Stake Casino: Facts, Money & Celebrities

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$4.7B

2024 revenue

$2.8B

Each founder's net worth

2017

Year launched

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Who Built Stake

Ed Craven

Co-founder & CEO · born 1995

From Melbourne. Met Bijan in RuneScape in 2010. Net worth ~$2.8B.

Bijan Tehrani

Co-founder · born ~1993

Born in the US to Iranian parents, raised in Melbourne. Net worth ~$2.8B.

Two Australians, Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, met playing RuneScape in 2013. They started messing around with mini-casino mechanics inside the game, built a company called EasyGo together, and eventually launched Stake.com in 2017. Not exactly the most conventional origin story.

Forbes puts each founder at roughly $2.8 billion. Stake's revenue crossed $4.7 billion in 2024 — numbers that are hard to wrap your head around for a gambling site most people hadn't heard of ten years ago.

The same two guys launched Kick in 2022, a Twitch rival that hands streamers 95% revenue cuts. Kick and Stake are basically the same organism — once you see that, the whole influencer marketing machine makes a lot more sense.

Celebrities & Deals

Ambassador

Drake

Everyone assumes Drake owns a piece of Stake. He doesn't — he's a paid face, reportedly pulling around $100 million a year for it. He streams his sessions on Kick, bets big on sports, and keeps the brand constantly visible. In February 2026 he dropped a million on the Patriots to win the Super Bowl. They lost 13–29.

Streamer / Kick co-founder

Trainwreck (Tyler Niknam)

Trainwreck basically built his entire streaming identity around Stake gambling sessions. He's said himself that his deal started at $1M per month and eventually peaked at $22.5M monthly. In July 2025 he spun $37.5 million from a single slot — world record at the time.

Streamer

xQc (Félix Lengyel)

The most-watched streamer on Twitch three years running. By mid-2025 he'd wagered around $3.6 billion total through Stake — and freely admits roughly 90% of those bets lost. In 2023 he jumped to Kick for a deal reportedly worth $100 million.

Sports ambassadors

Israel Adesanya, Alexa Grasso, Marlon Vera

Stake locked in a UFC partnership covering Latin America and Asia, with Adesanya, Grasso, and Vera as faces of the deal — covering the combat sports audience that Drake doesn't naturally reach.

Ambassador · Dec 2025

Iker Casillas

December 2025 brought Iker Casillas into the fold. The legendary keeper — a World Cup winner — is the kind of name that gives Stake mainstream credibility in European markets.

Global ambassador · March 2026

Eden Hazard

March 2026: Eden Hazard signed on as global ambassador heading into the World Cup. Belgium's Gaming Commission opened an investigation almost immediately — Stake isn't licensed there and advertising it to Belgian audiences is illegal. The timing was not exactly subtle.

The Bloomberg Investigation

Early 2026, Bloomberg Businessweek dropped a story that made a lot of noise. Their team went through roughly 1,500 hours of Kick streams from 25 players and found something odd: Drake was hitting big wins on Stake's own EasyGo slots at four times the rate of everyone else. On regular third-party slots, his numbers were completely normal.

The detail that got the most attention: during an August 2025 stream, Drake's balance tanked from $3.5M to $400K. Co-founder Ed Craven then joined live from Melbourne, topped up Drake's account with $500K, and nudged him toward EasyGo roulette. A run of big wins followed. Make of that what you will.

Stake's response: Bijan Tehrani hit back on Twitter, pointing out that Bloomberg's sample was just 1.3 hours of Drake footage and 0.1 hours of Adin Ross — calling it a thin basis for such big conclusions. Stake called the findings "categorically false."

Lawsuits

December 2025: a federal RICO lawsuit landed in Virginia targeting Drake, Adin Ross, and a third party. The claim is that Stake's internal transfers were used to hide money that allegedly went toward inflating Drake's Spotify streams with bots. Similar suits followed in Missouri and California. Stake denies everything.

Twitch vs. Stake: The Ban Story

2022: a chunk of the streaming world turned on gambling content. Pokimane, Mizkif, HasanAbi and others went public demanding Twitch act. By October that year Twitch had banned streaming from unlicensed gambling sites. Stake was on the list.

A lot of gambling streamers moved to Kick. As for Mizkif — the guy who led the charge to get Stake banned — he signed a partnership deal with Stake in 2025. Three years is apparently a long time in streaming.

Pros & Cons

Pros

Casino + Sportsbook in one platform
Exclusive in-house games (EasyGo)
Up to $300 cashback weekly
12 cryptocurrencies accepted
Deep VIP program with personal manager
Kick streaming ecosystem integration
Provably fair original games
No KYC for most users

Cons

Bloomberg investigation raised fair play questions
Ongoing RICO lawsuits (denied by Stake)
Not licensed in US, UK, or EU markets
Curaçao licence only
Heavy influencer marketing focus

Key Numbers

$45.5M

Roshtein's world-record single spin win (2025)

$37.5M

Trainwreck's previous world record (2025)

$3.6B

Total wagered by xQc on Stake

Both all-time slot world records belong to Stake. Roshtein hit $45.5 million in 2025, taking the top spot from Trainwreck's $37.5 million set just months earlier. Whether that says more about Stake or about high-variance slots is a question worth asking.

Whatever you think of Stake, it's impossible to ignore. Crypto + A-list celebrities + streamer millions + lawsuits across three countries — there's no other casino that generates this much noise. Regulators are paying closer attention by the month. The machine keeps running anyway.

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