Ed Craven is one of the most well-known people in the high-stakes world of cryptocurrency and online entertainment. This Melbourne-born entrepreneur is only 30 years old, but he is already a billionaire. He co-founded two game-changing platforms: Stake, the world’s largest crypto-backed online casino, and Kick, a live-streaming service that is taking on Twitch’s dominance. Craven isn’t just playing the game; he’s changing the rules. As of October 2025, his net worth is thought to be $2.8 billion. His story is about how he used his teenage smarts, took calculated risks, and never gave up on his goal of turning gaming, crypto, and content creation into a multi-billion-dollar business.
Early Life: From betting on Runescape to being interested in crypto
Edward “Ed” Craven was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1995. He grew up in a city that is known for its love of sports and its thriving tech scene. His father, Jamie Craven, was a businessman whose career took a controversial turn. He was banned from the industry after being involved in the Spedley Group’s collapse in the 1980s, which happened before Ed was born. Young Ed didn’t let his family’s past stop him from finding his passion in the digital world. He played Runescape, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, a lot when he was a teenager. There, he and some friends found a way to make a lot of money by “staking,” which is when players bet in-game gold coins on virtual fights. It was a simple kind of gambling, but it sparked something deep in Craven: an interest in risk, reward, and the possibilities of virtual economies.
Craven’s interests changed by 2013, when Bitcoin was worth about $100. The two of them tried out cryptocurrency together with childhood friend Bijan Tehrani, a U.S.-born coder he met online while playing Runescape. They coded Primedice, a simple game that lets people bet Bitcoin on virtual dice rolls, with a few friends who thought the same way. Craven later said, “We took over a million dollars in bets on our first day.” The launch was a huge success. What started as a side job turned into a full-time business that made enough money for the owner to quit their regular job and start their own business. At 18, Craven was more than just a gamer; he was a pioneer in crypto gambling, learning how to develop software, get new users, and deal with regulatory gray areas.
Building Stake: The King of Crypto Casinos
Craven’s fortune comes from Stake.com, a crypto-only online casino that opened in 2017. It has slots, blackjack, roulette, and sports betting, all powered by Bitcoin and other digital currencies. Stake quickly took over the niche market even though it was based in Melbourne and registered in Curaçao to avoid Australia’s strict gambling laws. It attracted a young, tech-savvy crowd that was tired of platforms that used fiat currency by combining the excitement of traditional casinos with the speed and anonymity of blockchain.
Smart marketing sped up growth. Stake funded well-known projects like Formula 1 teams (including the Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber, which Craven bought in 2025), English Premier League jerseys, and UFC events. But the real genius move was to work with influencers. Craven signed multimillion-dollar deals with streamers and celebrities, paying some up to $1 million a month to gamble live on Twitch, often with money that Stake seemed to provide. Heavyweights like Drake and UFC star Israel Adesanya became brand ambassadors, making Stake a cultural phenomenon.
The numbers speak for themselves: Stake’s gross gaming revenue went from $100 million in 2020 to over $2 billion in 2022, giving it a huge share of the crypto casino market. It made $4.7 billion a year by 2024 and handled 2–4% of all Bitcoin transactions around the world. Stake made a big change in March 2025 when it said it would accept 70% of transactions in fiat currency. This made it more appealing while still keeping its crypto roots. Today, the platform is said to handle $400 million in bets every day, with Craven and Tehrani each getting half.
Easygo Solutions, which is Stake’s engineering arm, has 350 employees in Melbourne. To get the best workers from competitors like Canva and Atlassian, he offers $100,000 signing bonuses and salaries that are 20% higher than the market rate. Easygo made more than $500 million in 2025, which shows how big the business is.
Kick: The Rebel Challenger of Streaming
Craven’s next big bet, Kick, which came out in late 2022 as a creator-friendly alternative to Amazon’s Twitch, was made possible by Stake’s success. What made it happen? Twitch banned Stake ads in 2021 because they were worried about gambling. This made Craven and Tehrani make their own platform. Kick promised streamers 95% of their revenue (compared to Twitch’s 50%), relaxed content rules, and no ad breaks. This made it perfect for gaming, real-life streams, and even gambling broadcasts that used Stake.
The platform blew up, signing stars like Destiny, Hikaru Nakamura, and Adin Ross. Kick had taken 20% of the market from Twitch and YouTube by 2025, thanks to partnerships like UFC that helped it get more attention. Craven streams on Kick himself, mixing humility with excitement. In an interview in 2025, he said that the company would be profitable in two to three years. He stressed that rapid growth would break up the “near-monopoly” of social media giants. High-profile events, like streamer Adin Ross giving Donald Trump a Rolex and a Tesla Cybertruck in a Kick-exclusive stream that 500,000 people watched, made it a cultural icon.
Beyond the Billions: Investments and Issues
Craven wants to do more than just AI and charity work. In August 2025, he became the biggest investor in Maincode, an Australian AI company that was working on Matilda, the country’s first “sovereign large language model” trained on local data. He also bought a 5% stake in PointsBet, a bookmaker listed on the ASX, which suggests that he plans to offer a betting product in Australia.
But success hasn’t come without criticism. In 2023, Craven was accused of encouraging bad behavior toward a female escort during a Kick stream, which got a lot of media attention. Because Stake operates outside of Australia, the platforms’ links to gambling have sparked debates about consumer protections. Craven admits that it’s a “uphill battle” against what people think: “We’ve taken two of the most controversial technologies and industries and put them together.” Craven’s kindness, on the other hand, is clear. He gave a waitress in Melbourne $10,000 in 2023, making him “Australia’s mystery diner.” He has given millions to good causes, quietly leaving a legacy that goes beyond money.
Legacy: the youngest billionaire in Australia
Ed Craven’s rise from Runescape stakes to a $5.6 billion fortune shared with Tehrani shows both the good and bad sides of the crypto era. As Forbes Australia said in 2025, he’s the youngest self-made billionaire in Australia, and he’s even more daring than tech giants. He still attracts talent and expands around the world from Easygo’s headquarters in Melbourne. He plans to open offices in Brazil and Peru soon.
What makes Craven different? A gambler’s gut feeling tempered by a builder’s discipline. He tweeted in 2024, “The best is yet to come,” and linked to a Forbes profile. As Stake and Kick change, one thing is clear: Ed Craven isn’t just betting on the future; he’s making sure he wins.
