Anjouan vs Curaçao: Two Offshore Licences, Weighed as Evidence

Two place names do most of the work in the footers of this sector. Curaçao has spent two years rebuilding its regime; Anjouan has spent the same two years collecting operators who preferred not to be rebuilt around. Each yields a licence number, a badge, and the implication that somebody responsible looked. Read what each publishes; ask what it lets an outsider establish.

The two regimes, as they stand

Curaçao’s change is statutory. Per iGB’s rulebook on the jurisdiction, the LOK — the national ordinance on games of chance — cleared the island’s parliament on 17 December 2024, closing the master-licence structure under which a few holders sublicensed operators at scale. Permissions now run direct, granted and withdrawn by the island’s supervisor alone. This desk covered that transition when it landed.

Anjouan’s proposition is administrative. Its authority describes itself, on its own site, as the designated regulatory body for internet gaming under the laws of the Autonomous Island of Anjouan, Union of the Comoros, sitting under the Anjouan Offshore Financial Authority and Gaming Board. It publishes two categories rather than one universal permit — B2C and B2B — with permitted activities set in each licence’s conditions: online casinos, sports betting, poker and bingo, prediction markets, blockchain-based platforms and crypto-enabled operations. Crypto sits inside that list rather than beside it, and the published application process names corporate structure review, key person assessment, source of funds verification and sanctions screening — no separate virtual-asset step.

What Anjouan publishes

More than the sector’s reputation would suggest. Alongside company, status, licence number, type and issue and expiry dates, the register carries the field that earns its place: the domains each permission covers.

Status definitions are published too, so “active” carries a stated meaning: suspended holders may not conduct licensed activities, revoked ones are out permanently, expired ones simply lapsed. Behind them sits an enforcement section — a suspended-licence table, a revoked list, a notices page. As of this writing the suspended table is empty and the notices page carries two licence terminations. An empty table is not evidence of a clean sector; it is evidence of a table. But the machinery for saying so in public exists.

Then the fee schedule: €17,828 to issue and €17,828 to renew annually, in euros, B2C and B2B alike. It does not move with turnover — a brand settling a million a year and one settling fifty million fund their supervisor identically. A fact about the schedule, not any licensee.

What Curaçao now asks of a crypto licensee

Considerably more, on paper. iGB’s reporting on the authority’s June 2026 crypto policy guidelines has B2C holders told to take crypto for gambling only and not act as exchanges, custodians or VASPs; to prefer fiat-backed stablecoins while excluding privacy coins, meme coins and wrapped tokens; to refuse funds touching mixers or sanctioned addresses; to segregate player, operational and treasury wallets, banning personal and beneficial-owner ones; and to run blockchain analytics, per FATF standards and the Travel Rule.

The clock is phased: sanctioned wallets and mixers immediately, policies at three months, risk assessments and counterparty due diligence at six, segregation and analytics in production at twelve — mid-2027.

One provenance note. The same account says those guidelines were circulated by an adviser to the authority on LinkedIn — trade-press reporting of a document distributed that way, not a gazetted instrument. The desk discounts accordingly.

What either licence settles for a player

Not the thing anyone wants settled. A register entry establishes that an entity applied, paid, and has not yet been stopped — not that a game’s mathematics matches the paytable, that a withdrawal will be paid, or that balances sit anywhere. Curaçao’s June text is the more demanding by a distance, and a demanding text with a mid-2027 horizon is, today, a description of 2027. What the two prove this afternoon differs far less than the documents do.

One operation is worth performing: take the domain in front of you, find it in the Anjouan register’s domains column, and confirm the status reads active. The authority says that data is updated periodically and reflects the last status it confirmed — a clean result is current to that confirmation and no further. It remains the only part of a badge an outsider can check unaided.

Bottom line

Neither licence is what the footer implies. Curaçao is rebuilding in public and has written the harder rulebook; whether it binds anyone is a 2027 question and an enforcement question, in that order. Anjouan has built the more useful artefact — a register with a domains column — around obligations its own documents show to be modest. One is a promise, the other a receipt.

The arithmetic at the table is indifferent to letterhead. The edge is a cost on every wager wherever the licence was printed, the asset funding it moves on its own schedule, and the counter stays shut to anyone under eighteen and to any sum that has to come back. No financial advice is offered here.