How young Aussie billionaire Eddie Craven has rocked Silicon Valley
Australia’s youngest billionaire Eddie Craven has his eyes set on a big piece of the online gambling space. See why he has sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley.
Australia’s youngest billionaire has sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley with the meteoric rise of a rebel social media platform aiming to take down Amazon’s USD $45 billion ($A66 billion) streaming giant, Twitch.
After signing the world’s biggest video game streamers with deals bigger than LeBron James’ USD $97.1 million ($A142.5 million) LA Lakers contract, Victorian entrepreneur Eddie Craven revealed his rival live streaming site Kick.com had surpassed 10 million users in about six months.
Twitter and Facebook took more than two years to reach the milestone.
Craven, the 27-year-old co-founder of Stake.com with an estimated $A2.1bn fortune, is now planning a “large acquisition” in the US after Twitch banned his cryptocurrency casino, among several other betting websites.
Kick launched about six weeks after Stake.com was banned by Twitch on October 18 and quickly began signing the world’s biggest streaming stars.
The Canadian streamer known as xQc, Félix Lengyel, inked a two-year deal for USD $70 million ($A102.7 million) with incentives to push it to USD $100m ($A145,000), according to his agent Ryan Morrison.
Kick passed 10 million accounts on June 24, just two days before Craven scored another victory with the dismissal of a USD$400 million ($A582 million) claim in the Southern District of New York from a former business partner.
Craven, and his Stake.com co-founder Bijan Tehrani, were sued by American Christopher Freeman claiming he’d been misled by the two Australian-based entrepreneurs over the widely-popular gambling business, which is registered on the Caribbean island Curacao.
In dismissing the case against both Craven and Tehrani, US District Judge Ronnie Abrams said the claim “reads not unlike The Social Network’s account of the creation of Facebook”.
“[Freeman] alleges that Craven and Tehrani stole his idea for developing an expansive online cryptocurrency-based casino, subsequently launched Stake.com, an online cryptocurrency casino now worth more than a billion dollars, and, through a series of corporate transfers, left him without any real partnership stake in the original Primedice venture,” Abrams summarised in his opinion and order.
The court found that Freeman failed to adequately identify the citizenship or residence of the Defendants, and dismissed the case.
He was given until late July to amend his complaint to show that the court has sufficient subject matter jurisdiction.
While Kick did not respond to interview requests by the time of publication, Craven told the Gamer Update podcast that Stake.com had no ownership in Kick despite speculation the platform was created in direct response to the gambling website’s falling out with Twitch.
“Discussions around Kick started way before Stake was banned from Twitch,” he said.
“Kick was very much based on the fact we were spending more time with large creators.”
Twitch’s crackdown on gambling streams last year came after user ItsSlicker allegedly took money from 1000 of the platform’s biggest creators and fans, in the amount of more than $300,000, which he later admitted in a video was to fund a gambling addiction that started in the video game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [CS: GO].
It is not suggested the conduct was criminal, and he has never been charged with any crime.
The apology video was released on September 18, one day after the scandal became public on September 17.
On September 20, Twitch announced its crackdown on unregulated gambling on the platform would begin on October 18.
One of the people who said they were taken in by Slicker was gambling streamer TrainwrecksTV, who claims he gave $100,000.
Trainwrecks, a gambling streamer who claimed he made USD $360 million ($A528.45 million) over 16 months through gambling and partnerships, himself faced criticisms that he glamorised the highly-addictive practice.
He denies he engaged in any wrongdoing.
Asked about the controversies and speculation surrounding online gambling on Twitch, Craven said there were “incredible amounts of money that were being bet” that he didn’t believe was good for those involved, and attracted unwanted attention, but that Stake.com’s partnerships were legitimate and authentic.
“I think there’s some very unfair comments in regards to what is defined as acceptable versus unacceptable. I’ve heard some ideas over whether it’s regulated or unregulated,” Craven said.
“Stake is actually making a very big move into the US market with a large acquisition that’s upcoming and we look forward to hopefully being able to work back on Twitch under their guidelines,” he said.
“But I have a feeling, I’m not sure whether they’re going to follow through with this whole concept of what’s regulated versus unregulated.”
Asked whether the acquisition target was DraftKings, a US-regulated sports betting website allowed on Twitch under a multi-year partnership with Amazon, Craven shrugged and laughed.
“Do you think they’ll allow Stake if we did something like that?” he added.
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Originally published as How young Aussie billionaire Eddie Craven has rocked Silicon Valley
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