For four years, Adin Ross was the face of Stake — reportedly pulling in over $78 million in sponsorship transfers along the way. So when he announced he was jumping ship for a rival crypto casino, Rainbet, in a deal reported to be worth somewhere between $50 million a year and $150 million total, it should have looked like a clean, hostile defection. It hasn't played out that way.
The $1M blackjack stream that broke the narrative
If Ross and Stake were really on the outs, nobody told Stake co-founder Eddie Craven. The two showed up together on a Kick stream, each threw in $100,000, and ran it up to $1 million playing blackjack — on Rainbet. Not exactly the optics you'd expect from a bitter corporate breakup. Craven is also a co-owner of Kick, the platform Ross streams on, which made the pairing even harder to read as a coincidence.
It followed a stranger sequence of events: rumors of the Rainbet deal broke, Kick banned Ross for the first time ever, the ban was lifted within a day, and the whole saga generated a wave of press coverage and a reported 225,000 concurrent viewers when Ross moved his stream. To a lot of observers, that timeline reads less like a punishment and more like a launch campaign.
Rainbet's own presence on display
Rainbet has leaned hard into this kind of high-visibility, influencer-driven marketing — branded events, press conferences, and streamer partnerships designed to travel well as short-form clips.
The platform's public-facing leadership is a separate story. Rainbet's listed CEO and co-founder, John Evans, has almost no verifiable footprint outside the company's own materials — no prior industry history, no interviews, no conference appearances. Some outlets have gone as far as to question whether the name itself is real. Guilherme Fideles, the company's COO, is the only senior figure with a documented, checkable work history.
Denial, but a revealing tweet
Both companies have publicly denied any connection. But in June 2026, Rainbet posted on its official account thanking Stake's founders for "supporting fair competition" after becoming the first official sponsor of the Slots section on Kick — the platform Stake's founders own. Handing your supposed biggest rival premium sponsorship placement on the exact platform where it just lost its highest-profile talent isn't a normal move between competitors.
Rainbet is formally registered to RBGaming N.V. in Curaçao, with management structured through nominee directors, which keeps real ownership legally opaque regardless of what gets said publicly.
Where that leaves things
None of this proves Stake and Rainbet are the same operation wearing two masks. It's entirely possible Rainbet is exactly what it claims to be: a fast-scaling, well-funded independent competitor that happens to have copied Stake's playbook down to the interface. Anonymous ownership and aggressive influencer spending aren't unique to one company in this industry.
But the pattern is hard to ignore — a ban that lasted exactly long enough to generate headlines, a "rival" CEO who's functionally unverifiable, a celebration of "fair competition" from the platform that just lost its $78-million-plus star, and that star turning around to gamble alongside the man he supposedly left. Whether it's genuine rivalry or a shared marketing engine, the Ross-Rainbet-Stake story has become one of the more talked-about examples of how blurry the line between "competitor" and "collaborator" can get in the offshore crypto casino space.