By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · June 10, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen
LAS VEGAS - The World Series of Poker announced at 6 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, June 10, that it has begun accepting Solana cryptocurrency for tournament ticket purchases at the 57th annual summer series in Las Vegas, in a first-of-its-kind collaboration with the Solana Foundation and the global payment processor MoonPay. The new rail, by the language of the WSOP release, activates "beginning today" at the Horseshoe and Paris venues, and will expand at the December 2026 WSOP Paradise event in The Bahamas to include stablecoin payouts to tournament winners on the same blockchain. The Solana Foundation will also serve as the Presenting Sponsor of both events, an executive-level commercial slot the WSOP has not previously filled with a digital-asset partner.
The Las Vegas activation, on the present North American regulatory map, opens a payment rail that is simply not available to a meaningful slice of the Canadian recreational base. Players physically located in Ontario, the largest regulated online poker market in Canada, cannot fund their AGCO-licensed accounts with cryptocurrency under Registrar Standard 5.69 of the Standards for Internet Gaming, which states that "deposits made are appropriately authorized by a financial services provider" and adds a brief but unambiguous note: "Cryptocurrency is not legal tender and shall not be accepted." The standard was issued by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario at the launch of the regulated provincial market in April 2022, has not been amended since, and applies to every operator on the AGCO's list of registered internet gaming operators, which now includes GGPoker Ontario, BetMGM Poker, 888poker, and the recently launched PokerStars on FanDuel.
The Mechanism
The Solana-WSOP payment integration, by the description on the official release, runs through MoonPay's checkout infrastructure. The payment partner, a New York and Miami-based crypto-to-fiat ramp known for its Know-Your-Customer-compliant onboarding and stablecoin custody rails, processes a player's Solana payment, converts to United States dollars at the prevailing market rate, and remits to the WSOP cage in fiat. The transaction settles, on Solana's published network statistics, at average fees of "below $0.001," and at network throughput "capable of processing thousands of transactions per second." The processing path, on the WSOP side, has zero additional processing fees layered on top.
The December activation at the WSOP Paradise event in The Bahamas extends the relationship to the payout side. Tournament winners, by the release, will be able to receive their winnings in stablecoins, again on Solana, "enabling near-instant access to payments and reducing the friction traditionally associated with international tournament settlements." The phrasing is significant. The traditional international payout process for a non-United-States winner at a Las Vegas event can run from several days to several weeks, depending on wire rails, IRS withholding handling, and the player's home banking infrastructure. A stablecoin payout on a blockchain settles globally in a single network confirmation. For a Brazilian, Vietnamese, or Eastern European winner, the cost-of-capital saving on a six- or seven-figure prize is non-trivial.
Ontario's Standard 5.69, on the Record
The Ontario regulatory position was set, in clear and durable language, at the launch of the regulated provincial market on April 4, 2022. Ifrah Law, the Washington gaming-industry counsel that has tracked North American iGaming standards for two decades, summarised the Ontario standard at the time as the first explicit cryptocurrency prohibition in a major North American iGaming jurisdiction, and as a deliberate signal to the global operator base. "Ontario recently took a significant step along a different avenue: explicitly prohibiting the use of cryptocurrency in certain contexts," the firm wrote in its market-launch analysis. "With the launch of regulated gaming in the territory, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario explicitly addressed and restricted the use of cryptocurrency as a deposit method of account funds in its Registrar Standards for Internet Gaming."
The legal-tender framing is the operative concept. Ontario law, on the AML and KYC side, requires every regulated iGaming operator to comply with the federal Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act, the same statute that the federal Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada administers for the Canadian banking sector. The AGCO's reading, on the deposit-funds question, has been that cryptocurrency cannot be authorised through a "financial services provider" in the conventional sense required by Standard 5.69, because the asset itself is not recognised as legal tender by the Bank of Canada or by FINTRAC's traditional payment-rail framework. The Bank of Canada's published position on cryptocurrency, restated in multiple Senior Deputy Governor speeches across the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years, treats Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and the major stablecoins as commodities, not as currency. Standard 5.69 imports that classification directly into the gaming-deposit context.
The practical effect, on the regulated Ontario operator base, has been the absence of a single AGCO-licensed iGaming brand that accepts cryptocurrency for player funding. The list of approved deposit methods at the four AGCO-registered poker rooms is consistent across the market and runs to Interac e-Transfer, Interac Online, Visa and Mastercard direct, ApplePay and GooglePay through the same card rails, online banking via the major Canadian retail banks, and the standard pre-paid voucher products. The cryptocurrency on-ramps that the WSOP and MoonPay have publicly described for the Las Vegas event are functionally invisible in the regulated provincial market.
The Practical Read for Ontario Players
The Ontario poker player who intends to participate in the 2026 WSOP, on the live floor at the Horseshoe and Paris in Las Vegas, is unaffected at the cage by Standard 5.69. Standard 5.69, by its plain language, applies to deposits into AGCO-licensed iGaming player accounts. The WSOP cage is a Nevada-state-licensed casino cage operating under the Nevada Gaming Control Board, not an AGCO-regulated entity. A Canadian player who travels to Las Vegas can therefore physically arrive at the Paris with a MoonPay-bridged Solana balance and complete a tournament ticket purchase exactly as a United States player would. The new rail is, on the cage side, jurisdiction-agnostic.
What the rail does not do is reach upstream into the provincial regulated qualifier path that delivered GGPoker Ontario's recently announced Ontario-only satellite ladder to the WSOP Super Circuit Canada at Playground in Kahnawake from August 24 through September 9. The Ontario-only Stage 1 to Final Stage qualifier structure, the only AGCO-licensed path into a WSOP-branded tournament for players physically located in the province, runs in Canadian dollars from start to finish. The C$5 first-stage entry, the C$50 second-stage entry, and the C$500 Sunday final-stage qualifier are all Interac and card-funded under Standard 5.69. The C$5,000 main event seat that the Final Stage awards is a tournament-equity instrument, not a crypto payment. The Ontario regulated path, on a provincial-licence basis, remains operationally untouched by the Solana announcement.
The asymmetry is worth flagging for the rest of the 2026 calendar. An Ontario resident who travels to Vegas can fund a Solana wallet domestically through any of the licensed Canadian crypto exchange platforms, including those registered as Money Service Businesses with FINTRAC, and arrive at the WSOP cage with a payment instrument the Las Vegas event will now accept. That same resident, while physically located in the province, cannot fund an AGCO-licensed player account with the same wallet under Standard 5.69. The geography of the player at the moment of payment, not the geography of the WSOP brand, is the determining factor.
The Industry Context
The WSOP-Solana arrangement, on the broader industry-positioning question, is the most significant cryptocurrency integration the WSOP has executed in its 56-year tournament history. The release positions the Solana Foundation as "Presenting Sponsor" of both the 2026 summer Las Vegas event and the December WSOP Paradise event in The Bahamas, the highest-tier commercial relationship the WSOP makes available. Ty Stewart, the WSOP's Chief Executive Officer, framed the partnership in the release as a cultural alignment first and a payment-rail upgrade second. "We are incredibly proud to bring such an innovative and passionate community into the fold," Stewart said. "Solana's ecosystem, like the WSOP, constantly challenges conventions and remains laser-focused on the consumer experience. Solana's speed and efficiency mirror the fast-paced energy of our tournaments."
Vibhu Norby, the Solana Foundation's Chief Product Officer, drew an explicit analogy to the trading floor. "Trading in particular has been a huge area of growth on Solana over the last few years, generating over $4 trillion in volume," Norby said in the release. "At its core, trading shares many of the same characteristics as poker: hard decisions, incomplete information, minding your bankroll. We're incredibly excited to grow the game of poker with the WSOP and bring these two worlds together." Jim Walker, the President of MoonPay Commerce, focused on the operational rail. "By powering purchases and settlements through MoonPay on Solana, we're meeting that demand directly: faster, borderless payments that make it simple for players anywhere to take their seat at the world's biggest tables."
The WSOP-Solana deal is also notable for what it does not announce. There is no mention of a Solana integration on the GGPoker side for online-pool deposits or withdrawals, despite GGPoker's status as the official global online satellite partner of the WSOP. GGPoker operates in the regulated Ontario market as GGPoker Ontario, in the United States only through state-specific permitted models, and in offshore jurisdictions as GGNetwork. The Ontario-licensed product, on the language of the release, is not within the scope of the Solana integration. The offshore product is not addressed in the public release either, though the international satellite-pool architecture has long handled crypto deposits in jurisdictions where local law permits.
The broader provincial regulated landscape outside Ontario, on the same crypto question, sits in approximately the same position as Ontario. The British Columbia Lottery Corporation and the Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis regulator, the two principal operators of provincial-government-run online gambling outside Ontario's privatised market, both decline cryptocurrency as a deposit instrument. PlayNow and PlayAlberta accept Canadian dollar deposits through the same banking rails as the regulated Ontario operators. Alberta's coming privatised iGaming market, on the latest published consultation papers, has signalled that it is likely to follow the AGCO's Standard 5.69 model rather than diverge. The Solana payment rail, in other words, is unlikely to reach any provincial regulated Canadian iGaming market in the near term without an explicit revision to the legal-tender framework that Standard 5.69 codifies.
What to Watch Next
Three forward-looking questions follow from the Wednesday-morning announcement. The first is the volume question. The WSOP has not disclosed, in its release, what fraction of the 2026 summer ticket sales it expects to settle through the Solana rail. The Paradise December event, with its global player base and a stablecoin payout side, is the more meaningful proof case. Whether a meaningful share of international winners take their settlements in stablecoin rather than wire is the test that will determine whether the rail expands into the main 2027 summer event in a deeper way, or whether the integration is, on the operational view, a sponsorship-led commercial activation more than a payment-infrastructure shift.
The second is the AGCO question. Standard 5.69 has not been amended since 2022. The standard is, on its face, a rule rather than a statute, and the AGCO Registrar retains administrative discretion to revise the Standards for Internet Gaming on the same procedural basis they were issued. A Solana-style or stablecoin-style payment rail, if the AGCO were to authorise it, would require a structural amendment to the legal-tender clause and almost certainly a separate KYC and on-chain analytics framework on top. There is no public signal that the AGCO is considering such an amendment. The 2025-2026 AGCO consultation cycle, by the published documentation, did not surface cryptocurrency as a deposit-method question.
The third is the federal question. The federal Department of Finance, through the Bank of Canada and FINTRAC, has been developing a Retail Payments Activities Act framework that explicitly captures cryptocurrency payment service providers under the same registration regime as conventional payment service providers. The Act came into force in 2024 and the Bank of Canada's implementation regulations took effect in the 2025 fiscal year. A FINTRAC-supervised payment service provider that handles cryptocurrency, on the post-RPAA framework, is structurally closer to a "financial services provider" in the Standard 5.69 sense than was the case in 2022. Whether the AGCO chooses to revisit Standard 5.69 in light of the new federal architecture, or whether the standard remains in its current legal-tender-based formulation, is the structural question that will determine when, or whether, a Solana-style rail reaches the regulated provincial market.
The 2026 WSOP Main Event, on the present schedule, begins on July 2. The Paradise December event opens on December 5. The next Ontario regulator update with implications for Standard 5.69, by the AGCO's published consultation cadence, is the late-2026 Standards Review window.