Stake Built a $4.7 Billion Business Where It’s Banned. The Regulated Industry Should Be Paying Attention.
By Stephen Crystal, CEO, SCCG Management
Here is a fact that should sit with every operator, regulator, and investor in the Global Gambling Industry: Stake, a crypto casino licensed in Curacao, generated $4.7 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2024. That is an 80 percent increase from 2022. The platform draws 127 million monthly visits, processes roughly 4 percent of all Bitcoin transaction volume, and has facilitated more than 300 billion cumulative bets since its launch in 2017.
It did all of this while being banned in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Germany, and more than 40 other countries.
Stake is not an edge case. The broader crypto casino industry generated $81.4 billion in GGR in 2024, a fivefold increase from two years earlier. These numbers are not coming from unregulated backwaters. They represent demand that is actively leaving, or never entering, regulated markets. Understanding why matters more than debating whether it should be happening.
What Stake Actually Did
Most operators in restricted verticals follow a familiar playbook: invest in SEO, buy affiliate traffic, run paid media where regulations allow, and fight for positioning on platforms they do not control. Stake took a fundamentally different approach to distribution.
The company invested heavily in creator-led marketing, paying streamers to broadcast live gambling sessions on Twitch. The strategy worked. Revenue grew from approximately $100 million to over $2 billion in roughly two years. When Twitch banned gambling streams in October 2022, most observers expected the growth to stall.
Instead, Stake’s parent company, Easygo, launched Kick, a competing streaming platform. Kick removed the platform dependency entirely. Rather than renting attention on channels that could shut them out at any moment, Stake built owned distribution infrastructure. Traffic increased fivefold. The 127 million monthly visits the platform now attracts flow through a channel that no third party can revoke.
This is not a story about a marketing hack. It is a story about vertical integration of audience distribution, and it represents a strategic capability that most regulated operators have not developed.
The Consumer Protection Reality
None of this should be read as endorsement. Stake’s growth has come with serious and well-documented concerns.
The UK Gambling Commission opened an investigation into the platform over marketing content that regulators determined could appeal to young audiences. Stake subsequently exited the UK market in March 2025, with TGP Europe (its licensed UK entity) terminating operations. In the United States, the Los Angeles City Attorney filed a lawsuit against Stake.us, the company’s sweepstakes-model alternative, alleging it constitutes an illegal gambling operation. In 2023, North Korea’s Lazarus Group compromised Stake’s infrastructure and extracted $41 million from user wallets.
Beyond these specific incidents, the broader crypto casino model operates with minimal Know Your Customer verification at initial registration, limited affordability checks, and an influencer marketing pipeline that reaches audiences who may not meet age requirements in their home jurisdictions. These are not minor footnotes. They are real consequences of a model that operates outside the frameworks designed to prevent them.
The Question Regulators Should Be Asking
The instinct in most regulated markets has been enforcement: ban the platform, block access, pursue legal action. That instinct is not wrong in principle. Consumer protection frameworks exist for good reasons, and platforms that circumvent them create real risks.
But the results of that enforcement approach deserve honest examination. Stake is larger now than it was before any of these actions. The crypto casino industry is five times bigger than it was two years ago. Bans have not reduced demand. They have redirected it to environments where the protections regulators care about do not exist.
This is the same dynamic playing out across multiple regulatory questions in our industry right now. When you prohibit something that consumers want without offering a regulated alternative that meets the same need, the activity does not stop. It moves to channels where there is no oversight, no intervention capability, and no tax revenue for the jurisdictions doing the banning.
The question is not whether Stake should be allowed to operate as it does. The question is why this much demand is flowing to platforms that operate outside regulated systems, and what regulated markets can do to capture that demand inside frameworks that actually protect consumers.
What the Regulated Industry Can Learn
Three observations are worth sitting with.
First, distribution strategy in this industry is overdue for rethinking. The regulated sector remains heavily dependent on Google, affiliate networks, and paid media channels that are being disrupted by AI on one side and platform policy changes on the other. Stake’s move to owned distribution, building a direct relationship with its audience through creators and then through an owned platform, represents a strategic model that regulated operators have largely ignored. You do not have to approve of how Stake executed it to recognize that the principle of owning your distribution rather than renting it is sound.
Second, the gap between what regulated platforms offer and what consumers are choosing tells us something. Speed, accessibility, crypto-native transactions, and a frictionless onboarding experience are driving user preference. Regulated operators can deliver many of these benefits within compliant frameworks, but the industry has been slow to prioritize them. The longer that gap persists, the more volume migrates to platforms that fill it without the consumer protections that should accompany it.
Third, enforcement without alternative is not a long-term strategy. The most effective regulatory frameworks in our industry’s history have not been the ones that banned the most aggressively. They have been the ones that created regulated pathways compelling enough to draw demand away from unregulated alternatives. The jurisdictions that figure out how to do that for crypto-native gambling will be better positioned than those that continue to rely on prohibition alone.
Looking Ahead
Stake’s trajectory is a data point, not a model to follow. It tells us where consumer demand is flowing, how distribution is evolving, and where the assumptions underlying current regulatory approaches may need updating.
The operators and regulators who treat this as useful intelligence rather than a threat to dismiss will be the ones best positioned to build the next generation of consumer-protective, commercially viable gaming markets. The ones who ignore it will continue to watch the numbers grow on the other side of the wall.
Stephen Crystal is the founder and CEO of SCCG Management, a global advisory firm serving the gaming, sports betting, and emerging technology industries. SCCG advises operators, regulators, and investors across more than 100 jurisdictions worldwide.
For more on SCCG’s advisory services across market strategy, regulatory navigation, and emerging technology, visit sccgmanagement.com.
