim your free marketing audit

Differentiation. The market has strong demand, but most operators are running the same acquisition playbooks, offering the same games, and competing on the same bonus structures. The product has become a commodity, and the real battle is now about standing out.

Players leave because there’s very little reason to stay loyal. Promotions rotate, bonus offers change constantly, and switching platforms takes one click. Most operators have quietly accepted churn as a cost of doing business rather than treating retention as a core strategy.

Over 430 million people globally own cryptocurrency and already understand wallets, communities, and on-chain rewards. Yet most iGaming brands still treat crypto as just a payment method. The culture, distribution channels, and trust signals these users respond to are almost entirely ignored.

When the games are the same across every platform, belonging becomes the differentiator. A community that took months to build, with its own rituals, language, and identity, can’t be copied overnight the way a bonus structure can.

It’s not about ads or payment rails. It’s creator-driven trust, community-led discovery, status and identity systems, and reward design that people actually talk about in the spaces where they already spend time.

Most iGaming marketing teams are built around traditional acquisition logic: paid media, affiliates, SEO, and bonus-led conversion. That toolkit works for the audience it was designed for, but it doesn’t translate to crypto-native users or long-term brand loyalty.