I've been observing how the staking ecosystem really works for a while, and honestly, it's a pretty deep rabbit hole to fall into. For those who don't know, Stake is basically the largest cryptocurrency casino in the world operating from Curaçao, and what's happening there is... well, it's worth understanding.

It all started when I noticed that certain streamers on Kick had an absolutely ridiculous luck playing slots. Drake, Adin Ross, Trainwreckstv – these guys won big prizes with a frequency that defies all statistical logic. Bloomberg analyzed 500 hours of live streams and found that Drake won jackpots on Easygo slot machines (the Stake matrix) approximately four times more often than average players. We're talking about a major prize every 2,500 spins versus one every 10,000 for regular players.

But here’s the interesting part: in games operated by third parties, their win rate was completely average. Suspicious coincidence, huh?

Ed Craven, the founder, apparently is very involved in all this. He literally appears on streamers’ live broadcasts, encouraging them, suggesting which games to play, topping up their wallets. In one stream, Craven told Ross that if he had bet more money on a certain game, he would have won 5 million dollars. Then Ross hit a massive jackpot on that game. Craven has even publicly denied manipulating the odds, but the numbers speak for themselves.

The business model is quite clever if it weren’t so problematic. Stake processes approximately 10 billion dollars in bets monthly – that’s 4% of Bitcoin’s annual transaction volume. Their revenue hit 47 billion dollars in 2024. All this without real regulation, operating from a small office in Curaçao registered literally across from a cemetery.

What really concerns me is how this affects minors and problem gamblers. I met (a good one, the article mentions) a Swedish kid who started playing on Stake at 15. No one asked for age verification. By 17, during the pandemic, he was betting between $10,000 and $40,000 weekly in Bitcoin. He deposited 14 bitcoins – roughly $100,000 at that time – without anyone at Stake doing KYC. The kid tried to self-exclude multiple times. Each time, Stake gave him a 24-hour cooling-off period. When the exclusion was activated, Craven simply contacted him via Telegram offering reloads.

In seven years, that player lost about $1.5 million in cryptocurrencies. If he hadn’t bet that much, today he’d have between $15 and $20 million in current Bitcoin value.

Now, about the corporate structure: Stake and Kick (the streaming platform founded by Craven) present themselves as “independent,” but share the same parent (Easygo), the same executives, the same office in Melbourne, and employees working simultaneously on both. It’s a perfect structure to evade regulations – Stake says it doesn’t control advertising, Kick says it’s just a platform. Meanwhile, streamers earning eight figures monthly promote Stake to audiences that include minors.

The contract numbers are astronomical. Ross received at least 26,000 ETH from November 2021 to March 2025 – roughly $78 million. Drake gets between $45 and $50 million in cryptocurrencies weekly, according to an ex-employee. Trainwreckstv publicly admitted he uses platform funds, not real money, meaning that even if he wins, he can’t withdraw most of his earnings. It’s essentially an animated advertisement.

Lawsuits have started piling up. There are at least 10 class actions in the U.S., including one in California accusing Stake, Drake, and Ross of “planning one of the largest illegal gambling activities in California history.” The argument is that live streams make statistically impossible wins look normal, deceiving vulnerable players about the real risks.

The most absurd part: when Curaçao’s prosecutor finally acted in July 2025 after complaints about poor identity verification, they issued fines of $12,500 to 12 operators. That’s roughly a minute and a half of Stake’s betting revenue. It’s a joke.

Craven continues living luxuriously in Melbourne – he bought a mansion in 2022 for 56.8 million Australian dollars. Meanwhile, there are reports that Stake’s social media inbox was filled with suicidal threats from problem gamblers.

What bothers me most is that all this is relatively well known among those of us investigating these spaces, but it still keeps going. Stake continues processing billions in bets monthly. Streamers keep earning fortunes. And new young players sign up every day, probably watching those viral clips of massive wins without understanding that the odds are completely manipulated.

If you’re new to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, beware of these platforms. The casino always wins, but at Stake, it seems some win way more than others – and those “others” are exactly who you and I are.