The complete story of how two brothers built the technology behind the $100 billion online gambling industry.”
We also recommend that you read:Every time you open a slot, place a blackjack bet from your phone, or deposit crypto at an online casino, you’re using something that two brothers from Toronto built in their parents’ basement in 1995. No venture capital firm backed them. No tech incubator guided them. Andrew and Mark Rivkin were fresh out of university, living at home, and tinkering with encryption software while the rest of the world was still figuring out how to send email.
They didn’t set out to create the online gambling industry. They stumbled into it. And that accidental pivot from internet security to casino software ended up creating a market worth over $100 billion today. This is the story of how two Canadian kids wrote the code that let people gamble with real money on the internet for the first time, launched the world’s first online casino, took their company public on three stock exchanges, and then quietly walked away before most people even knew their names.
| Names | Andrew Rivkin and Mark Rivkin |
| Born | Andrew: May 31, 1969, Toronto, Canada. Mark: birth date not public |
| Education | Andrew: University of Toronto (B.Comm, Finance & Economics, 1992). Mark: University of Western Ontario (graduated 1993) |
| Known For | Creating CryptoLogic, WagerLogic, and launching the world’s first real-money online casino (InterCasino, 1996) |
| Company Founded | CryptoLogic Inc. (February 1995, Toronto) |
| Stock Exchanges | Toronto Stock Exchange (CRY, 1998), NASDAQ (CRYP, 2000), London Stock Exchange (CRP, 2003) |
| Peak Market Cap | $400+ million |
| Users at Peak | 500,000+ end users, $4 billion+ in processed transactions (by mid-2000) |
| Growth Rate | 26,181% over five years (ranked #1 fastest-growing company in Canada, Profit 200, 2002) |
| Major Partners | William Hill, Littlewoods Gaming, Betfair, Playboy, World Poker Tour |
| Left CryptoLogic | Andrew stepped down as CEO January 2001; both left the board by 2003 |
| Andrew’s Net Worth | Estimated ~$19 million |
| CryptoLogic Acquired | Amaya Gaming Group, $35.8 million (April 2012) |
Andrew Rivkin graduated from the University of Toronto in 1992 with a commerce degree in finance and economics. Mark finished at the University of Western Ontario a year later, in 1993. Neither had a job lined up. Neither had startup funding. What they did have was a shared obsession with the internet, which in 1994 was still a novelty for most Canadians, and a decent understanding of cryptography.
Andrew had already been building businesses since his teens. He’d started a network systems company before he was old enough to vote. Mark had founded Campus Notes during university, a lecture notes service that operated at both U of T and Western. Entrepreneurship wasn’t new to either of them. The scale of what came next was.
In February 1995, working from the basement of their parents’ house in Toronto, the brothers launched CryptoLogic Inc. The original idea had nothing to do with gambling. They’d built a secure online financial transaction system, basically software that could handle real money moving between strangers over the internet without anyone getting ripped off. The question was: who would actually pay for that?
The answer showed up from an unlikely place. In 1994, the tiny Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda passed the Free Trade and Processing Zone Act, making it the first country in the world to issue licenses for online gambling. Suddenly there was a legal framework for running casinos on the internet, but nobody had the technology to handle actual cash bets securely.
Andrew and Mark saw the gap. Their encryption software was designed to move money safely through the internet. Online casinos needed exactly that. The pivot from “general internet security” to “online gambling infrastructure” happened fast. The brothers raised C$500,000 in venture capital and started building the casino platform that would become the backbone of the entire online gambling industry.
Think about what the internet looked like in 1995. Amazon had just launched. Google didn’t exist. Most people connected through dial-up modems that took 30 seconds to load a single webpage. The idea of trusting a website with your credit card information felt insane. Trusting one with casino bets? That was on a different level entirely. The Rivkin brothers had to solve a problem that most people didn’t even think was solvable.
On November 17, 1996, InterCasino went live using CryptoLogic’s software. It was the first online casino in history to accept a real-money wager over the internet. The site launched from Antigua with 18 casino games, including blackjack and roulette, and it was operated by William “Billy” Scott, a former bookmaker from Ohio.
Eighteen games. That’s it. Today’s top online casinos offer thousands of slots from providers like Pragmatic Play, Nolimit City, and Hacksaw Gaming. In 1996, eighteen games was the entire online casino experience. And people loved it.
The technology behind InterCasino was CryptoLogic’s ECash system, an electronic payment processor that used cryptographic protocols to protect transactions. Players could deposit money, place bets, and withdraw winnings, all through a system secured by encryption that, at the time, was more advanced than what most banks offered for their own online services. The random number generators powering the games had to be built from scratch too, because certified RNG software for online gambling simply didn’t exist yet. The Rivkin brothers weren’t just building a casino. They were building the entire infrastructure that online casinos would need to function.
The growth was ridiculous. By the end of 1996, only 15 gambling websites existed on the internet. By 1997, there were 200 and 1999, over 650. CryptoLogic was powering a growing share of them.
| Year | Milestone | What It Meant |
|---|---|---|
| 1995 | CryptoLogic founded in parents’ basement, Toronto | Two brothers with encryption software and no gambling experience start a company |
| 1996 | InterCasino goes live (November 17). First real-money online casino | Online gambling becomes real. 18 games, Antigua license, CryptoLogic software |
| 1998 | CryptoLogic IPO on Toronto Stock Exchange (CRY) | First online gambling software company to go public. Casinos operating in Antigua, Curacao, Dominica |
| 2000 | Listed on NASDAQ (CRYP). 500,000+ users, $4B+ in processed transactions | CryptoLogic is now a major tech stock during the dot-com era |
| 2001 | Andrew steps down as CEO. Both brothers remain on board | New leadership to handle the next growth phase |
| 2002 | Ranked #1 on Profit 200 as Canada’s fastest-growing company. 26,181% growth over 5 years | Faster growth than any other Canadian business, period |
| 2003 | Listed on London Stock Exchange (CRP). Both brothers leave the company | Third stock exchange. The founders move on to new ventures |
| 2004 | Partnership with Betfair for exclusive online poker. Alderney certification | Expanding beyond casinos into poker. Entering regulated European markets |
| 2007 | Playboy Gaming and World Poker Tour join the CryptoLogic network. Market cap hits $400M+ | Peak valuation. Celebrity brands choose CryptoLogic over every other platform |
| 2012 | Amaya Gaming acquires CryptoLogic for $35.8 million | End of CryptoLogic as an independent company |
| 2014 | WagerLogic (including InterCasino) sold to Goldstar Acquisitionco for $70 million | InterCasino changes hands. The subsidiary alone was worth double what Amaya paid for the parent company |
That 26,181% growth number deserves a second look. Canadian Business magazine’s Profit list tracked the fastest-growing companies in Canada by revenue growth over five years. CryptoLogic wasn’t just on the list. It was number one. No tech startup, no oil company, no real estate developer in the entire country grew faster than an online gambling software company launched by two brothers fresh out of university.
CryptoLogic built the games. WagerLogic made the money. The subsidiary handled everything that wasn’t directly related to writing software code: licensing deals with casino operators, customer support infrastructure, payment processing through the ECash system, and regulatory compliance across every jurisdiction where their casinos operated.
The business model was dead simple. WagerLogic licensed CryptoLogic’s software to casino operators, charged them for it, and took a cut of the revenue. The operators handled marketing and player acquisition. WagerLogic handled the technology, payments, and the headache of keeping everything legal across multiple countries with wildly different gambling laws.
It was a model that the modern iGaming industry still follows. Platform providers build the tech, operators run the casinos, and the money flows through licensing agreements. The Rivkin brothers designed this structure in the mid-1990s, and three decades later, the fundamental framework hasn’t changed.
If InterCasino proved the concept, the partnerships that followed proved the business. CryptoLogic didn’t just attract shady offshore operators. They attracted some of the most recognized names in gambling and entertainment.
Each partnership expanded CryptoLogic’s reach into new jurisdictions and new customer segments. William Hill brought the UK betting crowd. Betfair brought the poker players. Playboy brought mainstream attention. The company that started in a Toronto basement was now powering casino experiences for brands that had been in the gambling business for decades or centuries before the internet existed.
CryptoLogic hit the Toronto Stock Exchange in September 1998, trading under the ticker CRY. For context, Google wouldn’t go public for another six years. Amazon had been public for barely a year. An online gambling company listing on a stock exchange? Nobody had seen that before. Most investors had never even played a casino game on the internet.
NASDAQ came next, in March 2000, right at the peak of the dot-com bubble. The timing was lucky. CryptoLogic went public on the world’s biggest tech exchange just before the market crashed, giving them access to capital that many dot-com companies never got. The ticker was CRYP.
London followed in 2003 (CRP), after Andrew and Mark had already stepped back from day-to-day operations. The London listing made strategic sense: Europe was becoming the center of regulated online gambling, and a London Stock Exchange listing gave CryptoLogic credibility with European partners and regulators.
Under CEO Lewis Rose (2002-2007), CryptoLogic’s market capitalization grew from $90 million to over $400 million. For a company that started with C$500,000 in venture capital, that’s a return that most Silicon Valley firms would kill for.
This question comes up a lot, and it deserves an honest answer. Microgaming, an Isle of Man company, claims to have launched The Gaming Club in 1994, two years before InterCasino. If that’s true, InterCasino was second, not first.
Here’s where it gets murky. The Gaming Club (originally casino.co.za) did exist in the mid-1990s, but early versions relied on manual transactions, meaning players had to wire money or call in payments rather than transacting directly through the website. InterCasino, powered by CryptoLogic’s ECash system, was the first online casino to process real-money wagers directly through its platform, in a fully automated, encrypted, real-time transaction.
So was InterCasino “the first”? In the strictest sense: it was the first online casino where you could deposit money, play games, and withdraw winnings entirely through the internet without picking up a phone or wiring funds manually. That distinction matters more than it sounds, because automated online transactions are what made online gambling scalable. Without CryptoLogic’s payment technology, online casinos would have remained a curiosity rather than a $100 billion industry.
Both Rivkins left CryptoLogic by 2003, walking away from the company they’d built from nothing into a publicly traded multinational. They were in their early thirties. Most founders would have stayed and ridden the growth wave. The Rivkins wanted to build something new.
Andrew didn’t sit still for long. In 2002, before even officially leaving CryptoLogic, he co-founded Columbia Exchange Systems Software with Lorne Abony, a former CryptoLogic collaborator. They rebranded it as FUN Technologies in 2003 and went after a different corner of the gaming world: casual games and fantasy sports.
The company raised C$1.8 million from early investors and went public twice: first on London’s Alternative Investment Market in 2003, then on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2004. Andrew’s track record at CryptoLogic was a major selling point. Investors who’d watched CryptoLogic go from zero to NASDAQ weren’t about to miss his second act.
In 2005, Liberty Media (the Colorado-based media conglomerate) bought a majority stake in FUN Technologies for $195 million. By late 2007, Liberty acquired the remaining shares, valuing the company at nearly C$500 million. Andrew Rivkin had done it again: built a company from a small idea, scaled it, and sold it for half a billion dollars.
After FUN Technologies, Andrew founded Rivkin Asset Management in 2009 (hedge funds), served as a consultant for Mood Media (in-store media company), and was involved in Mood Media’s $345 million acquisition of Muzak Holdings in 2011. He’s also an avid polo player who participates in charity tournaments across Canada.
Mark took a different direction. In 2004, he co-founded QT Inc. with Harvey Solursh, a former CryptoLogic CFO. QT is a Toronto-based investment firm focused on real estate, commercial investments, development, and mortgages. In 2005, he became chairman of Groove Media Inc., a video game developer known for its Groove Games retail publishing label.
Mark kept a lower profile than Andrew. No second IPO, no headline-grabbing acquisitions. But his business interests have remained active, and QT Inc. continues to operate as a private investment firm.
With Lewis Rose running the show after the brothers left, CryptoLogic kept climbing. The Playboy deal and World Poker Tour partnership happened during this era. The software got better, the game library expanded, and new regulated markets opened up across Europe. By 2007, the company was at its all-time peak.
But the years after 2007 were rough. The US passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) in 2006, which crushed the American online gambling market overnight. CryptoLogic, like most online gambling companies, took a hit. Competition from newer platforms intensified. The company’s market cap dropped.
In April 2012, the Amaya Gaming Group acquired CryptoLogic for $35.8 million. For a company that was worth $400 million five years earlier, that was a painful number. But the story wasn’t over. In February 2014, Amaya sold CryptoLogic’s consumer-facing subsidiary WagerLogic (which included InterCasino, InterPoker, and InterBingo) to Goldstar Acquisitionco for $70 million. The subsidiary alone was worth nearly double what Amaya had paid for the entire parent company. The brand that the Rivkin brothers created in 1996 still had value, even 18 years after its launch.
Here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough: every online casino you’ve ever played at exists because the Rivkin brothers proved it could work. Before CryptoLogic, the idea of betting actual cash on the internet was a fantasy. After CryptoLogic, it was a business. A very big business.
The modern online gambling world, from the crypto casinos processing Bitcoin withdrawals in five minutes to the live dealer tables streaming from studios in Riga, grew from the foundation that two Canadian brothers laid in the mid-1990s. The random number generators that guarantee fair play in every modern slot? CryptoLogic was among the first to implement and certify them for online use. The licensing model where software providers build the platform and operators run the casinos? That was WagerLogic’s business structure, designed by the Rivkins in the mid-1990s.
Today, providers like Pragmatic Play and Hacksaw Gaming create thousands of slot titles. Crypto casinos compete with traditional platforms for market share. The crypto casino sector alone is booming. The European online gambling market generates tens of billions annually. All of this traces back to November 17, 1996, when InterCasino accepted the first real-money bet over the internet.
Ask anyone who created online casinos and you’ll get blank stares. People know who created Facebook. People know who started Amazon. Nobody knows who started the online casino industry. Part of that is the nature of the gambling business: it operates in a gray zone between entertainment and vice, and its founders don’t get invited to the same conference stages as tech billionaires.
But the bigger reason is that Andrew and Mark Rivkin left CryptoLogic before the online gambling industry truly exploded into the mainstream. They walked away in 2001-2003, during the early growth phase. The real mass-market boom came later, driven by mobile devices, live dealer technology, and the global spread of regulated markets. By the time online casinos became a hundred-billion-dollar industry, the brothers who started it all were long gone, building different companies in different industries.
They didn’t stick around for the fame. They took the money, the experience, and the satisfaction of having built something from nothing, and moved on. In the world of tech entrepreneurship, that’s rare. Most founders hold on too long. The Rivkins timed their exit almost perfectly: they left before the dot-com crash destroyed their company’s value (CryptoLogic survived the crash, but many competitors didn’t), and before the UIGEA gutted the US market in 2006.
The irony of CryptoLogic’s name hasn’t aged well. “Crypto” in 1995 meant cryptography, the science of secure communication. In 2026, “crypto” means cryptocurrency. But the connection is more than just a naming coincidence. The same fundamental problem that Andrew and Mark solved in 1995, how do you move actual money securely between strangers on the internet, is the exact problem that Bitcoin and blockchain technology later addressed in a different way.
CryptoLogic used encryption and centralized payment processing. Modern crypto casinos use decentralized blockchain transactions. Different approaches to the same challenge. The Rivkin brothers were solving the trust problem for online payments before Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008. They were 13 years early to the party, just using different tools.
Today, when you deposit USDT at an online casino, the transaction happens in minutes without any intermediary. In 1996, CryptoLogic’s ECash system achieved something similar for its era: a way to move money for gambling without mailing a check or reading your credit card number to a stranger over the phone. The technology looks ancient now. The problem it solved was the same one that still drives innovation in online payments today.
Andrew and Mark Rivkin are the most important people in online gambling that nobody talks about. They created the technology that made internet casinos possible. Brothers launched the first site that let people bet actual cash online. They built a publicly traded company across three stock exchanges. They proved that online gambling could be a legitimate, regulated, global business at a time when most people thought the internet itself was a fad.
The entire industry, every slot you spin, every bonus you claim, every casino listed on sites like ours, exists because two brothers in Toronto decided to see if their encryption software could be used to let people play blackjack on the internet. It could. And the world of gambling has never been the same.
If you’re curious about how far the industry has come since that first bet on InterCasino in 1996, check out our guides on how RTP works in modern games or our responsible gambling guide to make sure you’re playing smart in the world that the Rivkins helped create.
Andrew and Mark Rivkin created CryptoLogic, the software that powered InterCasino, which launched on November 17, 1996, and became the first online casino to accept real-money wagers directly through the internet. The casino was operated by William “Billy” Scott from Antigua. Microgaming’s The Gaming Club also claims an earlier launch date (1994), but early versions of that site relied on manual payment methods rather than automated online transactions.
CryptoLogic was an online gambling software company founded by brothers Andrew and Mark Rivkin in February 1995 in Toronto, Canada. It started as an internet security firm but pivoted to online gambling software. The company was listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (1998), NASDAQ (2000), and the London Stock Exchange (2003). Through its subsidiary WagerLogic, it licensed casino software to operators including William Hill, Betfair, and Playboy. CryptoLogic was acquired by Amaya Gaming for $35.8 million in 2012.
WagerLogic was CryptoLogic’s subsidiary that handled the business side of online gambling: software licensing to casino operators, payment processing through the ECash system, customer support, and regulatory compliance. It was sold to Goldstar Acquisitionco for $70 million in 2014, which included the InterCasino, InterPoker, and InterBingo brands.
InterCasino launched in 1996, making it one of the longest-running online casinos in history. It won multiple industry awards between 2002 and 2007. The casino changed hands several times: from its original operator Billy Scott (who was charged by US prosecutors in 1998) to CryptoLogic’s ownership, then to Amaya Gaming (2012), and finally to Goldstar Acquisitionco (2014). The site is currently registered in Malta and regulated by the Malta Gaming Authority.
Andrew Rivkin’s net worth is estimated at approximately $19 million. Mark Rivkin’s net worth is not publicly reported. Both brothers made money from CryptoLogic’s growth and their subsequent ventures, with Andrew’s FUN Technologies exit (C$500 million sale to Liberty Media) being the largest known transaction.
Yes, directly. The B2B licensing model (software provider builds the platform, operator runs the casino) that they designed through WagerLogic is still the dominant structure in iGaming today. Providers like Pragmatic Play and Nolimit City license their games to casino operators in exactly the same way CryptoLogic licensed its software to InterCasino in 1996. The framework hasn’t changed. The scale has.
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