Stake is officially the largest offshore crypto casino in the world. Last year alone, the site generated a tidy $2.6 billion, yes, billion, in revenue. As a brand, it’s even gotten itself into a position where it can comfortably pay rapper Drake a reported $100 million a year just to sponsor them, while also buying out the major casino streamers on Kick and Twitch. All of this, by the way, has been achieved by a site that only launched back in 2017.
As we sit here now, Stake is by far the biggest crypto-based online casino and sportsbook. Really, it’s not even close, with competitors like Cloudbet and Thunderpick posing little threat in comparison. If you’re someone looking to bet or win crypto, you generally go to Stake. That, at least for now, is how the market works, and it’s testament to the brand power behind this mega crypto casino brand.
Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, the Duo Behind Stake, Took It to the Top of Crypto Gambling
Of course, Stake didn’t magically become the hottest thing in crypto gambling overnight. It was actually founded all the way back in 2017 by friends Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani. The duo had first met years before that through the legendary MMORPG game Runescape, where they struck up a bond and quickly went on to create the in-game system that allowed players to wager on fights using gold coins. You couldn’t write a better script, as it was inevitable that these two would then eventually launch Stake, the biggest crypto wagering platform in the world, and become self-made billionaires.
The now 31-year-old Tehrani and 29-year-old Craven realized at the time that blockchain technology was waiting to explode and that it could, in effect, revolutionize online gaming. In their eyes, cryptocurrencies were inevitably going to crossover with gaming, and it was simply a matter of when it would happen. The “gray area” between these two different spaces was something that Craven and Tehrani opted to wedge themselves between early by launching Stake, and it’s paid off in the billions (literally).
After initially testing the waters when they launched cryptocurrency-based dice game PrimeDice in 2013, Craven and Tehrani quickly turned their attention to launching the bigger and better Stake in 2017. Operating under the Medium Rare N.V. company, Stake launched with the sole purpose of allowing players to engage in gambling activities, namely betting on sports and playing casino games, by using cryptocurrencies. Back during the mid-2010s, this was something of a novel concept, despite how quickly crypto investment was rising at the time, so Craven and Tehrani were very much ahead of the curve.
“We’ve taken two of the most controversial technologies and industries and combined them,” — Ed Craven.
It didn’t take long for Stake to catch fire in its first few years, attracting millions of players around the world before quickly becoming a household name. The COVID-19 pandemic, which Craven described as like putting “rocket boosters on the operation”, only sped up the process, with Stake officially having 5 million registered users and over 80 billion worth of transactions annually by the time 2021 came around. Simply put, players were hooked.
Stake had, and still has, everything, from live dealer casino games to the ability to bet crypto on the NFL, NBA, and all the other major sports leagues. Naturally, though, it’s the casino side of things that Stake fans love the most, which has allowed the site (according to casino.org) to reach a market share of 43% in the crypto gambling market. That’s huge, and it’s all coming from the over 3,000 casino games that Stake currently has stacked in its library, including all the latest slots like Sugar Rush and Big Bass Bonanza.
And since 2021, Stake has ramped up its aggressive marketing even higher, with the site’s biggest market pull hands down being the legendary Canadian rapper Drake. Currently signed on what’s believed to be a $100 million-a-year sponsorship deal, Drake is constantly pulling the strings for Stake, promoting them on his social media, linking up with the owners Craven and Tehrani, and pretty much everything else in between. The likes of Adin Ross and other big-name influencers are also in the mix, too, which has allowed Stake to reach an entire new generation of users and experience record levels of growth over the past couple of years.
Stake has even become so big that it’s branched out into becoming an official UFC betting partner, while also sponsoring the Sauber F1 Team (which has now been rebranded as the Stake F1 Team). Make no doubt about it, Stake is everywhere, with Craven and Tehrani even opting to launch a new sweepstakes-style social casino, Stake.us, back in 2022 specifically for American users. Interestingly, Stake.us itself has become so popular with Americans that now many sweeps operators accept crypto off the back of its success. The Stake influence is big enough to the point where it seems as though all types of casino sites, even the sweepstakes ones, are starting to accept crypto in order to stay competitive.
Stake Continues to Dominate the Casino Live Streaming Space on Kick and Twitch
Another of the big reasons why Stake has become the king of crypto casinos is because the site, smartly, bought out most of the major casino streamers on Kick and Twitch several years ago (Kick, the only direct competitor to Twitch, is also owned by Stake’s Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani). xQc, Adin Ross, Nickmercs, and Trainwreckstv all have their own sponsorship deals with Stake, which has influenced countless viewers from their live streams to go and create accounts with Stake. Effectively, the people at Stake realized that the best possible marketing strategy was to optimize popular streamers and content creators so that they could directly influence new generation players to sign up with the site, which is exactly what’s happened. And the fact they were able to land a sponsorship deal with Drake on top of this is nothing short of a marketing masterstroke, as Drake’s face has now become synonymous with the Stake brand.
How Stake Actually Works
When we’re talking about the casino side of Stake, the way it works is pretty much just like any other online casino. The twist, though, is that you’re depositing and playing with cryptocurrencies instead of real money. Outside of that, almost everything is identical.
Let’s say you create an account with Stake today for the first time. You’d then need to deposit a chosen crypto, such as BTC or ETH, into your account from your personal wallet. Once that’s done, your crypto can be used to start placing bets on any casino game you like.
Of course, just like with a regular online casino, you can withdraw any crypto you might win, whether it’s through playing slots or roulette. Usually, what most players try to do is build up a decent collection of the crypto they’re playing with, such as Bitcoin, before eventually withdrawing it. That, in a nutshell, is how it all works.
Really, what Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani have done is taken the traditional online casino model, spiced it up with new features like tournaments and giveaways, gotten Gen Z and Millennials content creators involved with the marketing side of things, and switched out real money for cryptocurrencies. On the surface, it’s a relatively simple business model, but it’s worked wonders and supercharged crypto gambling into a billion-dollar industry in less than a decade.
