Documents, registers and dates
Permits and licences: what each document lists and what it never confirms
A permit, a certificate and a register entry are three different documents, and each answers a narrow question. Here is what stands in each of them, where to find it, and what none of them says about an operator's cashier.
Permits and licences look interchangeable from the outside, and they are not. Behind a casino there may be an Estonian permit in two steps, a Curaçao certificate, an Anjouan entry, or nothing you can look up at all. Each of those is a document with its own issuer, its own register and its own narrow question.
This page describes the documents rather than the law behind them: what each one lists, where its register sits, what a date on it means, and what none of them says about how an operator handles your money. Every figure carries the day we read it; the Estonian lists were read on 8 September 2026.
The order is this: the two Estonian steps, who keeps which register, what a foreign certificate carries, the second Estonian list of blocked domains, and finally what all of it leaves unanswered.
The first Estonian permit: the step before the game
The operating permit is a document that gives a company the right to apply for the second one. It runs without an end date and cannot be handed to anyone else. It comes in three kinds, each issued separately: for games of chance, for fixed-odds betting and for games of skill. Granting it, refusing it and revoking it are all decisions of the tax and customs authority.
What matters just as much is what it does not do. No game starts running on it, because the document only opens the door to the next application. If a site writes that it holds an Estonian operating permit, half the picture is missing — the other half is the organising permit.
The second permit: the one a casino runs on
The organising permit is issued separately for each kind of game and sub-kind, and remote gambling has a line of its own. That line is the one that covers an online casino. Only a holder of the first permit can obtain it, it cannot be passed on, and it is granted for up to twenty years. Applications go to the same authority.
For remote gambling there is a condition the other kinds of game do not carry. The permit goes only to an operator whose system of electronic accounting and control is connected, to the required standard, to the authority's information system. That is a technical interface through which game accounting reaches the state's system, and an operator running on a foreign licence has no such interface with it.
Because the second permit has an end date, the list of permitted operators is not permanent either: once a permit expires or is revoked, the row disappears from the table.
So the order is fixed: first the operating permit, then the organising permit, and only then a game. How granted permits look in the national list is shown in the guide to the list of permitted operators.
Who keeps which document
Several bodies appear around these documents, and their roles are clearly divided:
- The tax and customs authority decides on both permits: it grants them, withholds them or revokes them, and it supervises how gambling is run.
- The finance ministry issues no permits at all. Its role in this field is the handling of lottery-proceeds applications.
- The commercial register is where each permit entry sits; the rows of the authority's list point there.
The heaviest consequence supervision carries is the fate of the permit itself: the body that granted it can also revoke it. That supervision reaches operators with an Estonian permit; an operator with a foreign licence is supervised by the authority that issued that licence. For a player, the practical difference is the address a complaint goes to. Those routes are compared on the complaints and deadlines page.
Remote gambling and crypto as a stake
Remote gambling means a game in which the decision to take part, the play itself and the outcome all happen through an electronic device away from a physical venue, the internet included. A game in which stakes are taken and winnings paid out through such a device counts as remote gambling too. The definition turns on the device, not on the currency.
The meaning of a stake widened on 1 January 2026. A stake is now three things: a sum of money paid to take part, an obligation with a monetary value taken on to gain the right to take part, and a crypto asset.
For crypto casinos that means something simple: the payment method does not change the kind of game. If a game fits the definition, it is remote gambling whether the stake is made in euros, in USDT or in bitcoin.
What a foreign certificate carries
A casino with a foreign licence holds a document from another country's authority — the Curaçao Gaming Authority or the Anjouan Gaming Board, for instance. Each keeps its own register, and the two are built differently.
A Curaçao certificate shows the holder company, its registration number, the licence number, the date of issue, the status and a list of the domains covered. The portal at cert.cga.cw is searched by domain or by company, not by licence number.
An Anjouan entry shows the holder, the status, two dates — issue and expiry — and the domains belonging to the entry. The register at anjouangaming.com is searched by number, and one number can carry many sites: twenty-nine domains sat under one licence there on 2 September 2026.
An Estonian permit and a foreign certificate are documents of different states, with different addressees and different supervision. They do not sit on one scale where one is stronger than the other: they answer different countries' questions, and each is checked in its own register. What each ranked operator's entry shows is set out on the foreign licences page.
Blocked pages: the second national list
The second public list the authority keeps is a list of blocked gambling web pages, available as a machine-readable file as well. In the file we downloaded there were 1,955 domain names as at 8 September 2026. That figure holds good only with its date, because directions keep being added and addresses change.
The list arises from a direction aimed at two different recipients. A provider of data-storage services is required to remove, or block access to, information used to offer the remote gambling named in the direction. A provider of internet access is required to block the domain name stated in it.
What being on the list means
The list is an administrative measure against an offering: the authority issues a direction and the named service providers carry it out technically. Its recipients are the host of the content and the access provider, not the player.
What the list is not:
- a court judgment;
- an assessment of an operator's payouts, support or terms, because the list does not look at those things at all;
- a statement about an operator's foreign licence. A Curaçao or Anjouan entry is a separate register, described on the page of foreign licence entries operator by operator.
How to read the list
The list is compiled by domain, not by company or trademark. If you want to know whether an address is on it, search the machine-readable file for the exact domain name and write the date beside the result, because the file changes as new directions are issued.
If a domain is not in the file, that means only that no direction covered it on the day you looked. Whether the address holds an Estonian permit is shown by an entirely different list.
Two lists that do not replace each other
The list of permitted operators and the block list answer opposite questions. The first says who holds an Estonian permit; the second says which domains a direction has been issued about. A great many addresses appear in neither.
“Not in the list of permitted operators” and “on the block list” are therefore two different sentences from two different documents. Neither can stand in for the other, and each holds good only for the day the list was read.
One domain can therefore be in one of three states: in the list of permitted operators, on the block list, or in neither. Each state comes with a source and a date, and none of them says anything about an operator's payouts or terms.
Limits an operator has to offer, and limits you set yourself
An operator with an Estonian remote-gambling permit has to offer you, clearly and before your first play, a way to set a weekly or monthly loss ceiling, and it may not accept a stake that would take losses past it. The two directions of change are not equal: a lowering takes effect at once, while a raising takes effect only once the wish has been confirmed at least 48 hours later. That is how a document separates a moment's decision from a considered one.
There are two age limits. Games of chance and games of skill organised remotely, and games of chance in a venue, are for players of 21 and over. Fixed-odds betting and lotteries start at 18.
At an operator with a foreign licence, a similar tool is a matter of its own terms, and the operator writes the content itself. Shuffle.com's clause 10.10, for instance, says that during a cooling-off period money stays available for withdrawal and that a responsible-play measure is not used to block a well-founded payout. If you feel a limit is needed, set it now rather than after the next loss. How to set limits and breaks in practice is shown on the limits and help page.
Help in Estonia
The counselling line 15410 is the telephone of the gambling counselling centre. Its reception is at Sakala 16a-11 in Tallinn, on weekdays from 10 to 17.
When you call, you do not have to show where or with whom you played, or whether the operator held an Estonian permit. For getting help, none of the differences described on this page — between permit, register and jurisdiction — matters at all.
If play has started to worry you, the first two steps are simple: set yourself a limit, and talk to someone who knows the subject. Both can be done today.
Four things to take away from this page
- The first Estonian permit is only a step; an online casino runs on the organising permit for remote gambling.
- Both permits are granted, and where necessary revoked, by the tax and customs authority.
- An operator with an Estonian permit has to offer a loss ceiling before your first play, and the age limit in remote gambling is 21.
- The list of permitted operators and the block list are two different documents, and each holds good only as at its own date.
What belongs on the other pages
None of these documents says how fast an operator pays, when it asks for documents or what its cashier takes. Those answers live in the operator's own terms, and that is what the rest of this site reads.
What leaves a payout before it reaches you — fees, minimums, instalments and ceilings — is collected on the cashier costs page. How the two sides differ in the cashier and in the documents is shown by the side-by-side comparison. The words used here are explained in a sentence each in the glossary. Which sources were read for this site, and on which dates, is set out on the sources and dates page.