Solitaire, Counter-Strike, Snake: How casual gaming could be a ‘huge’ Bitcoin on-ramp

September 19, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Gaming companies Zebedee and Thndr are taking advantage of the Lighting Network, atop Bitcoin, to entertain and onboard gamers into Bitcoin.

You can now play Solitaire, Snake and even Counter-Strike to earn Satoshis, tiny fractions of Bitcoin (BTC). Cointelegraph spoke to executives at Thndr Games, a play-to-earn (P2E) company built around Bitcoin and Zebedee, a gaming platform that will “Transform gaming with the power of Bitcoin.”

Thanks to the Lightning Network (LN), a layer-2 payment solution built on top of Bitcoin, instant microtransactions of Sats can pay out to gamers across the globe quickly. “This genuinely fixes a need in gaming,” Ben Cousens, chief strategy officer at Zebedee, told Cointelegraph.

Zebedee offers Bitcoin and LN support for popular games such as Counter-Strike: Go. They promote casual gaming and the creation of inviting environments that could “Bring people into Bitcoin in a way that surprises them,” Cousens explained.

For THNDR, which released a Solitaire-style mobile game on Monday, the rollout of popular, casual gaming types is also about onboarding people into Bitcoin. They actively target gamers in emerging markets as well as female audiences.

Looks familiar? In-game footage from CS:Go. Source: Zebedee

Desiree Dickerson, CEO & co-founder of Thndr Games, shared some statistics with Cointelegraph during a call: “Sixty percent of all women worldwide play games, and 60% of these women play mobile games every day.”

On top of that, the gaming industry is bigger than the movie industry; “2.6 billion people worldwide play games,” and within that segment, mobile gaming is the most popular. “It makes up 60% of the entire gaming market, and it’s only increasing,” Dickerson explained.

The release of Club Bitcoin: Solitaire specifically taps into the growing female audience segment:

“The mission is to onboard people into Bitcoin, but we are never going to make a game that is not a good game. We don’t want just to target Bitcoiners non-stop. It’s about making an excellent game that has Bitcoin in it.”

Around 60% of Thndr Game's users are located in the global south, a popular touchpoint for Bitcoiner companies. Emerging markets suffer from unstable regimes, volatile currencies and weaker socio-economic development.

In this environment, Bitcoin the asset can provide an economic lifeline to many and thanks to near-instant payment rails and Bitcoin-centric games, Bitcoin the protocol now offers a means of escapism as well as small economic rewards. At Zebedee, for example, the average transaction size is tiny, just $0.02.

Cousens told Cointelegraph, “Gaming and Bitcoin and Lighting is a huge onramp for Bitcoin [adoption],” sharing that Brazil is an important territory of their userbase, followed by the Philippines–both emerging countries with thriving crypto adoption.

Club Bitcoin: Solitaire. Source: apps.apple.com

Furthermore, both Dickerson and Cousens illustrated that gaming is a way of onboarding people into Bitcoin without “ideology.” The Bitcoin and crypto spaces are rife with infighting, dunking and told-you-so's, whereas gaming, in particular idle gaming, is a laidback environment in which users can start stacking sats.

Thndr has successfully sent over 1.5 million rewards over the LN and has garnered a growing audience of devoted fans. All of its games on the Apple App Store boast a 4.5-star or more rating. “We are almost first and foremost thinking about the pure joy of play,” Dickerson explained.

For Cousens, who is well aware of the risk of “Hyperfinancialisation” of gaming products, he explains it’s hard to underestimate the role that casual gaming could play in Bitcoin adoption .“A bad casual mobile game has like 10 million downloads [...] You get one or two games, you dwarf El Salvador.”

El Salvador could onboard a total population of 6.4 million people into earning, saving, and spending Bitcoin thanks to The Bitcoin Law. Solitaire, by comparison, has 35 million monthly users, according to Microsoft. And that’s just one game.

Bitcoin Lightning Network capacity crosses 3900 BTC marking a new ATH

May 30, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

The Bitcoin LN was first implemented into the Bitcoin mainnet in 2018 and has ever since been able to maintain an upward trajectory in terms of expanding its capacity.

Unwithered by the ongoing bear market, Bitcoin’s (BTC) underlying architecture continues to outperform itself — further securing, decentralizing and speeding up the impenetrable peer-to-peer network. The same holds true for the Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN).

The Bitcoin Lightning Network capacity attained an all-time high of 3915.776 BTC as evidenced by data from Bitcoin Visuals, displaying a commitment to the cause of improving BTC transaction speeds and reducing fees over the layer-2 protocol.

Cumulative Bitcoin capacity across all channels. Source: BitcoinVisuals node

The Bitcoin LN was first implemented into the Bitcoin mainnet in 2018 to address Bitcoin’s infamous scalability issues and has ever since been able to maintain an upward trajectory in terms of expanding its capacity.

The climb, however, saw a temporary disruption on April 18, when the LN capacity dropped by 7.7% — from 3687.051 to 3402.273 BTC in a matter of a week. Showcasing network resilience, the drop was accompanied by a quick recovery back to 3718.351 BTC by May 2.

Bitcoin Lightning Network statistics. Source: 1ml

Moreover, statistics data from 1ml shows that all other aspects of the Bitcoin Lightning Network continue to grow parallel to Bitcoin’s global adoption drive.

A Redditor’s data-driven prediction hints at a major disruption that will see the crypto industry move away from bridging between L1 blockchains toward L2s. As explained by the OP:

“L2 adoption is happening now, even if it is slow and in bursts. Behind the scenes, L2’s are improving reliability, decreasing fees, and increasing accessibility. L2’s are still building and improving, and that’s fantastic.”

As Cointelegraph previously reported, L2 scaling solutions take advantage of L1’s security and process multiple transactions into a single package.

Bitcoin transaction fees briefly doubled yet remain exceptionally low

March 9, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

The cost of sending Bitcoin from one address to another has stayed exceptionally low since July 2021 despite spiking in price last week.

Got some Satoshi to send or Bitcoin (BTC) wallets to reorganize? It’s increasingly cheap to do so. According to an Arcane Research report, Bitcoin “transaction fees have stayed low since July 2021, showing no signs of rising.”

*Bitcoin mean tx fees remaining very low despite small hike last week. Source: Arcane Research*

There was, however, a small bump in transaction fees last week. Shown as a small jump at the tail end of the graph, clustering of the mempool pushed “up the average transaction fees per day over the past seven days to $691,000, a doubling since last Tuesday.”

Nonetheless, the doubling in transaction fees is insignificant: transaction fees remained in a low range. Miners churned through the mempool transactions over a two-day period, securing the network while keeping transacting affordable.

Eric Yakes, author of the Bitcoin book the 7th Property told Cointelegraph that there were three main reasons why transaction costs are so low: Segwit adoption, hash rate redistribution, and Bitcoin layer 2 infrastructure such as the near-instant payment lightning network kicking in.

“June 2021 saw a large increase in the % of Segwit transactions on-chain increasing from ~50% to ~70% which has steadily risen to above 80%, which fundamentally should be increasing transaction throughput for the network.”

Cointelegraph reported on the growing number of exchanges using Segwit addresses over the course of 2021.

In July 2021, Yakes explains that “network difficulty bottomed and has since risen to ATHs,” following the China ban and redistribution of hash rate. Combined with the rise in the number of Segwit transactions:

“This rebound in hash rate has found blocks more rapidly than the difficulty adjustment can keep up with and that has created a more rapid clearing of transactions than otherwise, thus lowering the price of transactions.”

However, Yakes mentions that transaction fees “should not be expected to remain persistent. Eventually, and this is all contingent upon price, hash rate, and difficulty will find their equilibrium, making the fee market less competitive and increasing transaction costs.”

Tomer Strolight, editor-in-chief at Swan Bitcoin, names another factor for why transaction fees are low:

“We have the biggest exchanges all batching transactions now. This means they are sending out 100 or more withdrawals on a single transaction instead of the terrible practice from several years ago of sending out each withdrawal as a single one.”

Plus thanks to the lightning network’s ability to open “channels when the blockchain is uncongested and then using them over and over again prevents the chain from becoming congested whenever a faster, cheaper lightning transaction is an option.”

*Lightning Network nodes and channels map. Source: explorer.acinq.co*

The Arcane research report indicates that while these four factors are important, it’s also “likely that a lower number of transactions per day has driven down the average transaction fee.”

For Yakes, “transaction fees could increase in the short term but there are so many trends counter to higher transaction fees that I think they will be persistently lower over the long term.”

Tromer is also positive:

“I genuinely see that we can gradually build the network capacity to handle all the commerce in the world without the blockchain becoming an insurmountable bottleneck.”

It’s another feather to the BTC cap: the protocol continues to successfully scale, making it more affordable to transact on the network.

Ground Reports Concerning Salvadoran Bitcoin Law Highlight False Narrative Painted by Influencers

September 15, 2021 Bitcoin.com

Eftpos reveals plans to power Australian smart cities with blockchain tech

April 20, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Australian Blockchain Week

Eftpos revealed its plans to use distributed ledger technology to power smart cities and self-driving vehicles during the Australian Blockchain Week conference.

Australia’s leading point-of-sale technology provider Eftpos Australia has revealed ambitious plans to roll out blockchain-powered autonomous vehicles and smart cities in Australia built using Hedera’s Hashgraph.

Speaking on Tuesday as part of the Australian Blockchain Week, Robert Allen, deputy chair of Blockchain Australia and Eftpos’ entrepreneur in residence, discussed the firm's intention to use distributed ledger technology for advanced infrastructure, among other applications:

“We're going to be looking at smart cities. [...] We're going to be looking at autonomous vehicles and things that we haven't even thought about yet. All of this needs new infrastructure, and Eftpos needs to be informed by that.”

Eftpos chief investment officer Ben Tabell noted the significance of the firm’s DLT initiatives in partnership with Hedera, highlighting the firms’ efforts to combine digital identity and payments solutions in Australia.

“This is a big part of our work and effort at the moment to bring in digital identity and transactions so that we can securely support payments and other transaction clubs in the Australian digital ecosystem,” he said.

Eftpos Australia first announced a proof-of-concept for an Australian stablecoin using Hedera’s Hashgraph in July 2020. While the pilot focused on micropayments, such as real-time payments for streaming and pay-per-click content, Allen noted the trial laid the groundwork for more ambitious initiatives:

“Hedera is the only next-generation network that will support those kinds of use cases. So, we wanted to test it, and it has operated beautifully. [...] Now, because we've got all this digital strategy, we are in a position where we can start looking at ways that problems can be solved in a way which is maybe nontraditional and more distributed.”

In January, Eftpos became Hedera’s 17th governing council member and Australia’s first Hedera node operator.

Hedera has been expanding its governing council recently, with Shinhan Bank joining earlier this month, French utility giant Electricite de France onboarding in March, and Standard Bank Group becoming the network’s first African node operator in February.

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