Stake.us, Coinbase File Arbitration Motions in Underage Suit

Every defendant in the New York underage-gambling case against Stake.us and Stake.com - the Stake companies, Coinbase and Christopher Freeman - filed a motion to compel arbitration on September 8, 2026, in three separate motions backed by 79 pages of legal argument. Their central answer to the claim that the plaintiff signed up as a minor is that he accepted updated terms after turning 18, and so agreed to arbitrate "any and all past, present and future disputes".

The case is Doe v. Medium Rare N.V., No. 1:26-cv-05975, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, before District Judge John P. Cronan. We read the docket and pulled the three memoranda on September 9. Nothing has been decided, and every allegation in the complaint remains an allegation.

This closes an open item on our own file. When we reported the case going federal, we said the motions were due August 28 under the schedule the parties had proposed. That is not how the court set it. Judge Cronan's August 14 order gave the defendants until September 7, then granted a one-day extension to September 8 on September 1.

Who filed what on September 8?

Three defence camps, each with its own counsel, filed within hours of each other. Seventeen docket entries went in that day, entries 30 through 46, five of them either filed under seal or asking for material to be sealed.

Supporting declarations came from Jarrod Anthony Febbraio for the Stake platforms, David McGill for the Stake defendants, Freeman himself, and Charl Marais for Coinbase. Two of the Febbraio declarations and one Marais declaration were filed under seal, and both the Stake defendants and Coinbase asked the judge to keep certain exhibits sealed.

How do Stake.us and Coinbase answer the underage claim?

Directly, and it is the part of the filing that matters beyond this one case.

The complaint pleads that the plaintiff "was a minor lacking legal capacity at the time of any purported assent". The Stake defendants' memorandum answers that he opened his Stake.us account on April 1, 2023, weeks before his eighteenth birthday, but then logged in again on September 19, 2023, after turning 18, and was required to "scroll through the Updated Stake.us ToS in their entirety before clicking a checkbox to 'Accept'".

Their argument is that the clause he accepted as an adult reaches backwards. It covers, in the words they quote from it, "any and all past, present and future disputes, claims or causes of action", so "when he voluntarily agreed to the Updated Stake.us ToS as an adult, Plaintiff agreed to arbitrate all his disputes with Stake.us or the related Stake Defendants, not just future disputes." They add an estoppel point: having taken the benefit of access to the platform, he "should be estopped from disavowing the mandatory arbitration provision".

Coinbase makes the same move on a tighter fact. Its memorandum says the plaintiff opened a first account as a minor, on his own pleading "using his adult father's identification to bypass age restrictions", and then says "the complaint fails to mention that on his 18th birthday, Plaintiff opened an additional Coinbase account - this time in his own name," agreeing to the 2023 user agreement in the process.

Freeman, whom the complaint ties to Primedice, argues he can enforce the Stake.us clause even though he is not a party to it, because the provision "expressly reaches disputes involving Stake's affiliates and agents".

All three also argue the court should not decide arbitrability at all, because the terms delegate that question to the arbitrator. That is the same delegation clause Judge Cronan flagged in August, when he asked the parties on his own initiative whether a court needs personal jurisdiction over a party before compelling that party to arbitrate.

Has a court granted Stake.us this motion before?

Three times, on the memorandum's own account. It cites three district courts that have granted the company this exact motion.

Read that list with one caveat the memorandum does not supply. The Massachusetts case is the one where the arbitration has since run to an award and the players are now asking a judge to vacate it. Compelled is not the same as finished.

One detail in the Stake filing is worth recording on its own terms. The memorandum, citing the Febbraio declaration about Stake.com, says the company has identified two Stake.com accounts the plaintiff created, the first on August 31, 2017 and the second on May 24, 2019. It then says that when he submitted his New York licence to one of them, that account "was automatically flagged as being from a restricted region, the United States, and was closed by Stake.com".

Be careful how much weight that carries. The filing does not say when the closure happened, and it is the company's account of its own records rather than a finding by anyone. It establishes that Stake.com closed one US-identified account at some point; it does not establish that the block worked, and the complaint alleges years of play across both platforms.

What happens next, and does it affect Stake.us players?

Not quickly, and not directly. There is also a second fight coming that the arbitration filings do not mention, and it is written into the same scheduling order. Judge Cronan's August 14 order does not simply set a briefing calendar for the motions to compel. It says that "Plaintiff's opposition to the motions to compel and crossmotion to remand is due November 6, 2026", and gives the defendants until December 11 to file both their replies and their "oppositions to Plaintiff's cross-motion to remand", with the plaintiff's reply on remand due January 8, 2027.

A motion to remand is a request to send the case back to the New York state court it was removed from in July. So the court is already expecting the plaintiff to argue that this case does not belong in federal court at all, in the same brief in which he argues it does not belong in arbitration. Neither has been filed yet.

On that calendar the judge is unlikely to rule before spring.

Nothing here changes availability, balances or terms at Stake.us, and there is no class, no claims process and no deadline running for anyone else. New York is already on the list of states Stake.us excludes, and our page on whether sweepstakes casinos are legal in New York sets out the state's own position.

The one piece of this that reaches ordinary accounts is the clause itself. If you sign up at a sweepstakes casino today, the arbitration provision is live from that moment, and the 30-day opt-out window most operators give starts on the day you register rather than the day something goes wrong. If you are weighing whether any of this is settled law, our guide to whether sweepstakes casinos are legal is the wider picture. Our Sweepsteaks Limited operator profile tracks the corporate structure behind the brand, and the separate New Mexico case against Drake and Adin Ross drew its own dismissal motions the day before these landed. How we source docket work is set out in our verification guide.

We have not named the plaintiff. A New York state court granted his application to keep his name off the public docket before the case was removed, and we have left out the identifying detail the filings contain.

Sources & documents

• Doe v. Medium Rare N.V., No. 1:26-cv-05975 (S.D.N.Y.) - full docket, read September 9, 2026
• Stake defendants' memorandum in support of motion to compel arbitration and stay, filed September 8, 2026 (PDF, 24pp)
• Christopher Freeman's memorandum in support of motion to compel arbitration, filed September 8, 2026 (PDF, 27pp)
• Coinbase memorandum in support of motion to compel arbitration and stay litigation, filed September 8, 2026 (PDF, 28pp)

Every quotation above is taken verbatim from a document we downloaded and read, except the briefing deadlines and the cross-motion to remand, which are quoted from the text of Judge Cronan's August 14 order and the September 1 extension order as those entries appear on the public docket. The sealed declarations are not public and we have not seen them, so the factual record here is the defendants' account of it: the plaintiff's response is not due until December and the complaint's own allegations are summarised through the defendants' filings rather than from the complaint itself. No court has found that any defendant did anything unlawful, and none of the allegations described here has been tested.

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