Why so many 2026 casino launches carry an Anjouan licence

Working through this year's new offshore casinos, one thing stood out: the licence. Site after site launching in 2026 carries a permit from the Anjouan Gaming Board, in the Comoros, a name that barely appeared a couple of years ago. Of the newest operators we researched, the majority are on Anjouan. This post explains what the licence is and why it matters to you.

What Anjouan is

Anjouan is one of the three islands of the Comoros, off the east coast of Africa, and its gaming board issues online gambling licences. The appeal to operators is straightforward: the licence is cheap and fast to obtain compared with the alternatives. Where a Malta licence involves real scrutiny and ongoing compliance, an Anjouan permit is a lighter, quicker process, which is exactly why a wave of new operators has reached for it.

It helps to understand what a gambling licence is meant to do before judging any particular one. In principle, a licence is a promise backed by a regulator: the operator agrees to hold player funds properly, to run games that pay out at their stated odds, to verify identity and block underage or self-excluded players, and to submit to some authority when a dispute goes wrong. The strength of a licence is really the strength of the body behind it, and how much it is willing and able to do when an operator misbehaves. A licence from a serious jurisdiction carries audit requirements, capital rules, and a complaints process with teeth. A licence from a permissive jurisdiction can carry very little beyond the certificate itself.

Anjouan sits at the permissive end. The gaming board issues permits, collects fees, and lists licensees, but it does not run the kind of ongoing supervision that a player in trouble could actually lean on. For the operator, that is a feature: lower cost, faster approval, and fewer obligations to meet month to month. For you, it is the opposite, and it is why the licence tells you less than the marketing implies.

Why it took over in 2026

The shift is partly a story about Curacao. As Curacao reformed its licensing system, moving to direct licensing under the Gaming Control Board, the old fast-and-loose route through Curacao sub-licences narrowed. Operators who wanted a quick, low-friction licence needed a new home, and Anjouan filled the gap. The result is that the cheapest, fastest corner of the offshore market has largely relocated from Curacao to Anjouan over the past year.

The Curacao model that Anjouan replaced worked through a handful of master licence holders who could issue sub-licences to individual operators. That let a new casino launch under an established permit without dealing directly with a regulator, which kept costs low and approval fast. When Curacao began pulling that structure into a direct licensing regime, each operator was pushed toward its own application, its own scrutiny, and its own ongoing reporting. For a serious brand that is a step up in credibility. For an operator whose whole plan depended on launching cheaply and quickly, it removed the reason Curacao was attractive in the first place. Anjouan offered the same low-friction path the old Curacao route used to, so that is where the volume went.

The practical marker of this is how many 2026 launches you can check yourself. Look at the footer of almost any new offshore casino this year and the licence line points to the Anjouan Gaming Board. A couple of years ago that name would have been unusual. Now it is close to the default for a brand-new site.

What it means for players

For you, the practical effect is a low floor of protection. An Anjouan licence gives you little meaningful recourse in a dispute. The board is not a regulator with a strong record of intervening on a player's behalf, there is no segregated-funds requirement of the kind Malta imposes, and a complaint has no strong destination. In our scoring method, an Anjouan licence sits at the bottom of the licence tier, above only a bare business registration like Costa Rica.

The segregated-funds point is worth spelling out, because it is the one most players never think about until it matters. Under a strict regime, an operator must keep player balances in accounts separate from its own operating money, so that if the business runs into trouble your balance is still yours and not part of the pile creditors fight over. Without that rule, your balance is simply a number in the operator's system, backed by nothing more than the operator's willingness and ability to pay it when you ask. An Anjouan licence does not force that separation. In normal times you would never notice the difference. It only shows up in the bad case, when a site is short of cash or winding down, and that is exactly when you would want the protection you do not have.

The disputes point works the same way. On a strongly regulated site, an unresolved complaint can be escalated to the regulator or an approved dispute body, and the operator has a real incentive to settle rather than face a ruling. With Anjouan, a complaint that the operator ignores has nowhere serious to go. You can post about it, you can ask a payment provider for a chargeback if you funded by card, but there is no authority standing behind the licence that will compel the site to pay.

That does not automatically make an Anjouan site a bad one. Several operators we rate, such as LuckLeopard and Grailbet, run on Anjouan licences and behave reasonably on the things we can test. It means the licence itself gives you almost nothing, so everything rests on the operator's own conduct: its payout record, its terms, and how it treats a withdrawal. On an Anjouan site more than any other, you are trusting the operator, not the regulator.

How to approach an Anjouan site

Treat the licence as a formality rather than a protection. Lean on the things you can verify yourself: test a small withdrawal before trusting the site with a real balance, read the bonus terms for the clauses that cap payouts, and prefer operators with a track record over brand-new launches. And where a stronger licence is available for the games you want to play, a Malta site like SpinStag starts from a position of trust an Anjouan launch has to earn. The reviews mark each site's licence clearly, because in this market the licence is the first thing worth knowing and the last thing worth trusting on its own.

A few concrete habits follow from all of this. Keep less on deposit than you would on a site with segregated funds, and withdraw winnings promptly rather than leaving a large balance sitting in an operator's system you cannot audit. Screen a new Anjouan launch harder than an established one, because a brand with no payout history gives you nothing to go on but its own claims. Read the withdrawal limits and the bonus clauses in full before you deposit, since on a lightly supervised site those terms are enforced entirely at the operator's discretion. And run the small-withdrawal test early, while your balance is modest, so you learn how the site actually behaves before there is real money at stake. None of these steps replaces a strong regulator. They are simply the checks that do the work the licence does not.