In 2017, two millennials named Ed Craraven and Bjon Trani created Stake, an online casino that operates using cryptocurrency. They didn't know it at the time, but their new startup would eventually become the largest offshore crypto casino in the world with an estimated valuation of 23.5 billion, making them two of the youngest self-made billionaires on the planet. From their first time meeting playing video games online to the controversial legal loopholes they grew their business from to their genius and shady marketing strategies and more. The story of this duo and their company is nothing short of fascinating. But how did they even get the idea to start a crypto casino to begin with? Well, it all started back in 2010 when they were just 15 and 17 years old playing Runescape, but not just for the fun of it. They met on this game and quickly grew their friendship over their love of staking on it. Now, I don't know too much about Runescape. I mean, I was too busy drooling over finding diamonds in Minecraft. But what's important for you to know is that staking in Runescape is essentially when players bet on 1v one fights in game. Ed and Bejon created their own sports book of sorts for these fights, taking real life money from people who wanted some action on these 1v ones, and it was actually profitable, but not for very long. They eventually were both banned from Runescape because of their scheme, which left them without their favorite video game and their favorite hobby. However, even though they got hit with the chopping block, they still became great friends through all of this. And their love for gambling on video games eventually led to the creation of their first business together. In February of 2013, Ed and Bejon at just 18 and 20 years old launched an online casino called Prime Dice, and it was very profitable. Surprisingly, the casino itself wasn't actually a casino, but rather just one game. The concept was simple. Players deposit cryptocurrency into their account and try to guess where a randomly generated number lands between one and 100. And based on how risky their bet is, the multiplier for their bet amount will increase or decrease accordingly. Is this bottom of the barrel degeneracy? Absolutely. But people were all over it. The day it launched, Ed and Bejon saw over a million dollars in bets placed. And over the next few years, those bets continued to grow exponentially. And besides one exploit someone found in the game where they stole a million dollars worth of Bitcoin, the duo's first casino game was a smash hit monetarily speaking and more importantly proved to them that there was a massive audience for online crypto casino games, which is when they realized they needed to expand quickly. In 2016, with a good chunk of change to his name from Prime Dice, Van flew out of his New York apartment to where Ed was living in Melbourne, Australia, and never went back. Shortly after, Ed impulsively purchased an office space where himself and Bejon worked on their new venture, EasyGo. In simple terms, EasyGo was going to be the company that would develop casino games for online casinos like Stake, which they started the following year. In typical startup fashion, Ed and Bejon moved as fast as they could to expand their team of developers to build out a ton of casino games for Stake, like roulette, slots, blackjack, you name it. Their office even resembled what a typical tech company looks like with in-house baristas, chefs, big giveaways for employees, and even company boat cruises. Now, what I find most impressive about all of this was they were doing this when they were only 21 and 23 years old. I mean, shit, when I was that age, I was a bum in college, skipping class, and looking forward to my next vendor. But anyway, these two young guys were getting really serious about launching a full-fledged crypto casino. I mean, they had the employees, a shit ton of money from Prime Dice, and the ambition to get stake off the ground and roll. But there was just one massive problem in their plan. It was illegal to run an online casino in Australia. Since the inception of online gambling in the late '9s, they've always been against it, meaning casinos like Stake couldn't exist in the continent. So, you're probably thinking, "How in the hell were Ed and Bejon able to start not one but two companies that solely focused on online gambling in a place where it had been banned for decades?" Well, the answer lies in one remote island I guarantee you've never heard of. This is Kurissau, a Dutch Caribbean island rich with marine life, beaches, pastel colored architecture, and most importantly, extremely liberal gambling laws. Since the inception of online gambling, Curisowl was the go-to spot for online gambling startups because they gave out gambling license like candy. Plus, they had overseas countries and territory status, 0% taxation on foreign sourced income, 0% value added tax, no sales tax or import duties, and no restrictions on the withdrawals of dividends. These amazing benefits led to literally thousands of gambling operators obtaining gambling license from the island country, including our two boys from Australia. They set up a company incorporated in Curisowl called Medium Rare Envy and listed their company's address as a real place on the island, albeit an old shack, and snagged a license for themselves. Okay, so they have a gambling license based on some random island. Now, how does that help them not get bent over by the Australian government? Well, according to the Interactive Gambling Act, an Australian law that regulates online gambling, online gambling companies were only legal if the gambling providers offered services to people in Australia. There was nothing in the law that said it was illegal to operate a foreign licensed casino from Australia. Case in point, the duo was allowed to run Stake and EasyGo from Australia as long as they didn't serve people in Australia or advertise there. And because Stake's online casino license was registered in Kiraau, they were able to avoid any governing bodies from taking them down. And all the people of Australia or anywhere really had to do on their part to play on stake was to download a VPN, set up their stake account with an address not in Australia, and boom, they could pun away. And speaking of VPNs, if you're going to be chronically online these days, and hopefully not gambling, you need to be using one. And the one I trust the most is private internet access. A VPN or virtual private network is basically a secure encrypted tunnel for your internet connection. It hides your IP address and protects your data from anyone trying to snoop, like hackers, your internet provider, or that one weird looking guy in the corner of your local coffee shop. Using the internet without private internet access is like going to a five-star buffet, but they only let you eat the croutons. Seriously, streaming services like Netflix have entire catalogs that are locked based on where you live. But with private internet access, you can switch your virtual location to unlock shows and movies from all around the world. It's like teleporting your laptop to London, Tokyo, or New York, minus the jet lag. On top of that, private internet access is available for all platform, including Windows, Mac OS, Android, Linux, iOS, and many more. And you only need one subscription to protect as many devices as you want. With these benefits and many more, it was a no-brainer for me to try out Private Internet Access. And I can say with confidence, it's great. So, go to piaavvpn.com/bcproductions to get 83% off plus four extra months completely free. There's a 30-day money back guarantee and it's risk-f free. Trust me, your future binge watching couch potato self will thank you. So, now that Ed and Bejon had set up shop, their mission in life was to get as many users on stake as possible. Now, that's obviously the goal for any business ever created. I mean, you want to get customers in the door. But what was different about the duo's business was how closely tied it was to two industries, crypto and gambling. And luckily for them, the explosive rise of one of those industries helped them out a ton. Pre 2016, not many people knew about cryptocurrency. And if they did know about it, they were most likely selling drugs on the dark web. This is evident by the price of Bitcoin through the years. From its inception in 2009 to the end of 2016, Bitcoin had gone from worth nothing to around a,000 bucks. Now, I know all the finance bros are going to be up my ass here because in reality, the percentage growth on that is absolutely insane. But what's most important here is the rise of crypto becoming a household name. In 2017, when the price of Bitcoin exploded to over 17,000, everyone was talking about it. This mainstream chatter slowly shook off the reputation of Bitcoin being this shady currency and established itself as an actual legit thing that had value behind it. And because of that notion, people across the world started to adopt crypto and create wallets to buy it, which for Ed and Bejon was huge. Now that hundreds of thousands of people were creating wallets and buying crypto, Stake had become more accessible to way more people because in order to use Stake, well, you needed to have a crypto wallet. The rise in their total addressable market led to Stake going from being a pretty niche website in the crypto community to a decently well-known platform reaching tens of millions of dollars in revenue by 2019. But even though more people were into crypto and knew about the site, Ed and Bejon weren't satisfied. After all, they wanted to accomplish a much much bigger goal of making Stake a worldwide brand. And luckily for them, a worldwide pandemic hit just at the right time. Now, of course, I don't mean that in the way of people getting sick, but for the fact that everyone was forced inside. Millions of people crammed in their homes and apartments became bored as hell. Some people picked up new hobbies. Some people like myself opted to drink six-packs and run squads with the fellas. But what a hell of a lot of people did was watch their favorite streamers on Twitch. The amount of both streamers and viewers of Twitch nearly doubled during the pandemic with 26.5 million users visiting the site daily. And the duo being the young, savvy businessmen they were saw a great opportunity. What if they paid streamers with large audiences to use their site in front of their millions of fans? And so Ed and Bejon set off on their plan to reach a global audience that had nothing better to do than to stare at their screens. And it worked to a tea. Massive influencers including Train Rex TV, XQC, Aiden Ross, the Neelk Boys, and many more were reportedly given at least a million dollars a month to spend slots, play Blackjack, and yell at dealers live in front of their massive fan bases. The list of stars recruited by the duo went beyond typical social media people also most notably Drake who was given an estimated 20 million a month to Gamble Live and had multiple news outlets talking about it. At one point 64 of the top thousand streamers streamed only slots and all of these guys played with massive bank rolls and exclusively played high stakes which to their fans of mostly teenage boys was awesome. As a result of these new fans, Ed and Bejon saw growth they couldn't imagine happening. Between 2020 and 2022, stakes revenue went from around 100 million to roughly 2 billion. They were reportedly handling betting volumes in the tens of billions of dollars, and the growth of their company made a 26-year-old Ed and a 28-year-old Bejon both billionaires. But their genius marketing play didn't come without some pretty major controversy. There were a plethora of ethical concerns from these streamers partnering with Stake, with each one putting Ed and Bejon in a hotter seat. For example, many streamers didn't disclose that they were playing with stakes money, which not only made them lose the trust of some of their fans, but raised concerns about the massive wins they were showing their fans, because, well, in a sense, it wasn't really their money they were risking. But the real backlash came from the fact that it was mostly young, impressionable teens watching this gambling content. At the base level, just over a fifth of Twitch users are between 13 and 17 years old. But that doesn't account for the audience ages that these streamers viewers actually were. It's safe to assume that a bigger percentage of them were in that age range and promoting a dangerous vice that could ruin lives to such a young demographic for personal gain wasn't really the best look ethically speaking. Plus, many of these influencers often downplayed the risk of gambling and only showed it in an entertaining light, especially when they won big. Couple that with the fact that Twitch had no age verification requirements for viewing gambling live streams, and it's easy to see why these partnerships were a recipe for disaster. That recipe was the main reason why other big platforms like YouTube and Facebook had already banned streaming online gambling sites to begin with. So, inevitably, Twitch was pressured from all angles to follow suit. And that pressure eventually made them buckle. In September 2022, Twitch announced that it was banning streamers from streaming stake in similar crypto casinos, citing concerns about it being predatory behavior. This was a massive roadblock for Ed and Bejian's plan. They had just lost access to a huge part of their marketing strategy, a strategy they had proven to increase their business more than 20fold. And even though they tried to combat the Twitch ban by launching their own streaming service, Kick, they still needed to find a surefire way to stay relevant in front of millions of people. And the way they did that was a little more simple than you might think. Even though their main source of marketing essentially vanished into thin air, Ed and Bejon still had a massive war chest to use to their advantage. And the way they used it was through paid partnerships. They sponsored essentially anything that had a pulse and was willing to rep them, including a laundry list of soccer organizations, the UFC, Major League, and USA Cricket, among other organizations. These partnerships extended beyond teams and sports leagues into athletes as well. Evident by their collabs with UFC fighters like Max Hallowa, Alex Pereira, Israel Adisagna, F1 driver Pietro Fidipali, Argentinian soccer legend Sier Aguero, and even porn actress Bonnie Blue. But their biggest and most hilarious partnerships were through social media. If you've been on any social network recently, I'm sure you've seen posts with this stake watermark on it. This idea came from the minds of Ed and Bejon who decided to pay content aggregators who are basically accounts who repost viral images and videos to slap their logo on these posts. It wasn't just a handful of these accounts either. There were literally so many of these watermarked videos and images being posted that it became a meme in itself, which honestly was best case scenario for the duo. And despite once again their marketing play receiving backlash, mainly for violating some social platforms rules on gambling advertisements, Ed and Vjon had hit a record amount of revenue thanks to their sponsorships, $4.7 billion in 2024. All in all, Stake was now worth around 23.5 billion as a company, and the duo had fulfilled their goal of growing Stake into a worldwide brand. While doing so, they had become two of the youngest self-made billionaires in the world, and all that was left to do was to enjoy their newfound riches. Ed went on to buy about as many properties as I have phone chargers, including a beautiful $ 38.5 million mansion in Melbourne, a record-breaking $80 million property near that mansion, two more homes for a combined $76 million, and multiple topf flooror pen houses. He also drives sexy cars, helped his parents purchase a Jamaica Blue Cafe franchise, and enjoys front row seats at NBA games and tennis tournaments. Bejan also let loose a little bit with a small purchase of 47 million for a Manhattan townhouse that was previously owned by David Rockefeller. Yes, that Rockefeller. And as for their baby, Stake is now considered the seventh largest gambling group and largest online crypto casino in the world, available in over 100 countries and continuing to do billions in revenue. Now, something else you should continue to do is watch this video that YouTube thinks you'll enjoy, and I hope you do.