Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani: From a RuneScape Casino to Stake.com

Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani built one of the biggest online casinos in the world, and they never took a single dollar from outside investors to do it. The two Australians met as teenagers running a gambling scheme inside a video game, then spent the next seven years building the tools that became Stake.com. Today the crypto casino processes billions of dollars a month and pays some of the biggest names in music and sports to talk it up. It is also banned in dozens of countries, including the one where its founders grew up.

How did Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani meet?

As teenagers, on a video game, years before either one could legally set foot in a casino. Around 2010, Craven and Tehrani connected through RuneScape, a fantasy game with millions of players trading and battling online. Instead of just playing the game, the pair ran their own in-game casino: other players could wager RuneScape gold on player-versus-player fights, and Craven and Tehrani took a cut of the action. It worked well enough that the game's developers eventually banned their accounts for running an unauthorized gambling operation inside RuneScape.

That early scheme is not a footnote added for color. It taught two teenagers the basics of running a betting business: how to set odds, how to keep players coming back, and how a house edge quietly turns a game of chance into a real business.

How did a RuneScape hustle turn into a real company?

Slowly, through a few tries before Stake.com ever existed. In 2013, Craven and Tehrani built Primedice, a simple dice game that let players bet with Bitcoin instead of real-world currency. It was one of the first gambling sites built around what the industry calls "provably fair" betting, where the math behind every result can be checked by the player instead of just trusted. Primedice worked well enough to fund their next move: in 2016 they founded Easygo, a company that built casino games for other operators to license and run on their own sites.

Easygo gave them a working relationship with the wider gambling industry and enough capital to launch something bigger. In August 2017, Craven and Tehrani launched Stake.com under a license from Curacao, a small Caribbean island that has issued online gambling licenses since the 1990s and remains one of the easiest jurisdictions in the world to get licensed in. They funded the launch themselves. There has never been a venture capital round, a private equity buyer, or an outside shareholder, which puts Stake on a very different path from an operator like Flutter Entertainment, which grew mainly by buying rivals such as The Stars Group rather than building an audience from nothing.

How does Stake.com work without a bank?

By skipping banks completely. Stake only accepts deposits and pays out in cryptocurrency: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a long list of other coins. That single choice solves the biggest problem most online casinos face outside a handful of regulated markets, banks and card networks often refuse to process payments for gambling sites they consider high-risk or unlicensed in a player's home country. A crypto-only casino does not need a bank's permission. A player buys crypto somewhere else, sends it to their Stake account, and the deposit lands in minutes instead of days, from almost anywhere in the world. See how local currencies and crypto payments fit into a white-label operator's setup today.

Stake also uses what the industry calls "provably fair" games, the same idea Craven and Tehrani built into Primedice back in 2013. Every bet combines a server seed the casino generates, a seed the player controls, and a counter called a nonce, then runs them through a cryptographic hash function. The player can check the math after the fact and confirm the result was not altered. It does not stop the house edge from favoring Stake over time. It does mean a player does not have to simply trust that any single spin or roll was not rigged.

How did Stake grow from $100 million to billions in two years?

By paying the people players already watch, instead of buying traditional ads. Rather than TV commercials or billboards, Stake spent its marketing budget on Twitch streamers, who gambled on camera for hours at a time in front of tens of thousands of viewers. Streamers such as Trainwreck said their arrangement with Stake was worth over a million dollars a month at one point, a payment structure not far from the revenue share and CPA deals affiliate marketers negotiate every day, just with far bigger budgets and Twitch-famous names attached. That kind of spending turned Stake from a niche crypto site into something a huge number of young men saw on their screens every single day.

Twitch banned unlicensed gambling streams in October 2022, so Craven and Tehrani launched their own streaming platform instead. Kick went live two months later, in December 2022, offering creators a much larger cut of subscription revenue than Twitch did, which pulled some of the platform's biggest names, including xQc, over to Kick almost immediately.

Stake also spent heavily on mainstream sports and music. It signed the rapper Drake as a brand ambassador in a deal reported to be worth around 100 million dollars a year. It became an official betting partner of the UFC. It put its name on a Formula One team, first as Alfa Romeo F1 Team Stake and later as Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber, in a sponsorship reported at around 100 million dollars. And it signed a shirt sponsorship with Everton in the Premier League, reportedly the highest-value front-of-shirt deal in the club's 144-year history.

That combination, cheap-to-produce streaming content alongside a handful of very expensive, very visible endorsements, is what pushed revenue from roughly 100 million dollars to more than 2 billion dollars in about two years, then on to 4.7 billion dollars in 2024.

Is Stake.com legal, and why is it banned in so many countries?

It depends entirely on where you live, and in most regulated markets the answer is no. Stake operates under a license from Curacao, which is enough to run the business but does not make Stake licensed anywhere else. It is banned or blocked in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and more than 40 other countries. It is also banned in Australia, the country both founders grew up in and still call home, a detail that says as much about how Stake built its business as anything else in this story.

The UK shows what happens when a Curacao-licensed operator runs into a regulated market head-on. Stake's UK operator was fined more than 300,000 pounds by the UK Gambling Commission in 2023 over anti-money laundering and social responsibility failures. Further scrutiny followed after a widely shared video promoting Stake, and the operator shut the UK site down completely in early 2025.

Stake has faced other real problems beyond regulators. In 2023, hackers tied to North Korea's Lazarus Group stole around 41 million dollars from the company. In the United States, Stake does not run its main crypto casino at all. Instead it operates Stake.us, a separate site built on a sweepstakes model, selling coins for entertainment and awarding sweepstakes entries that can be redeemed for cash, a structure meant to work around US gambling law. Stake.us has since been named in lawsuits, alongside Drake and streamer Adin Ross, claiming it misled players about how close that sweepstakes model really is to plain real-money gambling.

None of that has slowed Stake down in the markets where it can operate. It just means the company two teenagers built out of a video game hustle now spends as much energy managing regulators and lawsuits as it does managing its marketing deals. It is a very different path from Denise Coates, who built Bet365 into a private empire through decades of steady, licensed operations rather than viral marketing and Curacao paperwork.

The bottom line

Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani turned a video game hustle into one of the biggest crypto casinos on Earth, without ever taking outside money to do it. They built the tools themselves, first with Primedice, then Stake, then their own streaming platform once Twitch turned against them. They also built a business that cannot operate in the United States, the United Kingdom, or their own home country of Australia, and one that has already drawn regulatory fines and lawsuits along the way.

Curious what it costs to get a gambling license of your own, the same kind of decision Craven and Tehrani made back in 2017? See what a Curacao gaming license costs today, or what it takes to launch a white-label casino without building every piece of the technology from scratch the way Stake did.