How two teenagers from Melbourne built the world’s largest crypto casino without a dollar of venture capital.
We also recommend that you read:Most billionaires get their start in Silicon Valley garages, Ivy League dorm rooms, or family money. Ed Craven got his start gambling for gold coins in RuneScape. At 12 years old, he won $6,000 on a family cruise and became obsessed with the math behind gambling. At 18, he was building crypto dice games. At 22, he launched Stake.com. By 27, he had bought the most expensive house in the state of Victoria for $80 million, signed Drake to a $100 million deal, put his name on a Formula 1 car, and quietly become one of the youngest billionaires Australia has ever produced.
His company processes more gambling volume than most countries generate in GDP. His streaming platform, Kick, is eating into Twitch’s market share month after month. His personal fortune sits north of $2.8 billion. And his critics want him investigated, sued, and shut down. Depending on who you ask, Ed Craven is either a genius who saw the future of online gambling before anyone else, or the man running the biggest unregulated casino operation on the planet from a country where his own product is illegal.
Both versions contain truth. That’s what makes his story worth telling.
| Full Name | Edward Craven |
| Born | 1995, Melbourne, Australia |
| Age | 30 |
| Education | Bishop Druitt College (no public record of university degree) |
| Business Partner | Bijan Tehrani (co-founder of Stake, Kick, Easygo) |
| Companies | Stake.com (crypto casino), Kick.com (streaming), Easygo (parent company), Primedice (first project, 2013) |
| Stake Revenue (2024) | $4.7 billion (gross gaming revenue) |
| Easygo Revenue (FY2024) | AUD $970 million (~$645M USD). Net profit: AUD $257 million (~$171M USD) |
| Net Worth | ~$2.8 billion (Forbes, 2025). Combined with Tehrani: ~$5.6 billion |
| Forbes Rank | #1305 globally, #35 on Australia’s 50 Richest (2025) |
| Crypto Holdings | $405 million (Easygo balance sheet) |
| Residence | Melbourne, Australia (Toorak). Property portfolio: $80M mansion (demolished, rebuilding at ~$150M), $38.5M second Toorak home |
| Major Sponsorships | Drake ($100M/year), Everton FC (£10M/year shirt deal), Sauber F1 Team (title sponsor), UFC (official partner), Watford FC |
| License | Curacao (primary). Previously held UK license through TGP Europe (exited February 2025) |
| Anonymous Until | Late 2021 (operated under the alias “Edd Miroslav”) |
Ed Craven grew up in Melbourne. His father, Jamie Craven, had his own history with money: banned from the financial services industry and sentenced to six months in prison in the 1980s after the collapse of investment company Spedley Securities. Financial risk ran in the bloodline, though Ed would channel it in a very different direction.
At 12, on a family cruise, Ed won $6,000 in the ship’s casino. Most kids would spend it on video games. Ed spent the next few years dissecting the math behind why he won. What were the odds? What was the house edge? How did probability stack against the player over time? It wasn’t the money that hooked him. It was the system behind the money.
Then came RuneScape. While other teenagers were grinding levels and collecting rare items, Ed and a kid named Bijan Tehrani figured out how to turn the game’s economy into a betting platform. They built a staking system where players could wager their in-game gold on fights. It was crude, unofficial, and wildly popular. Jagex (RuneScape’s developer) wasn’t thrilled, but for two teenagers on opposite ends of Australia who’d never met in person, it was a crash course in running a gambling operation.
That RuneScape partnership between Ed and Bijan never ended. It just kept scaling up.
In 2013, when Ed was 18, the two launched Primedice, a cryptocurrency dice game. The concept was dead simple: bet Bitcoin on a dice roll, win or lose based on the outcome. No complex software, no flashy graphics, no regulatory overhead. Just provably fair math on a webpage.
Primedice was crude by today’s standards, but it solved a problem that traditional online casinos couldn’t: instant deposits and withdrawals with zero identity verification. Bitcoin moved faster than bank wires, cost nothing in fees, and didn’t care whether you were 18 or 80, in Australia or Angola. For a generation of gamblers who grew up on the internet and didn’t trust traditional banks with their money, crypto gambling felt like freedom.
Primedice attracted a niche audience, but that audience was loud, loyal, and growing. The Bitcoin gambling community was tiny in 2013. Ed and Bijan got in at the ground floor.
In 2016, the pair founded Easygo, a company focused on building online casino games. This was the stepping stone between a simple dice site and the full-blown casino platform that would follow. Easygo gave them the infrastructure to develop their own games, handle payments at scale, and build the backend that a serious gambling operation requires.
In 2017, Stake.com went live. Curacao license. Cryptocurrency deposits. No traditional banking. No mandatory KYC at signup. A library of original games (Stake Originals) with RTPs up to 99%. And a clean, fast interface that loaded in under a second while most competing casinos took ten.
The timing was perfect. Bitcoin was in the middle of its first major bull run, climbing from $1,000 in January 2017 to nearly $20,000 by December. Thousands of new crypto holders were looking for places to spend their windfall. Stake was there, and it was better than everything else in the crypto casino space.
Through all of this, nobody knew who ran Stake. Ed operated under the alias “Edd Miroslav” until late 2021. For four years, the biggest crypto casino in the world was run by a guy whose real name wasn’t public information.
What happened between 2017 and 2024 borders on absurd. Stake went from a niche crypto gambling site to the largest offshore casino on the planet, pulling in $4.7 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2024. That’s more than many publicly traded casino companies generate.
| Year | Milestone | Why It Mattered |
|---|---|---|
| 2013 | Primedice launches. Ed is 18 | First crypto dice game. Bitcoin gambling is born |
| 2016 | Easygo founded | The parent company that would own everything |
| 2017 | Stake.com goes live. Curacao license. Bitcoin-only | Launches during Bitcoin’s first major bull run. Perfect timing |
| 2020-2021 | Twitch streamer sponsorships begin. Some creators paid $1M+/month | Gambling content explodes on Twitch. Stake becomes the casino everyone watches |
| 2021 | UK expansion through TGP Europe. Ed Craven revealed as real identity | First regulated market. The anonymous founder goes public |
| 2022 | Drake deal ($100M/year). Everton FC shirt sponsor (£10M/year). Kick.com launched. Revenue hits $2.6 billion | The year everything went mainstream. Celebrity endorsements, Premier League, streaming platform |
| 2023 | Alfa Romeo/Sauber F1 partnership. UFC official partner. $41M hack by North Korea’s Lazarus Group | Stake is now sponsoring in F1, MMA, and Premier League simultaneously. And getting hacked by a nation-state |
| 2024 | $4.7B in GGR. Sauber F1 Team becomes “Stake F1 Team.” Horse racing launch. PointsBet investment. $80M mansion demolished | Peak revenue. Title naming rights on an F1 car. Craven is building the most expensive home in Australia |
| 2025 | Forbes: $5.6B combined wealth. Stake exits UK. Shifts to 70% fiat transactions. Drake feud. $30M AI investment in Maincode. Backs $421M PointsBet bid | Richest year personally. Biggest controversy year. Diversification into AI and traditional sports betting |
The casino business is simple math wrapped in complicated marketing. Stake’s revenue comes from the house edge on every bet placed on its platform, whether that’s a slot spin, a blackjack hand, a roulette wheel, or a sports wager. When you bet $100 on a slot with 96% RTP, Stake keeps $4 on average. Multiply that by millions of bets per day across millions of users, and you get $4.7 billion in a year.
But the way Stake got to those numbers is what separates it from every other crypto casino. Three things drove the explosion:
In October 2022, Twitch banned gambling content from unregulated casinos. Stake.com, operating on a Curacao license, was directly affected. Overnight, the platform that had been Stake’s most effective marketing channel shut the door.
Most companies would have scrambled for alternative advertising. Ed Craven built his own streaming platform instead.
Kick.com launched in late 2022, backed by Stake money and co-developed with streamer Trainwreckstv. The pitch to creators was simple: Twitch gives you 50% of subscription revenue. Kick gives you 95%. The math did the recruiting.
On top of the 95/5 split, Kick introduced a Creator Incentive Program that paid streamers fixed hourly rates based on follower counts and watch time. In the first three months, Kick paid creators over $3 million through this program alone. High-profile signings followed: Adin Ross, xQc, and (for a while) Drake himself all moved to the platform.
By late 2025, Kick had grown into the fourth most-watched streaming platform globally, behind YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch. The gambling content that Twitch banned found its home on Kick, but the platform also expanded into gaming, music, IRL streaming, and other categories. Kick wasn’t just a gambling marketing tool anymore. It had become a real platform.
Easygo Solutions, Ed’s private company, owns both Stake and Kick. In the 2024 financial year, Easygo reported AUD $970 million in revenue and AUD $257 million in net profit. The company employs 636 people and paid AUD $152 million in corporate taxes. For an unlisted company run by a 29-year-old, those are wild numbers by any standard.
Stake’s marketing budget reads like a sports mogul’s fantasy draft. Every deal was designed to put the Stake brand in front of the largest audiences on Earth, as fast as possible.
| Sponsorship | Deal | Reach |
|---|---|---|
| Drake | $100M/year brand ambassador (2022-2025) | 104M Instagram followers. “Drake on Stake” live streams |
| Everton FC | £10M/year main shirt sponsor (2022+) | Premier League global TV audience, ~1 billion cumulative viewers per season |
| Sauber / Stake F1 Team | Title sponsor (2023-2025). Co-title with Alfa Romeo in 2023, full title “Stake F1 Team” from 2024 | Every F1 race broadcast in 180+ countries. 1.5 billion cumulative TV viewers per season |
| UFC | Official betting partner (2024). Israel Adesanya and Jose Aldo as ambassadors | Nearly 1 billion households globally |
| Watford FC | Shirt sponsor | English football exposure |
| Sergio Aguero | Brand ambassador | Football legend with 20M+ social media following |
Look at that list and try to name another crypto casino that has even two of those deals. Stake doesn’t compete with other crypto casinos on sponsorships. It competes with Betfair, William Hill, and DraftKings. The company operates from a Curacao license and a Melbourne office, but its brand visibility rivals the biggest regulated sportsbooks on the planet.
In 2022, Ed Craven paid A$80,000,088 for a 7,187-square-meter derelict mansion in Toorak, Melbourne’s wealthiest suburb. It was the most expensive residential property ever sold in Victoria. He was 27 years old.
He demolished it. The replacement, designed by architect Paul Conrad, will feature 8,000 square meters of internal space, a 220-square-meter underground gym (about the size of an average Australian home), an upper-level gym, a basketball court, dog wash rooms, and staff bedrooms. When finished, the property is expected to be worth roughly $150 million, making it the most expensive private residence in Australian history.
Craven also owns a second Toorak home purchased for $38.5 million, plus properties in Southbank and Mount Macedon. His father, Jamie Craven, bought a $16 million beach house in 2024. The family’s real estate portfolio alone is approaching a quarter of a billion dollars.
On September 4, 2023, hackers drained approximately $41 million in cryptocurrency from Stake’s hot wallets. The FBI later confirmed the attack was carried out by the Lazarus Group, a North Korean state-sponsored hacking unit responsible for over $200 million in crypto thefts that year alone. The stolen assets, spread across Ethereum ($15.7M), Binance Smart Chain ($17.8M), and Polygon ($7.9M), are believed to have been funneled toward North Korea’s weapons programs.
Stake’s response was fast. The breach was detected within 20 minutes and contained within 4 hours. User funds were never compromised, no personal data was accessed, and the platform resumed operations the same day. Ed Craven published a detailed post-mortem on Medium, calling it a “growing pain” for the crypto industry.
Losing $41 million to a nation-state hacking group and calling it a growing pain says a lot about the kind of money Stake moves on a daily basis. For a company processing billions, $41 million is a bad day, not a crisis. That doesn’t make it less serious. It makes the scale of the operation more real.
In March 2022, Drake posted on Instagram: “It was inevitable.” The $100 million annual partnership between Drake and Stake was the biggest celebrity gambling endorsement in history. Drake’s “Drake on Stake” live streams showed him wagering over $1.25 million on single sports bets and $200,000 on roulette spins. His total betting volume reportedly crossed $1 billion in just two months.
For Stake, the payoff was instant. Drake’s 104 million Instagram followers saw every bet, every win, every loss. The acquisition funnel was a direct line from celebrity content to casino sign-up. Stake’s user numbers exploded.
Then it fell apart. In August 2025, Drake appeared in Trainwreckstv’s chat and called Ed Craven a “snake” and a “goof.” His complaints: Stake had blocked him from withdrawing money on multiple occasions, he’d lost $8 million in a single month of sports betting, and Kick’s founders had created problems with his record label OVO. Days later, Drake deleted his Kick account entirely.
The fallout got personal fast. Streamer Adin Ross revealed that Drake had offered to fight Ed Craven in a boxing ring “for free,” even suggesting he’d “fight him in Walmart.” Whether that was real beef or content theater is debatable, but Drake walking away from Stake and Kick was genuine. The $100 million relationship ended with a 404 error on a deleted profile page.
Ed Craven’s business empire doesn’t exist without controversy. If anything, it runs on it. Here’s what the critics, regulators, and journalists have uncovered:
Stake.com operates under a Curacao license. It is not legal for Australian residents. Yet the company is headquartered in Melbourne, employs hundreds of Australians, and its co-founders live in Australia. In 2025, Easygo Group Holdings and Easygo Solutions were formally referred to AUSTRAC (Australia’s financial intelligence agency), ASIC (securities regulator), and Cypriot authorities following a three-year investigation into suspected money laundering connected to the MetaFiYielders fraud scheme. The investigation documented evidence of industrial-scale laundering affecting 832 victims across 21 countries.
An ABC News investigation in December 2025 exposed how Stake’s VIP program targeted gambling addicts. The case of “Oscar” documented a VIP host luring a self-excluded player back to the platform, leading to losses exceeding $180,000. A former employee told ABC this was a “mild” case compared to the complaints they’d seen internally. Multiple players have since sent legal demand letters alleging Stake knowingly exploited addicted gamblers through targeted bonuses and VIP attention.
The responsible gambling conversation around Stake is different from most casinos because of the scale. When you process billions in bets annually and your VIP program is documented as actively re-engaging self-excluded players, “responsible gambling” stops being a checkbox and starts being a question about business ethics.
Stake entered the UK in December 2021 through a partnership with TGP Europe. In February 2025, the UK Gambling Commission launched an investigation after the Stake logo appeared in a viral video by adult content creator Bonnie Blue, filmed outside a university and targeting 18-year-olds. Stake claimed the logo was superimposed by a third party, not an official sponsorship. It didn’t matter. Stake announced its exit from the UK market by March 2025, killing one of its few regulated-market operations.
In April 2025, Stake was sued in California for allegedly operating an illegal “social casino” in the state. The case is ongoing.
Every article about Stake focuses on Ed Craven. But Bijan Tehrani has been there since day one: RuneScape, Primedice, Easygo, Stake, Kick. He’s two years older than Ed (born 1993), equally wealthy ($2.8 billion), and far more invisible. Tehrani doesn’t give interviews, doesn’t appear in Forbes cover stories, and doesn’t stream on Kick. He is the operational counterpart to Craven’s public-facing role. The two have co-run every venture together for over a decade, from teenage RuneScape gambling to a $5.6 billion empire, without a single reported disagreement. In a world where business partnerships between friends usually end in lawsuits, that track record speaks for itself.
Craven isn’t putting all his chips on gambling. Recent moves suggest he’s building for a future where Stake is one piece of a larger portfolio:
The pattern is clear. Craven is moving from crypto-native gambling toward regulated markets, traditional currency, and technology investments outside gambling entirely. Whether that’s because he sees the regulatory walls closing in on offshore crypto casinos, or because he simply wants to build a bigger empire, the direction is obvious.
Ed Craven is 30 years old. He’s worth $2.8 billion. He co-owns the world’s largest crypto casino, the fourth-biggest streaming platform on the planet, a stake in an Australian bookmaker, and a $30 million bet on AI. He did all of this without a university degree, without outside investors, without a single cent of venture capital, starting from a crypto dice game he built as a teenager. There is no comparable trajectory in the history of online gambling.
At the same time, the list of people who want a piece of him is growing. Australian financial regulators. The UK Gambling Commission. California courts. Investigative journalists. Former employees. Players who say they were exploited. Drake, apparently. The same speed and aggression that made Stake the biggest name in crypto gambling also created the regulatory and ethical problems that could define the next chapter of Ed Craven’s story.
If you gamble on Stake, understand what you’re using. It’s fast, the game selection is huge (3,000+ titles from Pragmatic Play, Hacksaw Gaming, Nolimit City, and dozens of other providers), the RTP on Stake Originals is fair, and crypto withdrawals are nearly instant. It’s also operating on a Curacao license, which offers players far less protection than the MGA or UKGC. Know what you’re signing up for. Read our responsible gambling guide before you deposit. And keep in mind that the house, no matter how shiny the brand, always wins in the long run.
Edward Craven is an Australian billionaire entrepreneur born in 1995 in Melbourne. He co-founded Stake.com (the world’s largest crypto casino), Kick.com (a streaming platform competing with Twitch), and the parent company Easygo. His net worth is estimated at $2.8 billion as of 2025, making him one of the youngest billionaires in Australian history. He built his fortune without a university degree, starting with a crypto dice game called Primedice at age 18.
Stake operates under a Curacao gambling license. It is legal in many countries but restricted in others, including the United States, United Kingdom (exited February 2025), Australia (where it’s based but not licensed for local players), France, and the Netherlands. The platform entered the Italian market in 2024. Whether Stake is legal for you depends on your jurisdiction. Always check local laws.
Drake signed a $100 million annual deal with Stake in March 2022, becoming the platform’s biggest ambassador. The relationship collapsed in August 2025 when Drake publicly called Craven a “snake” on Trainwreckstv‘s stream, alleging that Stake blocked his withdrawals and that he lost $8 million in one month.
Kick is a live-streaming platform launched in 2022 by Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, with involvement from streamer Trainwreckstv. It was created partly in response to Twitch banning unregulated gambling content. Kick offers creators a 95/5 revenue split (compared to Twitch’s 50/50)
Craven is investing $30 million into Maincode, an Australian AI startup building a large language model called Matilda. He is the majority investor and sole shareholder of its parent company. He also owns over 5% of ASX-listed bookmaker PointsBet (through Easygo) and backed a $421 million acquisition bid for the company in August 2025. These moves suggest a strategy of diversifying beyond offshore crypto gambling into AI and regulated betting markets.
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