A significant and rather unusual development occurred in the US betting and gaming space last week, as PlayUp moved to sue its former regional CEO.

Laila Mintas, who previously served as CEO of PlayUp US, has been accused of threatening to ‘burn PlayUp to the ground’ and working to disrupt a reported $450 million sale of the company to crypto exchange FTX.

In a statement to the Legal Sports Report, Mintas argued that the comments attributed to her make ‘no sense’ due to her significant investment in both time and resources in the company.

“I am a major shareholder in PlayUp as of today and have invested seven figures of my own savings into the company,” she asserted.

“It makes no sense that I would have made any of those comments that are quoted in the filing or tried to destroy a deal to sell PlayUp, as I would have benefited from that, as well as other shareholders. 

“Over the last two years I built PlayUp USA a business from scratch, having been the US CEO of PlayUp and the only person on the ground for the first year and a half. 

“I built a great team on the ground, got PlayUp live in Colorado and New Jersey, got market access in many states which led to PlayUp USA often being called the ‘sleeping giant’ in our industry. My hard work has created the valuation of over $400 million in loans because of the US market.”

Adam Candeee, LSR Co-Host, described the news as “one of the more amazons stories that we have seen in three plus years of legal sports betting in the US”, but questioned whether PlayUp could be considered the ‘sleeping giant’ of the US market and whether the company could be accurately valued at over $400 million. 

Building on his colleague’s comments, Dustin Gouker said: “This is a tier below low tier players in terms of market share right now. I have real questions as to whether this is worth $450 million, that’s something that’s out there, and according to this FTX was willing to pay that.

“Second most interesting, a major crypto-exchange is trying to buy an online gamlbing company, and that’s almost a footnote to this story because of the lurid details of the lawsuit. It’s wild.”

Although overshadowed by PlayUp’s lawsuit against its former USA CEO, Gouker observed that this development was overshadowing something more significant – a potential trend which is seeing crypto firms becoming more interested in entering the gambling space.