Online gambling in the US has been on a bumpy road for the last 15 years, to say the least. When sports betting finally got the go ahead in 2018, it heralded the start of exciting times, but there were still a few wrinkles to iron out.
When Bovada introduced MatchPay to its network 10 months ago, the act of depositing funds to an online gambling provider became that much easier. It looked like a perfect solution; but then it was gone.
After removing the option without any explanation, MatchPay is now back on Bovada. For how long, nobody knows, but we hope enough users spot the option and see how it can revolutionise money transfers for gambling sites.
How Does it All Work?
The problem of depositing funds to a gambling website stems from the unpopular UIGEA 2006 legislation. Financial institutions based in the US are prohibited from processing payments from offshore, unregulated gaming providers. Now, with MatchPay we might have found a way around this issue.Forget for a minute that all of these advantages are mirrored by the use of cryptocurrency. Not everyone wants to concern themselves with that.
This new deposit option acts as a middle-man to process transfers from ewallets such as PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, and Cash App. It is a peer-to-peer trading platform that enables users to buy or sell account credit with each other.
In simple terms, Bovada customers can either sell off some of their account holdings or top them up, always bypassing any restrictions. For example, as soon as the sending user’s PayPal account receives the cash payment the corresponding funds will be sent from their Bovada account to the receiving player.
Users are paired up taking into account what account options they have available, so any customer considering this method should make sure they sign up for as many participating ewallets as possible.
Will it Solve All Problems?
On the subject of poker, while MatchPay is a fantastic solution to this particular problem, it doesn't get away from the fact that even though there are legal ways to circumvent the transfer of funds to and from gambling websites, the vast majority still won’t accept US-based customers.Until this happens it is unlikely that we will see a true worldwide player pool like in the golden age. For the most part, it doesn’t matter where you get your sports bets on as the odds are generally in the same ballpark, but for poker we still want to see sites fighting to get us all back together again.