A new game will soon drop in the App Store. You are a cat – a cute cat, a cartoon cat – who flings items like fish, seashells, and golden stars int
A new game will soon drop in the App Store. You are a cat – a cute cat, a cartoon cat – who flings items like fish, seashells, and golden stars into the sky. Your goal is to smash targets.
I tested the game, called THNDR Bay, while it was still in beta. In the spirit of games like Candy Crush, it’s a bit mindless yet oddly addictive, and it serves the usual purpose of putting off work.
But the game has a twist.
This article is part of CoinDesk’s Culture and Entertainment Week.
When you finish each level you win purple tickets, and these tickets automatically enroll you in a daily raffle that doles out free Bitcoin. The day after I first played my game, I opened THNDR Bay and learned that I had just won 20 Satoshi, or roughly $.01. Finally, at long last, I’m leveraging my journalism to get rich in crypto.
I might have only won a penny, but each month, 50,000 users are regularly playing other games from THNDR (the developer of THNDR Bay), such as Turbo 84 and Bitcoin Bounce, to “stack Sats.” Zebedee, another bitcoin gaming company, says 50,000 people have downloaded a mobile game called SaruTobi. These numbers are tiny compared to the 1.8 million daily users of Axie Infinity, but there are some in the space who see the rise of mobile bitcoin gaming – especially in a “normal” ecosystem like the App Store – as key to spurring global bitcoin adoption.
“Mobile games are the most frictionless way for people to onboard into bitcoin,” says Desiree Dickerson, the new CEO of THNDR. “Nothing feels safer than going to the App Store, or the Google Play store. Everything feels safe.” You don’t need to upload a picture of your passport. You don’t need 2-factor authentication. “That is the most beautiful experience for getting your first bitcoin,” says Dickerson. “You’re literally having fun and you’re earning bitcoin.”
Dickerson’s very presence at THNDR, in a way, is a massive vote of confidence in mobile gaming, and perhaps a signal for the future. She’s a good get. For years Dickerson served as VP of business operations at Lightning Labs, arguably the most consequential project in all of Bitcoin. She had a top role at a top company. She’s popular in the space and well-connected, and she could have landed any job.
So why cartoon cats?
The shorthand is that Dickerson left Lightning to launch a bitcoin mobile gaming company. The truth is more complex. At the end of July, she left Lightning to help care for her mother, spending 14 hours a day in a Cleveland hospital – often sleeping there – as her mother battled diverticulitis. “I had to make a call on where to spend my time,” says Dickerson, and her mom was more important than bitcoin.
When her mother recovered, Dickerson, exhausted and drained, took her first break in years and went on an “epic vacation” with her husband and bounced around Europe – Barcelona, Krakow, Naples, Prague, Slovakia, and on and on. “We ate and drank and did nothing,” says Dickerson. But wherever she went, and on every flight, she noticed something: People were playing games on their phones. Grandparents, teenagers, kids, parents, men, women – everyone was on their phone playing games. “It was literally everywhere,” says Dickerson. “Even in Ohio in the hospital waiting rooms. They’re not reading books anymore.” Even her mom was playing “these stupid Clue-like games.”
Meanwhile she had been doing research. Crunching numbers. “I was like, holy shit, mobile gaming makes up 60% of the entire gaming market,” she says. “That’s larger than both desktop and console gaming combined. Insane numbers.” And there are an estimated 3.1 billion gamers in the world. She found the math compelling.
Then there’s the lure of gaming itself – a lifetime obsession. When Dickerson was a kid, her dad had the original Nintendo and they played Duck Hunter. The N64 came out when her parents divorced, and the console brightened an otherwise bleak time, as “so much was breaking down in our lives.” Over pizza, she bonded with her father while playing Goldeneye and Mario Party. “It was such a huge, huge, huge part of my youth,” she says.
Later, at the University of Chicago, she got hooked on Facebook games, even using her student loan money on FarmVille. After college, working in management consulting for the federal government (she helped with the roll-out of HealthCare.gov, calling it two years of “non-stop nuts” and “insanity”), she was hell-bent on winning Pokemon Go battles… at the White House.
That gaming obsession continued at Lightning. She worked with Jack Everitt, the game developer who originally launched THNDR, and Christian Moss, the co-founder and head developer at Zebedee, to launch a bitcoin e-sports tournament called Mint Gox. “My favorite use case [for Lightning] is gaming,” Dickerson told me back in May of 2021, months before she made the switch. “Gaming is the perfect onramp for people who never…
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