01
The chain is almost never
the part you are waiting for.
Solana's own documentation gives the network a default slot time of about 400 milliseconds, with a phased reduction to 200 ms planned. Settlement, in other words, is effectively instant on the scale a person notices.
So when a cash-out takes four hours, the chain did not take four hours. Something between you pressing the button and the transaction being signed took four hours, and every one of those somethings sits inside the operator rather than on the network.
That is the single most useful thing to understand about this question, and it is why "Solana is fast" tells you nothing about whether a given casino pays quickly. The asset sets a floor on the wait. The operator sets the actual wait.
03
What the fee
is really made of.
Solana's documentation gives a base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature — about 0.000005 SOL — half burned and half paid to the validator, with an optional priority fee on top during congestion. That is the network's price for moving your money.
The number on your withdrawal screen is usually much larger, and the difference is the operator's own fee. It is worth naming that distinction because "network fee" is a common label for a charge the network is not receiving.
The practical check takes ten seconds: compare the fee the cashier quotes against the base fee above. If it is orders of magnitude larger, you are being charged a processing fee, which is a legitimate thing for an operator to do and an illegitimate thing to call a network cost.