u/mano990502

Hello, gamblers!

You can read my first part of this post here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gambling/comments/1sc8eva/the_stake_marketing_phenomenon/

Lets continue!

It’s 2017. EasyGo is up and running, and Stake has officially entered the market. Owners have crypto casino and their own slot game provider. Now the focus shifts to driving traffic to a new crypto product.

What traffic channels did the founders use?

1. BitcoinTalk — the top crypto forum of the time

Stake followed PrimeDice’s playbook and created a thread on BitcoinTalk in the Gambling section.

2. Signature campaigns

BitcoinTalk users placed a Stake ad signature under every post — paid in BTC. This generated thousands of brand impressions daily across EVERY section of the forum.

3. Promotions

$50K weekly challenge, BTC giveaways, biggest multiplier contests, rake races. The founders’ reputation built through PrimeDice since 2013 handled the trust.

4. Reddit

Announcements and engagement across crypto subreddits (r/bitcoin, r/cryptocurrency, r/gambling).

5. Existing PrimeDice user base

Thousands of loyal crypto gamblers from 2013, effectively migrated to the new platform.

6. Micro-streamers on Twitch

Stake started to bought streamers in 2017, when of the first in this niche. Through 2019, mostly micro-influencers: gamers and crypto bloggers.

7. Banner ads on crypto sites

Via Coinzilla, Stake ran banners and native ads on DexTools, Etherscan, BscScan, and similar platforms.

8. Affiliate program

A referral program paying a percentage of referred players’ losses. Motivated hundreds of bloggers and forum users to promote Stake with no formal contract.

9. Community as marketing

Rain: Stake had an active chat open to all registered users. A bot randomly dropped crypto to active participants every few hours.

Live chat: players communicated in real time — creating the feel of a live casino.

Giveaways: random BTC drops for active chat participants.

Rake races: weekly competitions for the highest betting volume, with a prize pool.

Tip system: players could send crypto to each other directly in the chat.

Users felt like insiders, not customers. Stake built a subculture.

10. The 2017 BTC bull run

BTC went from ~$1,000 in January to ~$20,000 in December. Millions bought crypto for the first time and were looking for somewhere to spend it.

11. Founder’s personal brand

Craven acted like a gambling streamer, not a CEO — played on camera, gave money away, engaged in chats. He posted giveaway and contest links on Twitter and actively ran his crypto account, resonating with the audience and driving significant brand reach.

Result by end of 2018: 100,000+ monthly players (Tehrani, Reddit).

November 2019: sportsbook launch — product expansion.

Hello, gamblers!

Recently I made some research on how the crypto casino Stake became a global brand and one of the most recognizable brands in the iGaming and Web3 worlds. My research consists of five parts; there may be more, but for now, there are five. Since there’s a lot of information, I’ll be publishing it in stages. Today, we’ll start with the origins, specifically the years 2013–2017. We’ll explore how two guys built a $2.6 billion gambling empire from scratch.

The Backstory Nobody Talks About

Founders Ed Craven and Bijan Terani met as teenagers while playing RuneScape. They set up an unofficial in-game betting operation, for which they were banned. Most people would have stopped there. But not them. That was the first step for these two into betting and iGaming.

PrimeDice. 2013.

The next project of this duo was PrimeDice — a simple Bitcoin dice game. It was one of the first “provably fair” platforms where players could mathematically verify the result of every roll. The casino generates a hash of the server seed BEFORE the bet is placed. After the game, players can verify and prove that the result is not rigged. In 2013, this was a revolutionary advantage for the crypto community, which valued trustless verification.

Key facts about PrimeDice:

- PrimeDice followed in the footsteps of SatoshiDice (the first BTC gambling site, launched in 2012), but processed bets instantly on its own servers — without waiting for confirmation on the blockchain

- On BitcoinTalk (the leading crypto forum at the time), a thread about PrimeDice had been active since May 2013 (in the “Gambling” section)

- Over a million dollars in bets on the first day of launch

- Real-time chat on platform — players communicated in real time, which fostered a sense of community and unity.

Why this matters: By the time Stake launched in 2017, the founders already had a base of loyal cryptocurrency gamblers that had been built up over four years. They were also well-known and had a reputation on the leading cryptocurrency forum, BitcoinTalk. Stake did not start from scratch; they already had a “strong foundation.”

Easygo (2016)

In 2016, Craven and Terani founded Easygo, their own online casino game development studio in Melbourne. The startup capital was funded by profits from Primedice.

Launch of Stake (August 2017)

Stake launched in August 2017 under a Curacao license. Terani announced the platform on BitcoinTalk, calling it “the future of gambling.” The product’s unique selling proposition from the very beginning:

- Complete absence of KYC — no identity verification

- Instant deposits and withdrawals in cryptocurrency

- Provable fairness — every gambler can verify the authenticity of the bet result; everything is on the blockchain

- Unlimited betting — no geographical restrictions, no limits.

- Initially, only their own games from the “Originals” series (Dice, Crash, Mines, Plinko)

In 2017, there were practically no such casinos. The product itself solved a specific problem for the crypto audience, the ability to play quickly, anonymously, without limits, and with provable fairness. They didn’t launch a casino; they launched a product created by crypto specialists for the crypto community. After many years of work to build trust within the very community they were targeting.

Part 2 will cover traffic acquisition channels.