Canadian rapper Drake has been the public face of cryptocurrency gambling platform Stake.com since 2022 under a reported endorsement deal worth $100 million a year. Stake holds no license to operate in any Canadian province. Canadians can still access the platform through its main offshore site and through Drake’s promotional livestreams on Kick, the streaming service owned by Stake’s founders.
The Drake Stake.com promotion exists in a regulatory gap that none of Canada’s gambling authorities were designed to police. Ontario online sportsbook regulators banned celebrities and athletes from appearing in licensed sportsbook advertising in 2024, after Wayne Gretzky, Auston Matthews and Connor McDavid had each appeared in commercials for Canadian-licensed books. Drake’s content is not on Ontario airwaves. It is on Kick, where the audience is global, includes viewers under 18, and sits largely outside any provincial regulator’s jurisdiction.
A Bloomberg Businessweek investigation published in March 2026 reported that Stake-sponsored livestreams featuring Drake and U.S. streamer Adin Ross showed statistical win rates inconsistent with random outcomes during a sampled window in 2024. The reporting raised the possibility that some celebrity gambling streams shown to millions of viewers were funded by Stake itself rather than by the celebrity’s own money. Drake has not publicly addressed the win-rate findings in detail and has not denied the underlying partnership terms.
Three U.S. lawsuits filed in late 2025 and early 2026 target the Drake-Stake relationship directly. A class action filed in Missouri in October 2025 names Drake, Adin Ross and the operator behind Stake.us, accusing them of deceptive promotion of what the complaint describes as an illegal gambling site operating as a “social casino.” A separate federal class action filed in Virginia on Jan. 3, 2026, brings racketeering allegations involving the use of Stake-derived funds. None of the cases has reached a substantive ruling.
Stake.us operates a sweepstakes-style social casino model that the platform argues falls outside U.S. gambling regulation. Players purchase “Gold Coins” that the company says have no cash value, while receiving “Stake Cash” as a promotional bonus. Stake Cash can be wagered and, if won in sufficient amounts, redeemed for U.S. dollars. The same model is accessible to Canadians. No Canadian regulator has issued a public determination on whether sweepstakes casinos require provincial licensing in Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia or any other jurisdiction.
The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario licenses operators that present themselves as gambling operators. Sweepstakes platforms do not. Loto-Quebec and the British Columbia Lottery Corporation hold provincial monopolies but have not pursued public enforcement against Stake. The Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries Corporation won a court injunction against another offshore sportsbook, Bodog, in May 2025, but Stake has not been the subject of similar litigation. The Mohawk Council of Kahnawake operates its own gaming commission and licenses some offshore brands. No public listing connects the Kahnawake Gaming Commission to Stake.com.
The Drake-Stake content reaches Canadian audiences directly. Drake’s promotional livestreams on Kick have at times drawn tens of thousands of concurrent viewers, with co-streamers including Adin Ross and Felix Lengyel, who streams as xQc. A December 2024 Stake-sponsored event titled the “Drizzmas Giveaway” featured Drake and Ross distributing prizes on stream. That stream was viewable by Canadians of any age. Kick’s age-verification standards are looser than those of Ontario-licensed operators, and Kick does not appear in AGCO compliance reporting.
Bill S-211, the National Framework on Sports Betting Advertising Act, passed the Canadian Senate on Oct. 21, 2025 and is now in the House of Commons. The bill would direct Canadian Heritage to develop national rules that could restrict celebrity and athlete endorsements at the federal level. As currently drafted, the bill focuses on licensed Canadian operators and broadcast advertising. It would not obviously reach streaming content hosted on a foreign-owned platform that is itself operated by the same people promoting an unlicensed offshore casino.
Drake is the most prominent Canadian celebrity to publicly endorse a gambling platform. The Stake partnership is the largest publicly disclosed celebrity gambling endorsement deal globally. The arrangement has run for nearly four years without enforcement action from any Canadian regulator, federal or provincial. The 2024 Ontario rule banning athletes and celebrities from gambling advertising was designed to limit exactly this kind of youth-facing promotion within the regulated market. The rule is in force in Ontario. It does not reach Drake.
Stake’s commercial reach has continued to grow. The platform generated nearly $2.6 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2022, the most recent year for which a credible public figure exists, placing it among the largest online gambling operators globally by revenue. Stake’s primary user base sits in Southeast Asia, Japan and Brazil, but Canadian access has never been blocked at the platform level. For Canadian players, the practical effect is that the most-promoted gambling brand among Canada gambling sites users is one that no Canadian regulator licenses, that no Canadian regulator has enforced against, and that operates entirely outside the rules the rest of the industry has been required to follow.
