Spaniard Ibai Llanos Garatea, who appears on Twitch under his first name, is currently the most watched streamer in the world. He was able to get famous actor Will Smith on board for his annual boxing event.
What kind of streamer is this? Ibai Llanos Garatea, known online simply as Ibai, is a Spanish Twitch streamer who rose to fame with League of Legends content. He is now mostly active in the Just Chatting category and is less into gaming.
Since 2021, Ibai has hosted an annual boxing event called “La Velada del Año,” which translates to “The Night of the Year.” At the time, the event attracted up to 1.5 million concurrent viewers on Twitch. The next year, Ibai set a new world record with a peak of 3.34 million concurrent viewers, which he broke for the 3rd time in a row on July 13, 2024 (via TwitchTracker).
Even xQc, the former star of Twitch, cannot keep up with such numbers.
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Twitch personally names Ibai a legend
So what was the new record stream? La Velada 4 took place on July 13 and attracted 3.8 million simultaneous viewers at its peak, once again beating Ibai’s own records from 2023 and 2022.
This means that Ibai reached as many viewers at once as the record streamers in second and third place combined: TheGregf’s absolute peak is 2.4 million viewers, which he reached in 2021 when he introduced his own skin in Fortnite. The streamer Squeezie reached 1.3 million viewers with a Formula 4 racing event in September 2023, holding the record in France.
The boxing event can not only be followed on Twitch, but also live in the stadium. There, 80,000 fans cheered along in the sold-out Estadio Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid, the home of Real Madrid. You can get an impression of the crowds on X.
Ibai is now so big that he even managed to get global star Will Smith to perform at his event. He performed together with his son Jaden (via X).
One particular song probably made many people feel nostalgic. You can see it here in the video:
Such success is also recognized by Twitch itself. In a post on the streaming platform’s official X account, it says: “Ibai and the Spanish-speaking community have made history again. You are legends of the internet.” (via X)
Ibai himself was touched on X. In a post, he shared a video of Will Smith’s performance and wrote: “9 years ago I was commenting on LoL from my grandparents’ house. Today it happened in an event on my channel. Thanks to everyone who accompanied me on this journey.”
When Twitch launched as an independent website in 2011, nobody would have expected that events of this magnitude would one day take place there. But even then, the streaming platform was already producing its own stars: Who was the first Twitch streamer and what is he doing today?