Stake is a combined crypto casino and sportsbook at stake.com, live since 2017 and operated by Medium Rare N.V. of Willemstad, Curaçao. Built by Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani on the back of an earlier Bitcoin dice game, it has grown into the largest of the crypto casino sites by reported revenue, with a betting arm that carries similar weight in crypto sports wagering.
The commercial verdict lives elsewhere: our Stake Casino review rates the gaming product, bonus terms, and payout speed, while the betting markets, odds, and live features are assessed in the Stake Sportsbook review.
Who Operates Stake?
The operating company is Medium Rare N.V., incorporated in Curaçao in November 2017 and registered under number 145353 at Korporaalweg 10, Willemstad. Co-founders Ed Craven, an Australian, and Bijan Tehrani, an American, met as teenagers playing RuneScape and still own the business; day-to-day leadership sits with CEO Mladen Vučković. Much of the engineering and game development happens at Easygo, the Melbourne studio the pair set up in 2016 — although Australian law keeps stake.com itself out of the founders' home market. Reported revenue reached $2.6 billion in 2022 and roughly $4.7 billion by 2024, figures that place Stake among the biggest gambling operators of any kind.
Licensing
Stake spent its first years as a sublicensee of Antillephone N.V. under Curaçao's old master-licence system (8048/JAZ). When the island's LOK reform replaced master licences with direct authorisation, Medium Rare N.V. obtained its own Curaçao Gaming Authority licence, OGL/2024/1451/0918, which now covers both the casino and the sportsbook — the same regulator standing behind the Curaçao-licensed crypto casinos in our directory.
Outside Curaçao, the group has bought its way into regulated markets rather than applying cold: Betfair Colombia in 2023, the Italian licensee Idealbet in 2024, and Denmark's Mocinoplay in 2025. In the United States, where the crypto platform is unavailable, the separate Stake.us site operates under a sweepstakes model instead of a casino licence.
Corporate History
Craven and Tehrani's first venture was Primedice, a provably fair Bitcoin dice game launched in 2013. Easygo followed in 2016, and stake.com went live in 2017 with Medium Rare N.V. incorporated that November as its operator. In 2022 the founders added Kick, a live-streaming platform that now shares branding with the casino, and Stake's sponsorship push carried the name into mainstream sport — backing the Alfa Romeo Formula One team in 2023, then taking title sponsorship of Sauber as Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber for the 2024–25 seasons.
A British site, stake.uk.com, ran from December 2021 as a fiat-only white label operated by TGP Europe Limited under a UK Gambling Commission licence. That chapter closed in early 2025: the Commission opened an investigation into a Stake-branded social media advert, TGP Europe announced it would shut the site, and stake.uk.com went offline by 11 March 2025. TGP Europe subsequently surrendered its British licence rather than pay a £3.3 million penalty over due-diligence and anti-money-laundering failures. The core stake.com platform was never UK-licensed and continues under the Curaçao arrangement described above, with Medium Rare N.V. named in its terms as the responsible entity.
