Stake.com is one of the best success stories in the history of startups. What’s interesting about the business is the obscurity of its origin. The company is based in Australia, where little to no gamblers would have guessed it is. Founders Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani first created the startup Easygo Gaming – on the surface, just another developer of casino software. As it turned out, however, the products of Easy go propelled Stake.com to the very top. What the developers did right and how they grew their business to a conservative value of $1 billion will be the subject of this short write-up.
Who is Easygo, you might ask? Sure, let’s start from there. The firm builds scalable, smart gaming solutions and is the driving force behind Stake.com’s success online. Easygo’s clame to fame is Primedice – a Bitcoin dice site with a clean interface used by thousands on a daily basis.
Established in 2016, Easygo practically took the community by storm with its Bitcoin-compatible games, which are also verifiable through provably fair technology. Consequently, this played a huge role in Stake.com plotting its way to the top of the Bitcoin gambling branch. As a result, the online platform is way past the other casinos in Australia you can read about on www.casinoaustralia.net. Stake.com is where it is, thanks to the plan of the crypto casino king Ed Craven and his right hand Bijan Tehrani.
Ed Craven – who is now the owner of one of the most expensive properties in Australia, partnered with Bijan Tehrani to establish Stake.com together in 2017. As they say – the rest is history and strategic decisions. For example, the brand is very active on the sports betting front. It doesn’t shy away from sponsoring athletes and entire sports teams, as is the case with Watford F.C. and Everton F.C. They even have something in the bag for the die-hard gambler Drake who is also part of the Stake.com legacy.
Why Being an Australian Company Matters
The Australian connection is not to the taste of the big fish in the industry. You could almost feel that the Australian origin of Stake.com was not in the headlines for a reason. Online casino gambling isn’t exactly legal in the country, and real money betting collectively is not regarded as something productive, given that problem gambling is spreading across the nation like wildfire. So, when the information that Stake.com is an Australian operation came out, both institutions and individuals took heed.
The anti-money laundering officials and anti-gambling proponents started digging into the past of Stake.com, but did not find anything substantial that could interrupt the operation of the platform. On the other side of the equation are the other gambling business owners of Australia, who were taken aback when the truth about Stake.com was revealed.
As a licensed in Curacao operator, Stake.com is exploiting a loophole in Australia’s main gambling law that is otherwise dead set against casino games. If the latter is not brought to Australians, it’s perfectly legal to distribute casino gambling services from Australia. This paradox has allowed for the existence of Stake.com and has kept it outside the jurisdiction of Australian money-laundering law. The company holds a Curacao license and has almost no legal touchpoints with Australia.
The Cryptocurrency Factor
During the pandemic, Australia took a plunge into its gambling obsession and marked a record-high in losses per person. This, no doubt, contributed to the rapid growth of the Stake.com business in 2020 and 2021, which is comparable to that of the top 10 Chinese startups. The other huge contributing factor to the expansion of Stake.com is the fact that transactions are made with cryptocurrency.
Research shows, however, that winnings are not wired directly to the punter’s wallet but rather withdrawn as hard currency, which is then deposited into the user’s wallet. Experts speculate that this high-level maneuver is done with the idea of circumventing heavily regulated banks. At present, the operator accepts payments made with all mainstream cryptocurrencies – Ethereum, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Tron, Ripple, Dogecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Tether and has no intention of slowing down.
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