At just 26, Noah Dummett is fast emerging as one of the most intriguing figures in the global cryptocurrency gambling industry. A high school dropout turned tech entrepreneur, Dummett now leads Shuffle — a Melbourne-based crypto casino brand he co-founded, which claims to process around $US2 billion in monthly wagers.
Operating largely outside the public spotlight, Shuffle has quietly become one of the world’s top five crypto gambling platforms in just over two years. It offers an array of games — including blackjack, roulette, baccarat, slots, Uno, and even a lottery — with all wagers placed in cryptocurrency. The business, registered in Curacao and banned from servicing Australian customers, also runs a sportsbook.
Rumours of a $US500 million acquisition offer surfaced earlier this year, but Dummett won’t confirm or deny them. What he does reveal is that Shuffle handles about 300 bets every second and is growing rapidly.
Dummett’s career began with early roles at FTX and Alameda Research, the now-infamous crypto trading platforms founded by Sam Bankman-Fried. He was among the first ten employees at FTX in Hong Kong and later moved to Alameda. Reflecting on the collapse of the FTX empire, he says: “It’s 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.”
After leaving Alameda in 2021, Dummett briefly backed a merchandise company before a chance trip to Los Angeles in 2022 sparked the idea for Shuffle. He was inspired when a wealthy influencer borrowed some bitcoin to gamble — and quickly lost it. “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,” Dummett says.
Together with co-founders Darcy Spangler and Bainy Zhang, he raised $US1.1 million — short of the $US2.5 million target — to launch Shuffle at a $US25 million valuation. An early technical flaw in the platform’s Keno game cost the company 30 percent of its bankroll overnight, but Shuffle survived.
Dummett draws inevitable comparisons to Ed Craven, co-founder of Stake.com, currently the world’s biggest online crypto casino and sportsbook. Like Stake, Shuffle is run from Melbourne and shares a Curacao registration. Stake’s 2024 revenue reportedly exceeded $US4.5 billion, while figures suggest Shuffle could already be generating between 5-10 percent of that.
Still, Dummett insists his ambition is not to outgrow Stake, but to outdo it in quality. “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. 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.”
His origin story begins in the quiet Victorian town of Korumburra, where he and his brother used the local library to access the internet and learn to code. He was introduced to bitcoin at age 15 and took his first tech job at 17, walking out of a school drama class to take the call.
With crypto gambling banned in Australia, Dummett operates under an offshore structure but says Shuffle, like Stake, will pay tax in Australia via a local service entity. He also hints at plans to obtain gambling licences in newly regulated markets like Brazil and Colombia.
Though the business is thriving, Dummett remains clear-eyed about the volatility of his chosen sector. “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.”
Whether his next move stays within the crypto space or not, Noah Dummett is betting big — and doing so on his own terms.
