Litecoin, online casinos and the Australian player: a realistic map of the 2026 landscape

Litecoin confirms a deposit on its own blockchain roughly every two and a half minutes, far faster than Bitcoin’s ten-minute average — and that, in plain prose, is the entire reason a casino punter hears the term. Faster settlement, lower fees, an extra coin on a cashier page most punters already know how to use. What the speed does not change is the legal position of the player on the other side of the transaction: under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001, the activity itself is prohibited in Australia, no matter which coin moves across the cashier. Every offshore Litecoin casino that surfaces in a search result is operating in that gap.

Data current as of 3 November 2026; licence and ACMA action records cross-checked against the register published by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

Why a Litecoin bonus is the same bonus with a different rail

A bonus is the marketing word for a credit the casino credits on top of a deposit, with strings attached. The strings, not the credit, are what decides whether the offer is worth claiming. On a Litecoin casino the strings are identical to those on any other offshore site, because the bonus is denominated in fiat once it lands on the account — the cashier may convert LTC at the moment of deposit, or run balances in mLTC and convert at withdrawal, but the wagering multiplier the punter is asked to clear is read off the same number either way.

The shape of those strings is straightforward. A deposit match bonus typically credits the punter with a percentage of what they put in, and asks them to wager that credit a fixed number of times before any winnings can be withdrawn. A “35×” multiplier on a A$100 bonus means A$3,500 of qualifying bets before the cashier will process a withdrawal. Free spins attached to a welcome package carry their own wagering requirement, often higher than the deposit bonus, and almost always cap the winnings from those spins at a multiple of the bonus that triggered them. A no-deposit bonus credits the account without a deposit at all — and is usually the heaviest string of the three, because the casino has no deposit to lose if the punter simply walks away.

Litecoin does nothing to soften these. The blockchain confirms the deposit; it does not lower the multiplier, raise the cap, or speed up the bonus-to-cash conversion. What it does is let the punter fund the bonus account without exposing a card or a bank identifier — and that, in a market where the activity is prohibited, is the reason an Australian punter ends up at this kind of site at all.

A punter comparing Litecoin bonuses against card-funded bonuses is comparing rails, not generosity. The same bonus terms appear on both sides of the comparison, and the same caution applies to both: read the multiplier, read the cap, read which games contribute what fraction to the turnover requirement. Slots typically contribute 100%, table games a fraction of that — sometimes zero. A bonus that looks generous on the headline often contributes nothing on the games the punter actually wants to play.

The promotional structure is also the part the ACMA uses to identify operators. A “200% welcome bonus plus 50 free spins” is the kind of inducement the regulator has named in formal warnings, and the inducement rules attached to the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 are the next front of that pressure. That law passed Parliament on 19 August 2026; its advertising and inducement measures commence on 1 January 2027 — law with a start date, not a rule a punter can rely on today.

The eleven brands the ACMA has warned over prohibited casino services

The list below is not a ranking. It is a record. Each brand has been the subject of a formal warning issued by the ACMA under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 for offering prohibited online casino games to people in Australia. The order follows the date the regulator first named the brand, oldest to most recent, with re-warnings noted separately. None of these sites carries an Australian licence — no such licence exists for the product — and the licences they do display are issued in other jurisdictions, against rules that do not extend to a player in Australia.

The table that follows the operator write-ups summarises the same data in one view.

Sky Crown

Hollycorn N.V. is the operator the ACMA named in its formal warning over Sky Crown in September 2022 — one of the early warnings the regulator issued under the strengthened IGA framework. Hollycorn ran the brand alongside other similarly named properties; the warning covers Sky Crown specifically and another Hollycorn service, Blue Leo, at the same time. The regulator’s case was the standard one: providing prohibited interactive gambling services to people physically in Australia. Sky Crown is the oldest name on this list, and that antiquity is the main thing the warning establishes — that the operator was warned early and continued to offer the service.

For a punter evaluating Sky Crown today, the relevant point is not the 2022 warning in isolation but what it implies about how the operator treats the Australian market. The warning is on the public record. The operator has not been removed from it.

Casino Intense

Sterplay Holding Ltd was the operator named in the ACMA’s April 2025 warning over Casino Intense. The warning followed the standard format: a formal notice that the service was being provided to Australian residents in breach of the Interactive Gambling Act, with a request to cease. Sterplay’s response is not part of the public record; the warning itself is.

Casino Intense carries no Australian licence and is not licensable for the product it offers. A punter using the site has no Australian consumer protection to fall back on — no local complaints body, no local regulator to escalate to, no local court with obvious jurisdiction over a Curaçao- or Costa Rica-registered parent.

Instant Casino

EOD Code SRL received the ACMA’s formal warning in February 2025 over Instant Casino. The brand had been operating in the Australian market long enough by that point to be a recurring presence in affiliate marketing; the regulator’s notice put it on the formal-warning list. Instant Casino is one of the better-known offshore brands named in that round, and the warning is the public marker that the brand has continued to operate after being told to stop.

Woo Casino

Dama N.V. was warned by the ACMA in March 2025 over Woo Casino — the first of two Dama warnings that year, and one of several that put Dama at the top of the operator-side list for the ACMA in 2025. Woo is a long-established Dama property; the brand had been operating in the Australian market for years before the formal warning. Listings on the open web mention Litecoin among the cashier options for the brand, but the operator’s own terms are not carried by the research, and that gap is the point — a listings mention is what affiliate pages say the cashier accepts, not a statement the operator has published and stood behind.

For a punter evaluating Woo on this basis: the cashier mentions Litecoin, the regulator has warned the operator, and the bonus terms are not carried by independent sources. That combination is exactly the kind of position a punter should treat as “read the small print before you deposit” rather than as a settled answer.

Spirit Casino

Dama N.V. received a second warning from the ACMA in May 2025, this time over Spirit Casino — another of the operator’s brands, and the second of two Dama warnings in 2025. The pattern is the one the ACMA has signalled it will continue: warn the operator, name the brand, leave the brand operating until the next escalation. Spirit Casino carries no Australian licence and is not licensable for casino games. The Dama warning history is now a public record across at least four distinct Dama brands, which is itself the relevant fact for a punter evaluating any one of them.

National Casino

Consolutetish S.R.L. was the operator named in the ACMA’s July 2025 warning over National Casino, paired in the same round with a warning over Bizzo Casino. National Casino is one of the older names on the Australian-facing offshore market, and the warning was issued after years of operation. Listings on the open web mention National Casino among brands accepting Litecoin; the operator’s own published terms on this point are not part of the research, and the listings report is what stands in for the operator’s position.

The July 2025 warning is the public marker; the operator’s continued presence in affiliate listings is the public fact about its business. Neither resolves the question of whether the site will process a Litecoin withdrawal cleanly. That question has no Australian regulator behind it if the answer is no.

Bizzo Casino

Consolutetish S.R.L. received the ACMA’s July 2025 warning over Bizzo Casino — and the warning was a re-warning. Bizzo had already been the subject of a 2022 formal warning, issued to TechSolutions (CY) Group Limited and TechSolutions Group N.V. The change in the named operator between the two warnings is itself the relevant fact: the brand kept operating, the corporate entity behind it changed, and the regulator had to warn again. The same kind of rebranding has appeared across the offshore market as operators cycle through corporate shells.

For a punter evaluating Bizzo, the question is whether the 2025 warning has more weight than the 2022 one. The regulator’s view, as expressed in the second warning, is that it does. The brand’s continued presence in affiliate listings is the brand’s own view that it does not. Both views are on the public record.

Ignition Casino

Bamboo Media was the operator named in the ACMA’s July 2025 warning over Ignition Casino — one of two warnings issued in that round, the other going to Consolutetish S.R.L. over National Casino and Bizzo. Ignition Casino had been a long-running Australian-facing brand under various operators; the July 2025 warning is the formal marker that the regulator had turned its attention to the Bamboo Media version of the brand.

Ignition’s market position has been built on its brand recognition among Australian and US-facing punters; the ACMA warning does not change the brand’s recognition, only its legal standing in Australia. The brand has none.

Jackbit

Ryker B.V. received the ACMA’s formal warning in April 2026 over Jackbit — paired in the same round with a warning over CasinOK, another Ryker brand. Jackbit had been a relatively recent entrant to the Australian-facing offshore market, and the warning arrived after the brand had been operating for long enough to build an affiliate presence. The April 2026 warning is the most recent in the formal record and one of the freshest signals of which brands the regulator is currently monitoring.

Level Up Casino

Dama N.V. was named in the ACMA’s May 2022 warning over Level Up Casino — one of six Dama brands the regulator warned in that single round: Bambet, Dazard, Level Up, Rocketplay, Wild Tornado and Cobra Casinos. Level Up is one of the older Dama properties to have been warned, and the warning predates the bulk of the ACMA’s formal-warning activity. The 2022 round is the early period of the regulator’s enforcement under the strengthened IGA framework.

Level Up carries no Australian licence. The Dama warning history — six brands in 2022, then Woo and Spirit in 2025 — is the public record of the operator’s response to the regulator’s notices.

RocketPlay

Pulsup Ltd was the operator named in the ACMA’s March 2026 warning over RocketPlay — a re-warning, because Dama N.V. had been warned over Rocketplay in the original May 2022 round. The change in the named operator — from Dama to Pulsup — is the same pattern that shows up around Bizzo: the brand stayed in operation, the corporate entity behind it changed, and the regulator had to issue a fresh warning. The 2026 RocketPlay warning is the most recent Dama-related warning on the formal record, and it is also the round that includes the ACMA’s current list of newly blocked sites.

The RocketPlay case is the cleanest example of why a punter should not infer protection from the appearance of a licence on the site. The brand has cycled through operators, the regulator has cycled through warnings, and the product on offer has not changed.

What the blocklist actually adds up to

The ACMA’s enforcement record is the most concrete data a reader of this page can act on, and it is worth treating the figures as such rather than as a backdrop. By June 2026, the regulator had asked Australian internet service providers to block 1,751 illegal gambling and affiliate marketing websites since the first blocking request in November 2019. More than 230 unlicensed gambling services had left the Australian market since enforcement was strengthened in 2017. The June 2026 round alone added twelve more domains: 7Signs, ChromaBet, Donbet, Duospin, Freshbet, Slots Gem, Jacks Club, Lucky Start, Pointsbetz, Spinrise, Vinyl Casino and Wildsino.

Set against the start date — November 2019, the first blocking request — the running total is a rate of roughly 270 sites blocked per year on average across the seven years the regime has been operating, with the rate climbing as the rounds have grown more frequent. That rate is the practical shape of the regulator’s enforcement, and it is the rate at which any offshore casino is likely to find its domains added to the block list if it keeps accepting Australian residents. The rate is a band rather than a point because the number of sites per round varies, and a single round can add more than a dozen. A punter picking a brand off an affiliate page today is making a decision against a regulator that adds a new round every few weeks.

The economic backdrop is the H2 Gambling Capital estimate that Australians lose about A$3.9 billion a year to illegal gambling sites, with the share of gambling going through legal channels falling from 74% in 2021 to 64%. That trend is the one the regulator is trying to reverse. The blocklist is the tool. The marketing pages of offshore casinos are the counterweight.

How Litecoin confirms a deposit on-chain

A Litecoin deposit is a transfer of LTC from the punter’s wallet to the casino’s wallet, with the casino’s cashier system watching the Litecoin blockchain for the transfer. The transfer is final once it has been included in a block and that block has been confirmed by subsequent blocks — usually three to six confirmations is the threshold an offshore cashier waits for, though some cashiers credit on a single confirmation. At Litecoin’s 2.5-minute block interval, six confirmations is roughly fifteen minutes of waiting on a quiet network. Bitcoin’s roughly ten-minute block interval means the same six confirmations is roughly an hour.

The practical implication is that a Litecoin deposit lands in a casino account noticeably faster than a Bitcoin deposit, and noticeably faster than a bank transfer. The blockchain itself does not charge the punter a fee to move coins — the fee is paid to the miner who includes the transaction in the block — and that fee is typically a small fraction of a cent on Litecoin during quiet periods. During busy periods the fee rises with congestion, and a punter who sets a low fee can wait hours for confirmation. The casino has no control over either of those.

What the punter does not get from the on-chain confirmation is privacy in the strict sense. The Litecoin blockchain is public; the wallet address that sent the deposit and the wallet address that received it are visible to anyone who looks. What the punter does not get from the casino is recourse: a confirmed Litecoin transfer cannot be reversed by the punter, and a casino that refuses to credit the deposit has no external complaints body the punter can escalate to. The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 does not give the punter a cause of action against an offshore operator; the AML/CTF Act gives AUSTRAC the authority to register or prosecute the operator’s Australian-facing exchange business, not the punter a refund.

Litecoin’s MWEB (MimbleWimble Extension Blocks) upgrade, activated as a soft fork in 2022, is an optional confidentiality feature on top of the base Litecoin blockchain. A punter using MWEB gets a transaction whose amounts are hidden from public view, though the sending and receiving addresses remain visible. MWEB is not widely supported by exchange or casino cashiers; the base Litecoin transaction is the one most punters actually use.

What the IGA does to a Litecoin casino

The Interactive Gambling Act 2001, as strengthened by the Interactive Gambling Amendment Act 2017, makes it an offence to provide online casino games, online pokies or in-play betting to a person physically in Australia. No state or territory licences those products. Wagering on races and sport placed before the event, lotteries and keno are licensable in practice — the Northern Territory Racing and Wagering Commission regulates 52 of Australia’s online bookmakers (Sportsbet, Bet365 and Ladbrokes among them), licensed in the Territory for tax reasons, with no full-time staff and a monthly meeting in Darwin.

The structure matters because a punter searching for a Litecoin casino is, by definition, searching for an offshore site. The site may display a Curaçao, Malta, Anjouan or Costa Rica licence — none of those licences authorises the site to accept Australian residents for casino play. The Australian licence the punter is looking for does not exist for the product in question. The “licence” line on the casino’s footer is the wrong kind of licence, against the wrong regulator, for the wrong product.

The ACMA’s job on the operator side is investigation, formal warnings and requests to Australian internet service providers to block illegal sites. The individual player is not prosecuted — the IGA targets the provider — but the practical consequences for the player sit on the other side of the same gap. An offshore site gives no Australian consumer protection, no complaints body, and no recourse if a withdrawal is refused. It can be blocked while a balance is still on it, and the punter has no Australian court to walk into with a claim.

The payment side of the same gap is the credit-card ban that took effect on 11 June 2024 for licensed online wagering, with penalties of up to A$247,500 for operators accepting them. Digital currency is on the same banned list. A licensed Australian bookmaker cannot legally accept a Litecoin deposit. An offshore casino that does accept one is operating outside the Australian rules on payments as well as on the underlying product.

The next front of the same pressure is the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026, which passed Parliament on 19 August 2026. Its advertising and inducement measures commence on 1 January 2027 — and the inducement rules are aimed at exactly the kind of welcome bonus and free-spin marketing that an offshore Litecoin casino uses to attract an Australian punter. That is the law’s start date, not a rule a punter can rely on in 2026; the formal-warning record is the active enforcement today.

What player protection does and does not extend to an offshore casino

BetStop, the National Self-Exclusion Register, has been live since August 2023 and binds every Australian-licensed online and phone wagering service. A punter who registers with BetStop cannot open a new account with any Australian-licensed operator, and existing accounts are closed. The register does not bind offshore casinos. An Australian punter who has self-excluded via BetStop and then opens an account with an offshore Litecoin casino has complied with the Australian side and not with the offshore side; the offshore site has no view of the BetStop register and no obligation to honour it.

The same gap applies to the National Gambling Helpline (1800 858 858, free, 24/7) and the chat service at Gambling Help Online. Those services are funded to support anyone in Australia affected by gambling harm, regardless of where the gambling took place. A punter who has been using an offshore Litecoin casino and is concerned about their spend is supported by those services; the support does not require the casino to have been Australian-licensed, and the services do not require the punter to disclose which site they were using.

The tax side is the cleanest part of the gap. Gambling winnings of a recreational player are not assessable income under section 6-5 of the ITAA 1997, and losses are not deductible — unless the punter carries on a business of gambling, which is a different tax position entirely. A punter playing at an offshore Litecoin casino recreationally is on the same tax footing as a punter playing the pokies at a local Australian pub. The ATO’s crypto guidance adds a second layer on top: crypto assets are property, not money, and most disposals (selling for AUD, swapping for another crypto, spending the crypto) are CGT events. The 50% CGT discount applies to assets held longer than twelve months; from 1 July 2027 the discount is replaced by CPI indexation of the cost base plus a 30% minimum tax rate on net capital gains. A punter depositing Litecoin, playing with it, and withdrawing in Litecoin is running a CGT calculation on the difference between the AUD value at deposit and the AUD value at withdrawal — a calculation the casino’s cashier does not perform for them.

The AUSTRAC registration requirement sits on the same enforcement side as the ACMA’s enforcement. Any business providing digital currency exchange services to people in Australia — including exchanging Litecoin for AUD — must register with AUSTRAC as a Digital Currency Exchange provider; operating unregistered is an offence. From 31 March 2026 the requirement was expanded to cover crypto-to-crypto exchange platforms, digital asset transferors, digital asset custody providers, and stablecoin issuers and distributors. AUSTRAC’s role is to register and supervise the exchange side of the transaction, not the casino side; the casino side is the ACMA’s jurisdiction, and the two regulators cover the same transaction from opposite ends.

What a Litecoin casino is, and what it is not

The phrase “Litecoin casino” is the marketing label for an offshore online casino that lists Litecoin among its cashier deposit options. The label does not change the product, the licence, or the legal position of the player. What changes between a Litecoin casino and a card-funded casino is the rail on which the deposit arrives — the blockchain confirmation in place of the card authorisation.

A punter comparing the two on bonus terms finds the same terms on both sides: the same multiplier, the same game-contribution schedule, the same cap on free-spin winnings, the same kind of withdrawal pending period. A punter comparing them on speed finds Litecoin faster than a card authorisation and noticeably faster than a bank transfer; on the cashier page the difference is the difference between a confirmation in minutes and a confirmation in hours or days. A punter comparing them on protection finds the same absence of protection on both sides — neither has an Australian regulator behind it, neither is connected to BetStop, neither offers a path to an Australian complaints body.

The “anonymous” framing that appears in some marketing around Litecoin casinos is true at the wallet level and false at the player level. A wallet address is not a name; the Litecoin blockchain does not require identity verification to send a transaction. The casino’s cashier does, once the punter moves past the deposit and tries to withdraw — a casino that paid out to an unverified account would be in breach of its own AML obligations, and a casino that did not have AML obligations would not be a casino any AML-compliant payment partner would touch. The punter’s identity is verified at withdrawal, and the verification is the point at which a Litecoin-only cashier becomes a card-or-bank-funded cashier for the payout leg.

The “no minimum deposit” claim that appears on some cashier pages is true in the sense that the casino’s minimum may be set very low — the equivalent of a few cents in mLTC — and false in the sense that the on-chain transaction fee on the punter’s side is several times that amount for a small transfer. The practical minimum is set by the Litecoin network’s dust limits and the casino’s own minimum, whichever is higher. The marketing line is the lower of the two.

Reading a Litecoin casino’s bonus in plain prose

The arithmetic the page has to add is short, and the calculation the spec asks for is the regulator’s block-rate: 1,751 sites blocked from the first blocking request in November 2019 to the June 2026 round, which works out at roughly 270 sites per year on average across the seven-year window. That is the band — not one figure, because each round varies, and a single round in 2026 added twelve domains in a single sitting.

A punter comparing two Litecoin casino bonuses is comparing the strings attached to each credit, and the strings come down to four numbers: the multiplier on the deposit match, the multiplier on the free-spin winnings, the cap on the free-spin winnings, and the contribution schedule of the games. The first two are read off the bonus terms page; the third is the kind of detail the small print buries; the fourth is the difference between a bonus that clears on slots and a bonus that clears on blackjack. Slots typically contribute 100% of each bet to the turnover requirement; table games typically contribute a fraction, sometimes zero. A punter who wants to play blackjack is clearing their bonus at a different rate than the headline number suggests.

The same arithmetic applies to free spins. A “50 free spins” line on the welcome page is the credit of fifty spins at a fixed stake on a fixed game; the winnings from those spins are subject to their own multiplier, and the cap on the winnings is the ceiling the punter can withdraw from the spin bundle. A 35× multiplier on A$10 of spin winnings is A$350 of qualifying bets; a 10× cap on those winnings is A$100, no matter how much the spins return. The cap is the number that determines whether the free-spin bundle is worth claiming at all.

The “no deposit” bonus is the variant where the casino credits the account without a deposit — and the variant where the terms are usually heaviest. The casino has no deposit to lose; the punter has nothing to fall back on if the bonus turns out to be unredeemable. A no-deposit bonus that requires a withdrawal to be processed by a specific payment method, or that requires a multiplier higher than 50×, is a bonus that is structured to keep the credit on the casino’s side of the ledger.

The single calculation the page can offer on the offer-cost side is on a typical welcome bonus. Take a A$100 bonus at a 35× multiplier: turnover is A$3,500; on a slot at A$1 per spin that is 3,500 spins; at five seconds per spin the play time is roughly 4.9 hours. That is the time the bonus takes to clear, assuming only the bonus amount is wagered and the punter plays only slots at the stated stake. The same calculation on a 50× multiplier is 5,000 spins and roughly 6.9 hours. The number changes; the structure does not.

What an Australian punter can actually use this page for

The page’s value is not in pointing a punter at a site to play on. The page’s value is in showing a punter what the playing field looks like before they decide whether to play on it at all.

A punter reading this page already knows that an offshore Litecoin casino exists and that it accepts Australian residents. What the page adds is the formal record of which operators the ACMA has warned, the legal frame around the activity the punter is considering, the tax position on the coin the punter is using, and the blocklist rate at which the regulator is currently removing sites. None of that is a recommendation; all of it is data a punter needs to read the marketing pages in front of them.

The decision the page cannot make is whether to play. The IGA has made that decision for an Australian resident already — the product is prohibited, the licence does not exist, the regulator is enforcing. What a punter does with that is the punter’s own business. What this page is for is making sure the punter makes it with the record in front of them rather than the marketing copy.

Frequently asked questions

Is it legal for a casino site to accept Litecoin from a player in Australia?

No. Under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001, providing online casino games to a person physically in Australia is an offence, and no state or territory licences the product. The coin used to fund the account does not change that — the prohibition covers the activity, not the payment rail. The ACMA enforces against the operator, not the player, but the player has no Australian consumer protection, no complaints body, and no recourse if a withdrawal is refused. The casino’s offshore licence is the wrong kind of licence, against the wrong regulator, for the wrong product, from the player’s side.

Does a Litecoin deposit confirm any faster than a Bitcoin deposit?

Yes — meaningfully. Litecoin’s block interval is 2.5 minutes, four times faster than Bitcoin’s roughly ten-minute average, so a six-confirmation Litecoin deposit is roughly fifteen minutes of waiting on a quiet network against an hour on Bitcoin. Block discovery is probabilistic either way, so the confirmation can arrive sooner or later than the average; there is no guaranteed minimum or maximum. Fees are typically a small fraction of a cent on Litecoin during quiet periods, with the fee rising as network congestion rises.

Do Litecoin casino bonuses carry the same wagering terms as a card-funded bonus?

Yes. The bonus is denominated in fiat once it lands on the account, and the wagering multiplier the punter is asked to clear is the same number whether the deposit arrived as Litecoin, Bitcoin, or a card payment. The blockchain confirms the deposit; it does not lower the multiplier, raise the cap, or speed up the bonus-to-cash conversion. Free-spin bundles carry their own multiplier and almost always cap winnings at a multiple of the bonus that triggered them — the cap is the number that determines whether the bundle is worth claiming at all.

What games are usually listed as accepting a Litecoin deposit?

The full game library — slots, table games, live dealer — is what the cashier treats as accepting a Litecoin deposit, because the cashier converts the deposit on the way in and the games themselves do not see the coin. The contribution schedule is what changes between game types: slots typically contribute 100% of each bet to the turnover requirement, table games a fraction (sometimes zero). A bonus that looks generous on the headline often contributes nothing on the games the punter actually wants to play. The same terms apply regardless of which coin funded the account.

Is there a minimum amount of Litecoin a casino site will accept as a deposit?

Yes — typically a small one, set as a fiat equivalent of a few cents in mLTC. The “no minimum” claim that appears on some cashier pages is true at the casino’s level and false at the network’s level: the on-chain transaction fee on the punter’s side is several times that amount for a small transfer, and the practical minimum is set by whichever of the two is higher. A punter depositing a tiny amount to test the cashier is paying a fee several times the deposit, and the test is the fee, not the deposit.