Company Name: THNDR Games
Founder: Desiree Dickerson, Jack Everitt, Greg Flor, Rafal Gauel
Established date: Founded in 2019 | Relaunched in 2021
Headquarters: London, UK with remote team members
Amount of Bitcoin held by the Treasury: “It’s still not enough,” Dickerson joked.
Number of employees: 6
Website: https://www.thndr.games/
Public or private? private
Desiree Dickerson believes that games are a powerful way to get people into Bitcoin.
She argues that in recent years, games have been used to familiarise people with new technology.
“We put the game on the original PC to get users used to using a mouse,” Dickerson told Bitcoin Magazine.
“It’s like Snake and Nokia,” she added, explaining that the Snake game was added to Nokia’s early feature phones “to get users familiar with Nokia phones.”
Dickerson believes games can play a similar role in helping people become more comfortable using Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency. Lightning Network.
So in 2021, she THNDR Gamesis a company that has developed a suite of mobile games that allow users to win. soil Just to play.
She was the perfect candidate for the job, given both her background as a gamer and her experience working with the Lightning Network.
Dickerson’s game and Lightning history
Dickerson has been playing games since he was a child.
“I grew up playing games with my dad,” she recalls. “He had a Nintendo Entertainment System, and I grew up playing Duck Hunt with him.”
She has been exposed to a variety of games throughout her life because her father had “every game console,” but now describes herself as aCozy Gamer” And she said she has no interest in more consumptive (and scary) games like Halo.
“It has to be a totally mindless game, like picking weeds in Animal Crossing,” Dickerson said with a laugh about his current gaming preferences.
Not only does Dickerson have a long history in the gaming industry, he has also been involved with the Lightning Network since its inception.
She started working Lightning Lab I joined the company in June 2018 and stayed there for three years before joining THNDR Games.
Dickerson met THNDR founder Jack Everitt while at Lightning Labs: She recognized that games were a way to spread the word about Bitcoin, and Everitt, a game developer, was already hard at work on THNDR.
The two began working on the project together. Mint Gox (A play on a defunct bitcoin exchange) Mount Gox) we introduced what companies like. GhibliSatoshi’s Games and Donner Lab had entered the Bitcoin gaming space.
By October 2021, Dickerson had become CEO of THNDR.
Building the THNDR game
Over the next few years, THNDR released six games, all of which were closer to cozy games than long-playing first-person shooters or other types of games that require longer engagement.
These games include Club Bitcoin: Solitairethe classic solitaire game. Tetro Tilea combination of Sudoku and Tetris. Bitcoin Snakea version of the aforementioned Snake.
By September 2022, Club Bitcoin: Solitaire will be ranked 21st ( Numerical significance The app, which the THNDR team did not miss, is the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store.
Lucky number 21! 🤩
#21 in the App Store⚰️
Number 21!
Thanks to our community and our new friends for downloading Club Bitcoin: Solitaire ♣️
This is just the beginning. It is time for us to #Bitcoin To everyone you know.
Copy, paste, send, repeat:https://t.co/WvPTIDWLL6 pic.twitter.com/LqED2MWEWN
— THNDR (@THNDRGAMES) September 21, 2022
October 2023, River’s Lightning Network Report He highlighted the fact that THNDR accounts for 3% of the Lightning Network’s transaction growth.
But despite this success, Dickerson and the team at THNDR worried that it wouldn’t be enough to make the business as profitable as they hoped.
“I think the question for us was, we’ve released a mobile game and it’s semi-successful, but can we really scale as a venture-backed company?” Dickerson said.
“We started thinking, ‘We’ve created a new genre of Bitcoin reward games, but does it really solve a problem?'” she added.
Thinking about these questions, Dickerson and the THNDR team looked to the online gaming sector and discovered an area ripe for disruptive change.
Gambling and Skill-Based Betting: The Next Frontier for Clinch and THNDR
In their research, Dickerson and the THNDR team found that the payment systems for virtual casinos and online sports betting were outdated and rife with friction.
“Payments are completely broken in this space,” Dickerson explained. “Withdrawals are super slow, fees are high, and there’s not much flexibility in the limits on purchases and withdrawals. Bitcoin solves that.”
So THNDR shifted its focus to developing a system that leveraged the Lightning Network’s near-instant settlement times and ability to process microtransactions to solve the payments problems it had discovered.
October 2023, THNDR Start clinchingis an API that enables instant, cross-border, low-fee peer-to-peer betting on Lightning. Clinch enables online casinos, sportsbooks, and competitive gaming platforms to level up their payment systems.
THNDR has also built its own version of skill-based betting. Solitaire Users can bet large amounts of money.
“Playing our[original]solitaire game won’t make you a millionaire, but now you can by starting to use skill-based betting,” Dickerson said (though he isn’t necessarily encouraging users to bet money they can’t afford to lose).
“In fact, 85% of our users have requested this, and it really opens up monetization possibilities for a variety of games, not just solitaire,” she added.
(To give an idea of how much monetization potential that is, Dickerson said the most successful company in skill-based solitaire games makes $25 million a month just from that game.)
THNDR is also looking beyond the business-to-customer (BSC) model and is working on creating white-label solutions (off-the-shelf products developed by a company and sold to another company, who then uses the product under their own name) specifically for sports betting platforms.
“This is an engagement and retention tool specific to sports betting, because in between games, people will leave the app because they think, ‘This game isn’t over for another two hours. I’m going to close the app. I have nothing to do,'” Dickerson explained. “We want to keep them in the app and keep them betting on more things.”
Beyond Bitcoin
The team at THNDR is also looking into other assets that could be used in the game.
“We would love to explore Taproot assets and other assets, as well as stablecoins,” Dickerson said.
However, don’t expect THNDR to adopt Tether (USDT) on Tron anytime soon.
“Users don’t actually need to see the bitcoin part,” Dickerson began.
“They can bet in fiat or in US dollars and it’s all done on Bitcoin. I want them to know about Bitcoin, but it’s actually the properties of Bitcoin that are solving the payment problem in sports betting and skill-based betting,” she explained.
That being said, Dickerson and the THNDR team are by no means fiat supremacists: they are pro-Bitcoin at heart, and certain elements of THNDR’s design prove it.
Vanishing Sats — for yourself
Dickerson said many THNDR users end up falling into the Bitcoin maze, sometimes prompted by THNDR.
“The prize has a three-day expiration date. If you do not redeem your prize, it will be forfeited,” Dickerson said.
“If you want the prizes, you have to download a (Lightning) wallet. We’re partially trying to lead people down the rabbit hole of putting a wallet on their phone, which is a big step because 80% of our users have no idea about Bitcoin at all,” she added.
Dickerson added that THNDR is willing to refund expired SATs, a request that users can make by contacting THNDR, she said.
That being said, she also pointed out that THNDR could have easily stated in its terms of service that sats that disappear after three days are lost forever, but didn’t do so because it wants users to learn how Bitcoin and Lightning actually work, not just to maximize profits.
“We just want people to cash out and own the satoshis themselves,” Dickerson said. “This is not a business move, this is a bitcoin enthusiast move.”
