BitStarz is currently owned and operated by Gareton B.V., a company incorporated in Curaçao (registration number 160656), licensed by the Curaçao Gaming Authority under license number OGL/2024/165/0185. That’s the direct answer, confirmed in BitStarz‘s own current terms and conditions.
It’s not the only name you’ll see associated with BitStarz, though, and the reason why is worth understanding if you’re trying to figure out who you’re actually trusting with your money.
In June 2014 the company was Founded as “BitStars.” The casino launched under the name BitStars (bitstars.net), not BitStarz, as one of the earliest Bitcoin-native casinos, running on the SoftSwiss platform. Legal and operational management sat with Direx N.V., which handled the licensing and legal side while SoftSwiss provided the technology.
In late 2019 to early 2020 they migrated to Dama N.V. Direx N.V.’s brand portfolio, including BitStarz, moved to a newly established operator, Dama N.V., under new management, while staying on the same SoftSwiss platform infrastructure. This is where BitStarz picked up the ownership attribution (“owned by Dama N.V.”) that’s still repeated on many older review sites today.
Sub-license era. Under Curaçao’s pre-2023 gambling license system, BitStarz operated via a sub-license (No. 8048/JAZ2020-013) issued through Antillephone N.V., one of the handful of “master license” holders that existed before Curaçao’s regulatory overhaul.
This is a different, older-format license number than the one BitStarz holds today.
It’s not an error if you see it in an older source, just a snapshot of the licensing system that no longer exists.
In 2024–2025 the company changed to Gareton B.V. Following Curaçao’s National Ordinance on Games of Chance (LOK), which came into force December 24, 2024 and eliminated the old sub-license system, BitStarz transitioned to a direct Curaçao Gaming Authority license under a distinct new entity, Gareton B.V. Notably, BitStarz wasn’t the only Dama-linked brand to separate out around this period. Other sources describe different Dama-affiliated casinos (Syndicate Casino, RocketPlay) now operating under yet another distinct entity, suggesting the old Dama portfolio has been splitting across multiple separate successor companies rather than migrating to one.
Today. BitStarz is owned and operated by Gareton B.V., under Curaçao Gaming Authority license OGL/2024/165/0185 — confirmed directly in BitStarz’s own current terms and conditions.
A note on “who really owns this,” beyond the corporate name: it’s worth understanding that a named director or officer on file for a Curaçao-registered company isn’t always the person who actually controls or profits from the business. Professional nominee arrangements, where an agency places a paid individual on the paperwork as the listed director or officer while the real controlling parties stay unnamed, are a documented, common practice in offshore corporate structures generally.
We looked for a named individual behind Gareton B.V. specifically and found conflicting, inconsistent references that didn’t hold up to a closer check, which is itself a more honest and more useful answer than presenting a name as if it settled the question.
The corporate entity (Gareton B.V.) and its license are verifiable facts; who ultimately benefits from it may not be, and that’s a real limitation of “ownership transparency” in this part of the industry rather than something specific to BitStarz.
If it feels like crypto casino ownership names shift more than you’d expect, that’s a real pattern, not just BitStarz. A few structural reasons this happens across the industry:
The National Ordinance on Games of Chance (LOK) came into force December 24, 2024, replacing the old master-license system with direct licensing. The important nuance is that the reform requires whoever hosts a brand to hold a direct, accountable license. It doesn’t require every individual brand to hold a separate one.
Most former Dama-linked brands (mBit, 7Bit, and others) stayed together under a new shared host, Scores55 Tech B.V., which is the normal, expected continuation of the standard white-label model, just with real regulatory transparency attached now instead of none.
Unlike most of its former Dama-linked siblings, BitStarz didn’t stay under a shared multi-brand host. It moved to its own dedicated license under Gareton B.V., with no other brands currently sharing it as far as we’ve found. We don’t have a confirmed reason why BitStarz specifically took this less common path rather than staying grouped with the others.
It could reflect a genuine change in beneficial ownership, BitStarz being valuable enough to warrant its own direct standing, or something else. Worth flagging as a real open question rather than a settled one.
Australia’s communications regulator (ACMA) has issued formal warnings against Dama N.V. repeatedly since 2022, across more than a dozen different brands, for offering unlicensed gambling services to Australian customers. At least one warning also named Strukin Ltd, a Cyprus-based payment-processing entity connected to Dama’s corporate structure, alongside Dama N.V. itself. This is real, public, and documented; it’s a credible contributing reason an operator might want distance from the Dama N.V. name specifically, on top of the regulatory and banking pressures above.
Worth noting what makes Australia different. We didn’t find equivalent formal warnings from European regulators like the Netherlands or Lithuania, both of which are otherwise very active against offshore gambling generally. The likely reason is structural. Most of these European countries run their own licensed domestic online casino markets and rely on operators self-excluding from them (BitStarz’s own terms list dozens of restricted European countries).
Australia prohibits offshore casino-style gambling from reaching its residents entirely and actively pursues violators rather than counting on self-exclusion. Dama-linked brands appear to have judged that risk differently by market. We haven’t found BitStarz named directly in any ACMA warning, so this is offered as context for the broader pattern across the old Dama portfolio, not a claim specific to BitStarz.
Operators that accept both fiat and crypto are subject to card-network risk controls. An entity that accumulates enough chargebacks or fraud flags can end up on an industry blacklist that effectively locks it out of payment processing under that name, creating real pressure to continue operating under a different legal entity.
where operating and licensing entities are kept separate for tax and liability reasons. This is a normal practice industrywide, unrelated to any red flag.
None of this means a name change is inherently suspicious, but it does mean that ownership information from an older review, even a reputable one, can be genuinely out of date through no fault of the reviewer.
The license itself, OGL/2024/165/0185, is current and verifiable directly. Click the Certificate of Operation seal in BitStarz’s footer, and it should resolve to cert.cga.cw showing this exact license number and a domain match to bitstarz.com. See our full guide on verifying a crypto casino’s license yourself.
The ownership entity behind that license matters less for day-to-day play than the license itself being current and verified, but it matters if you’re trying to understand who has ultimate responsibility for your funds, or if you’re researching BitStarz’s history and running into conflicting older sources.
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