Stake’s Owners: What the Curaçao Files Show
Expertise: Online casino, iGaming
Stake generated roughly $4.7 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2024, and the man registered as owner of the company behind it is neither of the founders anyone can name. Ask who owns Stake, and the answer used to be simple. Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani built the crypto casino, fronted it publicly and got rich from it. Then came September 2026 and the Casino Secrets investigation by Dutch outlet Follow the Money, built on files a hacker pulled from Curaçao’s gaming regulator over nine months, and the ownership paperwork told a different story.
Founder, operator, chief executive and beneficial owner are four different jobs, and at Stake they refuse to line up. The leaked records name a third man as owner of the licensed company, and the regulator’s own staff doubted even that was the full picture, which is what turned who owns Stake from a settled question into a live one.
Who Owns Stake Casino Today?
Stake.com’s own terms name Medium Rare N.V. as the company that owns and operates the site. The entity holds license OGL/2024/1451/0918 from the Curaçao Gaming Authority, and a player opening an account is contracting with it. At company level, the answer is public and clean.
The people behind the company are where it gets interesting. Craven and Tehrani founded Stake, still run the wider business through the Australian development company Easygo, and are billionaires several times over because of it. Neither of them appeared in the license application the investigation reviewed. On paper, the Stake casino owner is a Serbian national named Mladen Vuckovic, listed as the owner of Medium Rare N.V.
Vuckovic alone does not settle the Stake owners question either, and the doubt comes from inside the regulator. Its assessors identified loans and payments worth tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars flowing from Medium Rare to companies and individuals linked to Craven and Tehrani, and asked whether the man on the form was really the sole owner.
Nobody outside the company has published a cap table for Medium Rare or the wider Stake business, and no reliable percentage exists for Craven, Tehrani or Vuckovic. The record supports a three-part answer and nothing firmer. Medium Rare N.V. is Stake.com’s legal owner and operator, Craven and Tehrani are its founders, and Vuckovic is the Stake owner the regulator has on file.
Ed Craven, Bijan Tehrani and the Business Behind Stake
The Stake founder story starts in RuneScape, where Craven and Tehrani met online as teenagers gambling virtual gold. The pair turned that habit into Primedice, a crypto dice site, in 2013, then launched Stake.com in 2017, and even the brand name carries an echo of RuneScape’s old player-versus-player staking culture.
The business grew at a pace that still looks improbable on paper. Stake generated roughly $4.7 billion in gross revenue in 2024, according to Forbes, which currently estimates Ed Craven’s fortune at about $2.2 billion, with Tehrani in the same billionaire bracket. Neither figure tells us how much of Stake either founder actually owns. There is no verified Stake valuation or public equity split from which their shareholdings can be calculated.
Tehrani draws less coverage than Craven, mostly because Craven is the public face in Australia, but the two share the founder credit and run the company together. The Bijan Tehrani Stake connection runs through Kick too, the streaming platform the pair launched after Twitch restricted gambling content.
Christopher Freeman and the Ownership Claim That Went to Court
One more name keeps surfacing in ownership searches, and he never ran Stake at all. Christopher Freeman went to school with Tehrani in Connecticut and co-founded Primedice with him and Craven in 2013, when all three were under twenty, he says his Primedice stake was initially 20% and later cut to 14%. In 2022, he sued Craven, Tehrani, Vuckovic, Medium Rare N.V., Easygo and related companies in a New York federal court, seeking around $400 million.
The Christopher Freeman Stake claim was an ownership fight in its purest form. He alleged the crypto casino was his idea, that the founders discouraged him from joining unless he moved to Australia, that Stake launched with features he had proposed, and that his Primedice access was eventually cut off. The founders rejected all of it, calling the complaint “internally inconsistent, intentionally misleading, and provably false”.
No court ever ruled on who was right. A judge dismissed the amended complaint in June 2023 for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction, a procedural exit that says nothing about the merits, and the case ended in a voluntary dismissal without prejudice in October 2024. The suit still earned its place in this story. It dragged Stake’s corporate web, Primedice to Medium Rare to Easygo, into public court filings years before the Curacao leak exposed the same structure from the regulator’s side.
Why Does Mladen Vuckovic Appear as Stake’s Owner?
Vuckovic was a known quantity before September. He has long been publicly identified as the Stake.com CEO, so his name attached to the company surprised nobody. The surprise was where the name sat. An internal licensing report identified him as Medium Rare’s sole ultimate beneficial owner as well as its chief executive, and a 2024 disclosure to the regulator listed personal assets above $1 billion.
The same files catch the regulator hesitating over its own paperwork. Assessors flagged the large payments to companies and individuals connected to Craven and Tehrani, and the license was conditionally issued on June 9, 2025, with Medium Rare given five weeks to clarify its ownership structure and its contractual relationships with the founders. Asked about cases like this, the regulator has said operators were given time to meet the new framework’s requirements and that open questions did not automatically oblige it to reject an application.
The records inevitably raise the question of nominee ownership. A nominee holds legal title while someone else keeps the economic interest or practical influence, and nothing published so far proves that arrangement at Stake. The reporting assigns nobody a hidden percentage. What it establishes is narrower and still serious for a company this size: the regulator itself could not resolve whether the declared owner reflected the full ownership and control structure.
How these files reached the public is a story on its own. German researcher Lilith Wittmann spent nine months inside the regulator’s licensing portal after registering under the name of a trust-office manager the authority already knew, and handed the material to reporters as the basis of the wider Casino Secrets investigation. Follow the Money says it checked the underlying licensing documents wherever the leaked ownership data did not align cleanly. For Stake, that work exposed the gap around Vuckovic without proving who stands on the other side of it.
Curaçao’s License System Changed, and Stake Is Its Biggest Test
Curaçao was central to offshore gambling long before Stake existed. Under the old system, a handful of master license holders issued sublicenses to online operators, which built a huge international sector with limited direct state supervision and made the island especially convenient for crypto casinos serving customers across borders.
The 2024 reforms scrapped that arrangement. Operators now apply directly to the Curaçao Gaming Authority under the Curaçao licensing reforms that replaced the master-license model, and current conditions require clear terms on withdrawals, player funds, account closure and complaints, a working complaints process with approved alternative dispute resolution, and place player disputes under Curaçao law and Curaçao courts.
Stronger than the sublicense era, and still no guarantee of anything. A license does not mean a player wins a dispute or recovers funds, and it does not make an offshore site authorized in every country where the website loads. Authorities elsewhere can and do decide otherwise for their own markets.
None of this is abstract for someone with a balance on the site. Rules only bind when the authority knows who it is regulating, and an open ownership question leaves nobody certain who answers when a withdrawal stalls, a complaint escalates, or a court order needs a name on it.
Stake, Polymarket and Kalshi: Three Different Ownership Models
Stake makes a useful third chapter in this ownership series because its structure resembles neither of the first two. Kalshi’s ownership runs through two co-founders with estimated stakes, venture investors and a conventional board, and the uncertainty there comes from a private cap table rather than any dispute over who the legal operator is.
Polymarket’s ownership offers a second model. Shayne Coplan founded the company and still runs it, while Intercontinental Exchange has disclosed a large minority stake and governance rights through public filings, so at least one outside shareholder can be measured precisely.
Stake presents the opposite problem. The founders everyone associates with the brand are not the owner on file, the owner on file is the CEO, and the regulator holding the file doubted it told the whole story. Anyone researching who owns Stake casino ends up reading three documents at once, the company’s own terms, the billionaire profiles and the leaked licensing records, and the three do not describe the same structure.
The honest conclusion is the cautious one. The public record shows who founded Stake, who operates it, who sued over its origins and who appeared as owner in the Curaçao filing. The full economic ownership behind license OGL/2024/1451/0918 remains undisclosed, and the Casino Secrets reporting made that gap visible without closing it.
