CRYPTO CASINO
Yield Sec estimates that gambling in cryptocurrency generated US$81.4bn GGR last year alone despite crypto casino being illegal in most jurisdictions. 2 The numbers are disputed and even Stake, the largest market player, only claims GGR of US$4.7bn. Whichever total you accept, the market share being carved out by crypto casino is sizeable. While crypto gambling sites are blocked almost everywhere, they are readily accessible as gamblers bypass geo-blocks in their home countries to bet on unregulated offshore platforms. Use of VPNs is becoming increasingly common (some estimate that 30 percent of Americans and over half of Chinese internet users login via a remote server to mask their location). The internet is a ready source of guidance for those looking to get around the restrictions with tutorials often promoted by influencers who target new users. KYC safeguards can also be circumvented by purchasing crypto casino user accounts on peer-to-peer marketplaces. Companies that operate crypto casinos base themselves in jurisdictions like Curaçao, Malta, the Isle of Man (more on IoM shortly) and Gibraltar where crypto gambling is legal. The biggest names include Stake, Rollbit and Roobet and all have seen double digit growth in the last few years. Stake, operated by Curaçao-incorporated Medium Rare, claims to account for up to four percent of total transactions on the global bitcoin network, with 25 million users placing 300 billion bets on the platform since its launch in 2017. It reported GGR last year of US$4.7bn, up 80 per cent from 2022. While the likes of Entain, Flutter and Bet365 don’t divulge GGR, Entain reported a Net Gaming Revenue (NGR) of US$6.7bn, Flutter declared revenue of $14bn and Bet365 posted revenue for the year to March 2024 of $4.8bn. Whilst not directly comparable, Stake’s financials certainly place it in the same ballpark. Stake claims it is not a crypto casino saying that over half of the transactions on its platform are conducted in fiat currencies. It says its operations are “fully licensed” and “conducted in full compliance with applicable laws and regulations”. It goes on to affirm that its customers undergo “stringent KYC and AML processes”.
However, the FT, which reported the claims, was able to create a Stake crypto gambling account from London using a VPN and was not asked for proof of address or affordability documentation until after starting to play. Influencer driven growth One of the accusations made against Stake and its peers is that they use influencers to spread often misleading and unrealistic information over social media concerning odds and the likelihood of winning. In their defence they say that what “content creators . . . choose to post is entirely their personal decision and is neither directed nor influenced by Stake”. Does this claim stand up to scrutiny? Attendees to the IMGL spring conference in Vancouver heard a Ted Talk-style session on influencer marketing where figures were given for the kind of sums influencers can command. Matthew Showell, CEO of Snap Call Media share the story of a very successful video game streamer who goes by the name of TrainwrecksTV or Trainwreck. He started streaming slots content on Twitch in 2021 quickly building up a large following. Within weeks he had 77,000 concurrent viewers racking up over 600,000 hours of combined watch time for slots on his channel per day. He was quickly offered a sponsorship deal by Stake that saw Trainwreck gambling US$ millions almost daily on the offshore crypto casino. We cannot tell how many customers Trainwreck helped sign up or where they came from, but we get some insight into the value he provided for Stake from the amount he claimed he was paid by the company. In an interview in 2022, Trainwreck revealed that for that 18-month sponsorship Stake paid him US$360mn. Eventually, Twitch decided to ban content promoting crypto casinos, but that did not stop influencers like Trainwreck from promoting them. To get around the ban, Stake’s parent company Easygo launched kick.com, a rival service where they could stream slot-related content under rules of its own creation.
The rise of crypto casinos and the influencer marketing
2 https://www.yieldsec.com/static/Crypto_casino_takings_top%20$80bn_as_gamblers_bypass%20blocks-dd11439235e853895be137b- d2c092198.pdf
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IMGL MAGAZINE | JUNE 2025
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