Shuffle boss Noah Dummett: The 26-year-old who is Australia’s next crypto gambling magnate
The little-known Melbourne high school dropout has already packed plenty into a career running a global online casino business averaging $US2bn in wagering each month.
Australia’s next cryptocurrency gambling magnate is a little-known 26-year-old high school dropout who has already packed plenty into a career running a global online casino business averaging $US2bn in wagering each month.
Noah Dummett is chief executive and co-founder of Melbourne-based crypto casino brand Shuffle, which after a little over two years of operations, claims to be among the world’s top five crypto gambling brands.
All done mostly out of the spotlight.
There have been rumours of a $US500m offer from an unknown buyer for Shuffle that was knocked back earlier this year, and while Dummett won’t comment, he does confirm Shuffle – which is banned from having Australian customers – takes about 300 bets per second and is growing quickly.
Dummett’s colourful career already includes stints as one of the earliest employees at FTX and Alameda Research in Hong Kong alongside the now jailed Sam Bankman-Fried, once considered the globe’s richest young person.
Dummett led Shuffle’s founding in late 2022 and launch early the following year, and now the Curacao-registered business claims to have more than doubled its revenue and user numbers in the past 12 months. Customers play online casino games such as slot machines, baccarat, blackjack and roulette, others like Uno and even a lottery, all gambling with crypto. Shuffle also has a sportsbook.
If Dummett and Shuffle sound familiar, it is because there are obvious parallels to Ed Craven and Stake.com. Craven, Australia’s youngest billionaire at just 29, and his American business partner Bijan Tehrani have built Stake into the world’s biggest online crypto (and now fiat currency) casino and sportsbook.
Stake is also registered in Curacao, is run from an old bank building in Melbourne’s CBD, and has been wildly successful. Stake had gross revenue – the difference between the amount wagered by punters and the amount won – of more than $US4.5bn in 2024.
Just a couple of blocks away in a modern office building boasting accounting and investment bank tenants, Dummett and the Shuffle team are not quite at Stake’s level. Not yet.
But Dummett and other sources indicate that Shuffle is winning a growing piece of the online worldwide crypto gambling sector estimated to be worth at least $US80bn annually – most of it in “grey” or unregulated markets.
In his first major interview, Dummett outlines his ambitions for Shuffle, the wild ride that was FTX and Alameda Research, and how Shuffle almost failed just after its founding.
“I personally think that [Stake] will be the biggest in [the industry] for a very long time. I don’t really want to be as big as them,” Dummett tells The Australian. “I would be more than happy to be number two to their number one.
“But I want to be the best. I don’t want to be the biggest. I just want to be the best. And the best means I want to have the best product. So I want to have the best product around the best user experience.”
Like Stake, Shuffle is shrouded in some mystery in its home country, and like most gambling companies will likely attract controversy. Gambling with crypto and online casino games are banned in Australia, but there are plenty of countries where it is either allowed or not regulated. Most firms in the industry operate from tax havens or low regulation countries like Curacao.
Dummett claims he will pay tax in Australia as Craven and Tehrani do via their Easygo Entertainment entity that provides services to the global business and lodges financial reports to ASIC. (Dummett’s service entity is called Kingside.)
Figures seen by The Australian for publication of The List – Australia’s Richest 250 earlier this year suggest Stake’s profits exceed the $1bn mark (Craven’s wealth is estimated at $4.53bn). Shuffle’s could be 5-10 per cent of that already.
Craven and Tehrani famously spent their teenage years gaming from their bedrooms in regional Australia and the US respectively, before moving on to trading huge sums in the largely uncharted world of crypto and then the unregulated online gambling world.
Dummett has somewhat followed in their footsteps, starting in a library in the small country town of Korumburra in Victoria’s Gippsland.
It was a quiet place he soon wanted to leave, Dummett says, and given there was no Wi-Fi at the family home he and his brother would spend time at the library reading and using the internet.
Dummett says he taught himself to code from books he borrowed.
“The whole idea was, how do we get out of here as soon as possible? I got suspended a few times because I was coding in class. And at maybe 15, I think Bitcoin started popping up in the same circles that I was in. And started learning about that, and it made a lot of sense,” he recalls.
“I bought a little bit, and I remember it doubled, or something like that. And then immediately, I thought, ‘this is how I make it out of here’.”
A family move interstate eventuated but by then Dummett was applying for jobs online. He walked out of his drama class one day to accept a job from a recruiter calling from Intercom, and did not look back. He was 17.
He spent almost one and a half years at Intercom in Sydney before joining crypto trading platform BitMEX in mid-2018. BitMEX would thrive though its founders would later plead guilty over anti money laundering failures in the US and the company would pay a $US100m fine.
But it was another larger than life and later infamous entrepreneur that would next capture Dummett’s attention. It was mid-2018 and Bankman-Fried’s reputation in the crypto industry was starting to grow along with his supposedly burgeoning Alameda Research.
“When I was at BitMEX, I started hearing about Alameda because they were the biggest [crypto] trader around and they were pushing numbers that were pretty insane,” Dummett recalls.
“I watched an interview SBF (Bankman-Fried) had done, and he was an incredibly smart guy; obviously, on another level smart. I think he was 25 at that point, maybe 26 at the most. And so I just sent a message to him on Linkedin and said, ‘hey what you’re doing is really cool’.”
A month or so later, Bankman-Fried started crypto trading firm FTX and Dummett was surprised to be asked if he was open to joining the new venture. Bankman-Fried moved to Hong Kong and Dummett joined him there as one of FTX’s first 10 employees.
FTX and Alameda would take the crypto world – and wider corporate sector – by storm.
In just one year, Alameda Research reportedly made more than $US1bn exploiting mispriced assets.
It was all happening as the apparently monkish Bankman-Fried became a crypto evangelist with an estimated $US25bn fortune at its peak, gracing magazine covers, meeting politicians and espousing effective altruism.
“Honestly, it was electric. It was like you left the office to go and sleep, and then you came back and you kept working. And it just felt like 15 or 16 young people trying to build something massive,” Dummett says of his Hong Kong days.
He moved over to Alameda, alongside executives such as Ryan Salame and Caroline Ellison.
But as Covid-19 lockdowns started happening around the world, Dummett returned home to Australia to see family. He tried working remotely but by April 2021 had quit.
Bankman-Fried would move FTX to the Bahamas in September that year and in 2022 his business empire spectacularly unravelled in one of the most notorious white-collar fraud cases in modern history. Billions of dollars of FTX customer funds were transferred to cover Alameda losses.
Dummett in hindsight admits the systems and processes around the business were severely lacking.
“It’s kind of like, if you live in a house and you can see that there’s cracks in the walls. And then you leave the house, and two years later, it turns out that the house fell down one day. You knew that the cracks were there, but you didn’t expect the house to fall down.”
Dummett describes his time at FTX and Alameda as “formative”, given he learnt about building companies and running teams in such a way to get things done fast.
He also said he learned about the “god complex thing” for founders and what not to do.
“When I was 16 or 17, I used to think that is what you want to be. You want to be that big head that everyone looks up to, that walks into an office and everyone’s focus is on you. But after seeing what that does and the culture that instils, I absolutely don’t want that. That’s actually a super important lesson that I don’t think a lot of people will get to learn.”
Dummett’s next move was to invest in a school friend’s company Revolt, a clothing company for influencer merchandise. (Its founder later faced allegations of financial mismanagement.)
A trip to Los Angeles in 2022 with Revolt led to Dummett’s next career move. A cashed-up influencer asked to borrow some Bitcoin one evening to gamble online. The sum quickly disappeared, and Dummett sensed an opportunity.
“I started looking at the numbers, [customer] conversions, looking at the scene in general. And I thought, actually, this is massive, and no one knows about it.
“I had come from FTX where you have this super product driven mentality, where everything revolves around the user experience product. I thought, well, we can just bring that to the crypto casino industry, and build a better product than anyone else.”
Dummett and fellow co-founders Darcy Spangler and Bainy Zhang tried to raise $US2.5m from investors in the second half of 2022 to launch at a $US25m valuation. But some investors pulled their money after FTX’s collapse – Dummett’s resume was not exactly enticing – and they ended up with $US1.1m.
It was enough, but even then Shuffle survived an early scare when a flaw in its Keno game cost it 30 per cent of its bankroll while Dummett slept.
Dummett says growth has been particularly strong this year, won’t comment on the $US500m sale rumours, but admits Shuffle is looking to gain licences in some newly regulated markets, as Stake has in countries including Colombia and Brazil. That may mean taking bets in fiat currency, just as Stake is now doing.
Otherwise, Dummett predicts a future in which gambling may not be his only business.
“I’m not a gambler. I had never really gambled before this. I do like working on building consumer platforms [and] gambling was just an opportunity at the time. It could have been anything. It could have been an exchange or something else like that.
“I don’t really know what comes next, but I know that I wanted to be based in Australia, servicing Australians, doing things that Australians can use. And we’re doing things to kind of looking for that opportunity. At the moment I think Shuffle has a long way to grow. But I would say we’re only two or three years, maybe even one, away from diversifying. I don’t think that we’re that far away from starting the next thing.”
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