Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani have used their success in stakes to launch a streaming platform, sponsor a Formula One team and make billion-dollar fortunes.
Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani first met online as enterprising teenagers hoping to discover that players Runescape, The scheme, called “staking,” involved betting on opponents in old-school online video games using in-game digital gold coins. It was profitable, but he was reportedly booted off the platform. “I won't say too much,” he said. The curtain has risen“But the people who made the game certainly didn't think very highly of it,” says Craven, an Australian, with a mischievous grin.
A little over a decade later, Craven, 28, and Tehrani, 30, run Stake.com, the world's largest offshore crypto casino. Stake generated $2.6 billion in revenue last year, despite the fact that crypto gambling is not available in the U.S., Britain or much of Europe. Their marketing instincts and willingness to operate in legal grey areas have made them two of the world's youngest self-made billionaires, worth an estimated $1.3 billion each.
Melbourne-based Craven and Tehrani have used their fortunes to get Stake's name on Formula 1 cars, English Premier League jerseys, the UFC Octagon and new livestreaming services, but what they really want above all else is legitimacy, and they're willing to pay any price for it.
“We combined two of the most controversial technologies and industries,” Craven says, “so it was always going to be an uphill battle for us to break through the public perception of what we stand for.”
The two began dabbling in cryptocurrency in 2013 when Bitcoin was trading at around $100. Together with a few friends, they Prime Dis, Users can bet Bitcoin by rolling virtual dice. Prime Dice The teenage creators made enough money to turn it into a full-time job, and by spring 2016 their ambitions had grown to the point where they founded EasyGo, a company that opened an office in Melbourne and employed 18 people. EasyGo launched Stakes the following year, eventually adding slots, table games and a sportsbook, with all betting taking place in cryptocurrency.
The timing was perfect: by late 2017, one bitcoin was worth more than $10,000 (it's now over $60,000), and more and more people were thinking that bitcoin might be the future of money. “They weren't really businessmen at the time, they were community leaders,” says Tim Heath, a crypto pioneer and founder of Estonia-based crypto casino and venture capital firm Yolo. “Their profit and loss statements were probably done in Excel. It didn't seem like a professional organization.”
In the early days, crypto laws and regulations were virtually non-existent, and casinos could be licensed in offshore havens like Curacao, where Stake was licensed and taxes were minimal. The lack of oversight allowed Stake to keep costs low and offer better odds to gamblers. Players were anonymous to authorities and paid no transaction fees.
The category has grown in popularity, but online gaming review site Casinomeister has called Curacao a “laughable operator” for its lack of consumer protection, player verification and policing of fraud. In January, Curacao's finance minister acknowledged that the country has long been known to be a notorious money-laundering hub. “Look,” Heath said. “There were some corners cut in the beginning, that's for sure.”
Craven, looking for younger customers with a tolerance for risk, found a new type of salesman: content creators. Stake began paying some creators more than $1 million a month to gamble on the livestreaming platform Twitch. Many of the bets were funds that appeared to be provided by Stake. Twitch's viewership more than doubled during the pandemic lockdown, “which kick-started the business,” Craven said. In 2022, Stake gained mainstream recognition after a blockbuster partnership with rap superstar and high-stakes sports bettor Drake, reportedly worth $100 million.
From 2020 to 2022, Stake's total gaming revenue grew from about $100 million to more than $2 billion, giving it a commanding share of the crypto casino market. The company remains self-funded, split 50/50 between Craven and Tehrani, and has made hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. The founders have literally begun living like Rockefellers: Tehrani bought a $47 million Manhattan townhouse formerly owned by David Rockefeller, and Craven bought two homes in Melbourne's upscale Toorak district for a combined $76 million.
Both companies are also investing lavishly in marketing: Stake is paying $12 million a year to sponsor the English Premier League soccer jerseys and $100 million over three years to sponsor naming rights to a Formula One team. “It's not an ROI thing,” Tehrani says. “But if you've got people's attention, I think you should invest as much as you can to keep it.”
Recently, their focus has shifted to protecting what they have built. With many countries around the world, including Curacao, adopting or considering legislation regarding online gambling, crypto casino operators are faced with a choice: continue to operate in a shrinking grey market or comply with regulations in as many countries as possible.
Stake has chosen the regulatory path, hiring large amounts of legal and compliance staff, strengthening its customer authentication processes, and opening regulated non-cryptocurrency operations in the UK, Portugal, Italy and Colombia. In the US, Stake operates a “social casino” that runs on valueless digital coins. While this strategy will no doubt cut into profitability, Tehrani says Stake is “starting to grow into a company” that could last for decades.
The two have also diversified beyond gambling. In late 2022, Tehrani and Craven used some of the wealth they made from staking to launch Kick, a livestreaming service that is a direct competitor to Twitch. A few months earlier, Twitch had announced that it would ban advertising on Staking's platform, citing insufficient consumer protection. To counter this, Craven and Tehrani deployed an earlier staking strategy of looser regulation and maximum user benefits, helping Kick grow. They again lured well-known creators to the platform with multimillion-dollar contracts and the condition that streamers could keep 95% of subscription revenue (compared to Twitch's 50%). Kick was successful in attracting attention, but its loose content moderation has made it a breeding ground for controversial creators and illegal content, complicating efforts to roll out advertising on the service.
This has led some to question Kick's long-term viability. Forbes The company operates at a loss of millions of dollars each month and estimates it has lost more than $100 million since its founding. Over the past decade, tech giants like Microsoft and Meta have tried and failed to build livestreaming competitors, and even Twitch has never turned a profit. In 2014, Twitch was acquired by Amazon for $862 million, but that payment was mostly for livestreaming infrastructure, the same platform that Kick currently rents from Amazon Web Services.
Craven and Tehrani aren't worried, saying they remain focused on growth. Kicks' market share was about 5% in the fourth quarter of 2023, according to analytics website Streams Charts. “Our goal when we got into Kicks was not to make money,” Tehrani said. “At the end of the day, we're comfortable personally investing significant amounts of money in the business because we believe in it.”
All of this has been made possible thanks to Stake’s continued success and the profits Craven and Tehrani made from their early investments in cryptocurrencies. While both claim to be bullish on cryptocurrencies, it’s telling that they’ve converted much of Stake’s earnings into multiple government-backed fiat currencies.
“Cryptocurrencies can go up and down very quickly,” Craven said. “We don't want to take any chances. We're already in the gambling business, so we're not going to gamble.”
This article first appeared on forbes.com and all figures are in U.S. dollars.
