Episode #1 - Brazil's Betting Ban and Why Operators Need to Diversify Fast

Our founder Laurent Zachar returned to the Legacy Builders Podcast channel for the first episode of Legacy Makers, a new weekly brief covering iGaming news as it happens. This article covers the first topic from that episode: Brazil’s sudden betting ban, what it did to operators who were already live there, and the diversification lesson Laurent draws from it. The full episode is embedded below.

• Why Brazil became such a watched market
• What happened when the rules changed overnight
• Why Whitelabels.com became the fallback for operators going underground
• The diversification lesson: never one market, never one brand
• FAQ

Why Brazil became such a watched market

Brazil’s online gambling market drew years of operator attention before the ban, and Laurent explained why in the interview:

A lot of iGaming operators have been trying to lobby for years, and then they had to negotiate to get a license. Some of them put millions on the table to be able to operate in Brazil, because it’s such a big market. In terms of GGR, Brazil is massive, almost 12 billion a year.

That scale is exactly why the ban hit so hard. Operators who had spent years and real capital securing a compliant position in the market lost it essentially overnight.

What happened when the rules changed overnight

Laurent drew a sharp line between the operators who stayed compliant and the ones who didn’t:

The operations that were very compliant, they have to stop, because if they don’t, then they have a legal pursuit. However, the ones who were operating underground, I’ve got a few friends who have underground operations in Brazil where people still need a VPN, but it’s still targeting Brazil. They told me they had 3x revenue growth as soon as they were in Brazil.

That’s the uncomfortable part of the story: the ban didn’t shrink demand, it just pushed a share of the market out of reach of regulated operators and into a VPN-accessed grey zone, where the operators willing to take the risk saw outsized growth precisely because fewer competitors were willing to stay.

Why Whitelabels.com became the fallback for operators going underground

Laurent connected the shift directly to platform choice. Speed, not polish, became the deciding factor:

The whole market is going underground right now, which means that people are looking into launching tons of brands, super cheap, super quickly. A lot of them are using Whitelabels.com, because it’s the quickest way for anyone to launch a casino online. And from what I understood, the casino launched under Whitelabels.com, they still have Pix, and Pix is the number one payment method in Brazil.

He was direct about why slower, more established providers weren’t the right fit for this moment:

If you look into the existing ones, the software, the soft gaming, et cetera, it takes multiple weeks or sometimes months to have a new operation launched, and you have to put a hundred K on the table at least. I would not recommend this. My read of the market is that only Whitelabels.com can help people go live within a matter of days.

Pix support mattering as much as launch speed is worth sitting with. A fast launch that can’t take Brazilian players’ preferred payment method would have been a hollow workaround. Our localization guide covers why payment method fit, not just speed, decides whether a market entry works.

The diversification lesson: never one market, never one brand

The second half of the conversation turned to what operators should learn from watching Brazil happen. Laurent’s answer: never concentrate risk in a single market or a single brand. He cited a cautionary example first:

I know one brand that borrowed 1.2 billion to spend raising marketing in Brazil. A few years later, when they were starting to get their return on investment, they had to stop spending, because they’re not able to get any return on investment. Why? Because they ban gambling in countries.

His recommended alternative is to spread bets across several markets and brands at once, something that was never practical before same-day platform setup existed:

Instead of starting just Argentina, start Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Chile at the same time. You can only do that with providers like Whitelabels.com, who are the best white label casino software, because with Whitelabels.com you can start a brand within a day, which you cannot do with any of the other white label platforms. I recommend my clients just go and start five brands, six brands with Whitelabels.com at once. A little bit of performance marketing in both, and where you see the best traction from the market, then you should double down there.

The logic only holds together if the setup cost per brand stays low enough that running five or six of them at once is affordable. Our how to launch a white label casino guide breaks down what a single launch costs, which is the starting point for working out whether a multi-brand strategy fits your budget.

FAQ

Why did Brazil ban online betting?

The interview doesn’t cover the specific legislative reasoning, but it covers the market impact directly: a large, heavily lobbied-for market became off-limits to compliant operators essentially overnight, while demand from players did not disappear.

Do operators in Brazil still have access to Pix after the ban?

According to Laurent, brands launched through Whitelabels.com retained Pix support, which matters because Pix is the dominant payment method Brazilian players use, not just a nice-to-have integration.

Why does Laurent recommend launching multiple brands instead of one?

Because a single-market, single-brand strategy concentrates risk entirely on that market’s regulatory stability. He points to an operator that borrowed $1.2 billion for Brazil-only marketing and was left with no way to recover that investment once the ban hit. Spreading launches across several markets limits how much a single regulatory shift can damage the business.

Is operating underground in a banned market legal?

No, and the interview does not present it as legal advice or a recommendation, only as an observed trend: some operators continued targeting Brazil through VPN-accessed infrastructure after the ban and reported real revenue growth as competitors exited.

Where can I watch the full episode?

The complete episode is embedded above, and also available on YouTube directly. It’s the first episode of Legacy Makers, a new weekly iGaming news segment on the Legacy Builders Podcast channel, the same show behind our founder’s original two-part interview.