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Twitch kicked the big unlicensed crypto casinos off its platform in October 2022. About eight weeks later, the founders of the largest one had a streaming site of their own up and running.
That site is Kick. It hit 100 million registered users in April 2026, and people watched 4.5 billion hours of it in 2025, up 131% on the year before.
Ask most gamers about Kick, and they'll tell you it's where xQc went for the money. Ask where Kick's money comes from, and you mostly get shrugs. The answer is bitcoin gambling, and gambling is still a huge part of what happens there.
Stake owns the slots category, and America is watching
Stream titles give you a sense of the scale. Analytics firm Stream Hatchet counted Stake in roughly 6,600 of them across Twitch and Kick in January 2026, about 60% of every gambling brand mention it tracked. Mark Rowland, its content manager, told iGaming Business that plenty of Kick streamers bet with a bankroll Stake gives them.
So that screaming, chat-exploding slot win may well have been played with the house's cash. It's one reason US players weighing up the best bitcoin casinos are better off checking how fast a site actually pays out than trusting a clip.
Other casinos want in. In June 2026, Rainbet became the first official sponsor of Kick's whole Slots category, Blask reported, which puts the brand in the site's navigation permanently instead of in one streamer's overlay. Rainbet had already signed Adin Ross in September 2025, along with esports org Ninjas in Pyjamas.
Much of the audience those ads reach sits in the US. Blask's numbers show the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK together make up most of Rainbet's search interest, even though Rainbet doesn't actively operate in most of those countries. Plenty of American viewers are being pitched casinos that aren't licensed where they live.
Legal US betting is turning up on the same streams. In January 2026, Stream Hatchet logged about 12,000 mentions of Polymarket and 11,700 of Kalshi, the two most-mentioned betting brands it tracked. Kalshi is regulated by the CFTC. Most viewers flicking between a slots stream and a CS2 match probably couldn't tell you which sites are licensed and which aren't.
The ban that started everything
That story starts in the fall of 2022.
On October 18, 2022, new Twitch rules banned slots, roulette, and dice streams from sites without proper consumer protections. Stake and Rollbit were named outright, along with a few others, and they're still blocked. Twitch has also banned CS:GO skin gambling streams, the other gambling craze that came straight out of gaming.
Tyler "Trainwreckstv" Niknam, then Twitch's best-known slots streamer, lost 42% of his viewership almost overnight, according to Vindex. He'd also said gambling sponsors paid him about $360 million over 16 months.
He wasn't about to give that up, and he soon started talking about a platform of his own.
Kick arrives, and the money follows
Kick launched in December 2022. Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, who started Stake, co-founded it, and Trainwreck came on as co-founder and head of community. It belongs to Easygo, which also owns Stake.
For streamers, the hook was a 95/5 revenue split in their favor, a lot better than Twitch pays. xQc, Adin Ross and Nickmercs all signed. On his first Kick stream, Nickmercs said gambling was coming. Kick then said his contract had no gambling clause, and reporter Jake Lucky followed up that Nickmercs had a separate deal with Stake.
On paper, Kick and Stake are separate businesses. Spend a week on Kick, and you'll see how closely they work together.
Tehrani has said he'd put almost $1 billion of his own money into Kick by April 2026.
Why the biggest gambling streamers live in Canada
A lot of the big Stake-sponsored streamers aren't in the US at all.
Stake.com won't take US players, and most states still don't allow online casinos. Bloomberg games reporter Cecilia D'Anastasio has said the Stake-sponsored crowd moved to Canada so they could keep gambling on camera. Outside Ontario's licensed market, Canada has been slow to go after offshore crypto casinos.
Crypto holds it together. Players deposit and cash out in BTC or stablecoins; the casinos tend to hold licenses from places like Curaçao, and no bank gets a say. A streamer in Toronto can spin for viewers in Texas on a casino licensed in the Caribbean.
Kick is cleaning house, slowly
Kick knows its gambling image puts off mainstream sponsors. Since February 2025, casino streams can only show sites with visible 18+ ID checks, and the Slots & Casino category no longer gets the creator incentive program's fixed hourly pay.
In May 2026, it banned 500 streamers and removed 79 million fake watch hours in a crackdown on viewbots. It's also pouring money into IRL, Just Chatting and regular gaming streams. Those are easier to sell to sponsors, and a streamer grinding through the full Arc Raiders quest list can keep a chat going for hours with no slots involved.
Gambling built Kick. Nobody knows yet whether the gaming side can carry it.
What this means if you just came to watch games
You don't have to quit Kick. Plenty of it is ordinary gaming, from Fortnite to Counter-Strike esports. Just watch the casino streams knowing the streamer is often paid to be there, the balance on screen may not be theirs, and the people who own the platform also own a casino.
When I test a casino a streamer is pushing, I start with withdrawals. Does the money actually arrive, and how long does it take? A big win on stream won't tell you that. If you do play, pick a spend limit before you deposit and treat it as the price of a night's entertainment.
