Stake review: licence, withdrawals, complaints and verdict

Image: Stake on X

Stake is a crypto casino and sportsbook run from Curaçao by Medium Rare N.V., and it is the brand most people mean when they talk about crypto gambling. CryptoSlate reports revenue of about $4.7 billion in 2024, and an analysis by Stream Hatchet found Stake in 60% of all iGaming brand mentions in Twitch and Kick stream titles in January 2026. On 11 October 2026 the Curaçao Gaming Authority's certificate page showed its licence as active.

• Launched: 2017 (Medium Rare N.V. was incorporated in Curaçao in November 2017, company number 145353)
• Operator: Medium Rare N.V., Willemstad, Curaçao; CEO listed as Mladen Vučković
• Licence: Curaçao Gaming Authority, OGL/2024/1451/0918, active since 9 June 2025, approved domain stake.com (checked 11 October 2026)
• Coins: 22 listed as of 5 October 2026, including BTC, ETH, USDT, USDC, LTC, SOL, DOGE, BCH, XRP, TRX and BNB
• KYC policy: four verification levels; ID, address and source-of-funds checks can be required before withdrawals
• Games: thousands of slots from more than 100 studios, Stake Originals, live dealer tables, poker and a full sportsbook
• UK and US: stake.com says it is not available in the UK, US or Australia; Stake.us is a separate US sweepstakes site
• Our rating: Mixed

It appears across our crypto casinos hub and in ten of our lists: Bitcoin casinos, Ethereum casinos, USDT and stablecoin casinos, altcoin casinos, provably fair and crash casinos, crypto sportsbooks, crypto slots casinos, crypto live dealer casinos, streamer casinos and high roller and VIP casinos.

Stake has a verified Curaçao licence, a long record of fast crypto payouts and responsive complaint handling, but offshore-only protection, unsettled ownership questions, a 2023 hack, a forced UK exit and ongoing US lawsuits keep it at Mixed.

We rate crypto casinos from public sources only: the licence and what it covers, who owns it, what players report about withdrawals and complaints, how clear its terms are and how long it has been trading. Last reviewed 11 October 2026. How we rate crypto casinos.

Stake grew out of a crypto dice game. Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani launched Primedice in 2013, set up the Melbourne games studio Easygo in 2016 and put stake.com live in 2017, according to CryptoSlate's company profile, which says the two founders still own the business.

The public ownership record is less tidy than that. On the licence, the named owner is Mladen Vučković, who is also listed as chief executive. In September 2026 the Dutch outlet Follow the Money published an investigation built on leaked Curaçao Gaming Authority files, and Casinos.com reported that the records name Vučković as owner and show Stake's licence was granted while the regulator was still working out who controlled the company. Stake had not commented when that report was last updated on 25 September 2026.

Before Curaçao rebuilt its licensing system, Stake traded as a sublicensee of Antillephone N.V. under master licence 8048/JAZ. Its own licence from the regulator, OGL/2024/1451/0918, dates from 9 June 2025. Alongside the offshore site, the group has bought or licensed local operations: Betfair Colombia in 2023, Idealbet in Italy and a Peruvian licence in 2024, a Brazilian licence and Denmark's Mocinoplay in 2025, then Greenland and Mexico in 2026.

Sponsorship made the name famous. Stake became the UFC's official betting partner in 2022, sponsored Alfa Romeo in Formula One in 2023 and Sauber in 2024 and 2025, and has been with Everton since the 2022/23 season. With the Premier League's front-of-shirt gambling ban taking effect in 2026/27, Stake moved to Everton's sleeve. In December 2022, two months after Twitch's ban on unlicensed slots streams took effect, Craven launched the streaming site Kick.

Stake's library is large by any count, though the counts differ. Fair Gambling listed more than 3,775 games from over 107 providers on 5 October 2026, CryptoSlate says more than 6,000, and Stake's own Trustpilot description says over 2,000. AskGamblers lists 54 providers. The sensible reading is several thousand titles from most of the studios that supply crypto casinos.

The in-house Stake Originals are the distinctive part: Plinko, Crash, Dice, Mines, Tower and similar instant games, each marketed as provably fair. Easygo also makes slots such as Puffer Stacks and Rooster Returns, which CasinoBeats reports are available only on Stake. That detail matters because Easygo is Stake's parent company and these games sit at the centre of the Drake controversy covered below.

Live dealer tables, poker and a full sportsbook complete the offer. Fair Gambling calculated an average sports margin of 5.36% on the markets it sampled, and an average return of 98.3% across the casino games it checked; neither figure is a guarantee for any single game or bet. AskGamblers notes that Stake does not publish a game-by-game RTP list and shows no independent RNG testing certificate.

Crypto payouts are fast on paper and, for most players, in practice. AskGamblers lists crypto withdrawals at 0 to 1 hours, a pending time of 0 to 1 hours, weekend cashouts and no maximum withdrawal limit, with fees set by the blockchain rather than by Stake. Fair Gambling's 5 October 2026 snapshot shows no minimum deposit, a Bitcoin minimum withdrawal of 0.00002504 BTC and a Bitcoin withdrawal fee of 0.00001571 BTC.

Verification runs in four levels. Level 1 is name, address and date of birth; level 2 adds a photo ID and a selfie; level 3 is proof of address; level 4 is source of funds, such as payslips, bank statements or sale documents, according to a verification guide on The Spike updated in October 2026. Levels 2 to 4 take around one to five business days, and AskGamblers puts verification at 0 to 72 hours. Player reports on AskGamblers most often describe these checks arriving at the point of withdrawal.

This is where most complaints start. On Trustpilot, reviews dated 9 to 11 October 2026 describe an account blocked after verification, a withdrawal held, and a promotional payout disqualified over suspected multi-accounting. Positive reviews from the same days praise fast payouts and the VIP team. Stake replies to 98% of negative Trustpilot reviews, typically within 48 hours, which is better than most of the sector.

Stake holds a Curaçao licence, and we confirmed it on the regulator's own certificate page: Medium Rare N.V., company 145353, licence OGL/2024/1451/0918, status active, licensed since 9 June 2025 under Curaçao's National Ordinance on Games of Chance, with stake.com as the approved domain. CryptoSlate says it covers both the casino and the sportsbook.

What the licence does not give you is the protection of a UK or EU regulator. Curaçao is an offshore licence with limited routes for player disputes, no deposit protection scheme and no link to GAMSTOP. The September 2026 leak also showed the regulator itself had open questions about ownership when it granted the licence. Stake's licences in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Italy and Denmark belong to separate local operations and do not cover stake.com.

Provably fair checks apply to Stake Originals: a player can verify that a result matches the server and client seeds. They say nothing about third-party slots, which rely on each studio's own certification. We found no independently audited proof of reserves. Fair Gambling tracks Stake's public hot wallets, which held about $80.1 million across six chains on 5 October 2026, but hot wallets show balances, not liabilities.

Stake has been hacked once. On 4 September 2023 about $41 million was drained from its Ethereum, BNB Chain and Polygon hot wallets, and within days the FBI attributed the theft to North Korea's Lazarus Group, as The Block reported. Stake said the attacker took only a small percentage of its funds and that users would not be affected. Two-factor authentication, including for withdrawals, is available.

Stake's rewards run through a VIP ladder based on total amount wagered rather than a headline welcome package. Fair Gambling lists seven tiers as of October 2026: Bronze from $10,000 wagered, then Silver, Gold, Platinum from $250,000, Diamond from $25 million, Obsidian from $1 billion and Opal beyond $5 billion.

Rakeback, level-up bonuses and weekly and monthly bonuses start at Bronze; daily bonuses and reloads arrive at Platinum; Diamond players get a dedicated VIP host. Stake also runs races and raffles, which Fair Gambling lists with a $3 million pool. Rakeback returns a slice of the house edge on what you stake, so it rewards heavy play, not winning.

Read the terms on any offer. CryptoSlate lists a 40x wagering requirement on deposit plus bonus for casino bonuses and 1x for sports. Promotions can be withdrawn for suspected multi-accounting, as several Trustpilot reviewers describe, and bonus funds cannot be withdrawn until the wagering is met.

Stake is the dominant sponsor of gambling livestreams. iGaming Business reported on 23 March 2026 that Stake appeared in 6,600 stream titles in January 2026, against 1,800 for the next operator, and Stream Hatchet's Mark Rowland said "a lot of Kick streamers will be provided with a bankroll by Stake itself".

• Trainwreckstv: the most-watched iGaming streamer in January 2026 with 15.7 million hours; GameTree says he plays exclusively on Stake, and Wikipedia records his Stake sponsorship since the Twitch era.
• Roshtein: listed by Fair Gambling as a Stake streamer; GameTree notes he has used several operators.
• Classybeef: streams primarily on Stake according to GameTree, which credits the channel with 13.9 million watch hours in January 2026.
• Westcol: the Colombian Kick star is listed by Fair Gambling as a Stake streamer.
• Eddie: a Kick channel with about 345,500 followers whose promotion describes its host as a co-founder of Stake and Kick, with a Stake stream every Saturday at 12:30 GMT.

Fair Gambling also lists xQc and BigFoltz as Stake streamers, and Drake and Adin Ross have promoted the brand. Treat what you see on these streams as entertainment, not a guide to results. Sponsored streamers often play with balances supplied by the casino: Bloomberg's reporting, as summarised by CasinoBeats, described Ed Craven adding $500,000 to Drake's account during one session.

Stake has no regulator finding of fraud against stake.com that we could find, but its record carries real controversies, listed here by date. Allegations in lawsuits are claims, not findings.

• September 2022: Twitch named Stake among four sites whose slots, roulette and dice streams it would ban from 18 October 2022, citing licensing and consumer protection, as NPR member station WUNC reported.
• July 2023: Chelsea pulled out of shirt-sponsor talks with Stake after 77% of respondents to a Chelsea Supporters' Trust survey disapproved.
• 4 September 2023: the $41 million hot wallet hack attributed by the FBI to the Lazarus Group.
• October 2024: the UK Advertising Standards Authority said it was monitoring Stake-branded content pushed through viral aggregator accounts on X.
• February to May 2025: after a Gambling Commission investigation into a Stake-branded social media advert, TGP Europe shut the UK site stake.uk.com, which was offline by 11 March 2025. The Commission warned that Everton's officers could face prosecution for promoting an unlicensed operator, and on 16 May 2025 it announced TGP had surrendered its licence rather than pay a £3.3 million penalty, as law firm CMS summarised. Stake called the exit a strategic decision agreed with TGP.
• October and December 2025: class actions in Missouri and Virginia claim Stake.us is an illegal casino and name Drake and Adin Ross. On 30 July 2026 Judge Leonie Brinkema sent the Virginia claims against Stake to private arbitration and paused the rest. Stake.us called one allegation "a nonsense claim".
• February 2026: Bloomberg Businessweek reported that Drake hit wins of 1,000 times the bet on Easygo slots about four times as often as average. Stake called the findings "categorically incorrect", and xQc and other critics said the method mishandled bonus buys, as CasinoBeats set out.
• September 2026: the Curaçao licensing leak and its ownership questions.

Complaint files are mixed rather than alarming for a site of this size. AskGamblers showed 46 of 74 complaints resolved on 11 October 2026, with an average first response of two days. Trustpilot rated Stake 3.9 out of 5 from 12,035 reviews on the same date, but 23% of those are one-star. Fair Gambling counted five unresolved Casino Guru complaints on 5 October 2026.

The good

• A Curaçao licence we confirmed as active on the regulator's certificate page
• Nine years of operation, with crypto payouts listed at under an hour and no withdrawal cap
• Replies to almost every negative Trustpilot review, and most AskGamblers complaints resolved
• Huge game and sports range, with provably fair originals

The bad

• Only an offshore licence for the main site, with limited dispute routes
• Ownership on paper differs from the public story, and the regulator had open questions when it licensed it
• Source-of-funds checks and account blocks are the most common complaint
• A 2023 hack, a forced UK exit in 2025 and US lawsuits still in arbitration

Our verdict: Stake pays out and answers complaints more reliably than most crypto casinos, and its Curaçao licence checks out. Against that sit an offshore-only licence, an ownership picture the regulator itself had not settled, and a run of controversies from the 2023 hack to the Drake analysis and the US class actions. Players should expect strict KYC at higher withdrawal amounts. On the evidence, Stake is a mixed proposition, not a clean one.

Stake.com is not open to UK players: its own X profile says the site is not available in the UK, US or Australia, and the UK-licensed version run by TGP Europe closed in March 2025. A casino needs a UK Gambling Commission licence to offer gambling in Great Britain, and stake.com has never held one. Offshore crypto sites sit outside GAMSTOP and UKGC protections, so self-exclusion and complaint routes do not follow you there.

If you gamble with crypto anywhere, remember the mechanics. Your balance rises and falls with the coin's price, blockchain transfers cannot be reversed, casinos usually pay out in the coin you deposited, and bonuses carry wagering rules. Gambling is for over-18s and is never a way to earn money; free help is available from BeGambleAware.

• Curaçao Gaming Authority: certificate for Medium Rare N.V. (OGL/2024/1451/0918)
• CryptoSlate: Stake company profile
• Wikipedia: Stake (online casino)
• AskGamblers: Stake Casino review and complaints
• Trustpilot: Stake reviews
• Fair Gambling: Stake casino data
• Fair Gambling: gambling streamers and their casinos
• Casinos.com: Curaçao leak shows Stake licensed before ownership was resolved
• The Block: FBI says Lazarus Group was responsible for $41 million theft on Stake
• Cointelegraph: Stake hack of $41m was performed by North Korean group, FBI says
• CMS: From Stake to TGP, advertising unlicensed gambling
• CasinoBeats: Bloomberg's Stake report on Drake raises more questions than it answers
• Complex: Drake reportedly wins Stake games more often than average
• iGaming Business: Report finds Stake dominates operator visibility across livestreaming sites
• GameTree: Slot streamers on Kick
• The Spike: Stake verification explained
• WUNC: Twitch bans some gambling content after an outcry from streamers

Is Stake legit?

Stake is a real, licensed business: Medium Rare N.V. holds Curaçao licence OGL/2024/1451/0918, which the regulator showed as active on 11 October 2026, and it has operated since 2017. It pays most crypto withdrawals quickly, but the licence is offshore, ownership questions were raised in a 2026 leak, and it faces US lawsuits. We rate it Mixed rather than Good.

How long do Stake withdrawals take?

Crypto withdrawals are usually quick. AskGamblers lists crypto payouts at 0 to 1 hours with no maximum withdrawal limit, and network fees rather than Stake fees apply. Delays mostly come from verification: Stake can ask for ID, proof of address or source-of-funds documents, and those checks take one to five business days. Large or unusual withdrawals are the most likely to trigger them.

Can UK players use Stake?

No. Stake.com says it is not available in the UK, and its UK-licensed site, run by TGP Europe, closed in March 2025 after a Gambling Commission investigation. Stake.com holds no UK licence, so it may not offer gambling in Great Britain. Offshore crypto casinos also sit outside GAMSTOP and UK Gambling Commission complaint routes.

Does Stake require KYC?

Yes, in stages. Stake uses four verification levels: basic details, then a photo ID and selfie, then proof of address, then source of funds such as payslips or bank statements. Levels 2 to 4 take around one to five business days. Most complaints about frozen accounts and held withdrawals on Trustpilot and AskGamblers involve these checks, so have documents ready before cashing out large sums.

Who owns Stake?

Stake was founded in 2017 by Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, who also set up Easygo and launched Kick. Its licence holder is Medium Rare N.V. in Curaçao, and leaked regulator files reported in September 2026 name Mladen Vučković, the listed chief executive, as owner. The same reporting said the licence was granted while the regulator was still checking who controlled the company.

Was Stake ever hacked?

Yes. On 4 September 2023 about $41 million in crypto was drained from Stake hot wallets on Ethereum, BNB Chain and Polygon. The FBI attributed the theft to North Korea's Lazarus Group within days. Stake said the attacker took only a small percentage of its funds and that users would not be affected. We found no later breach on record.

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