Software company Zebedee has launched Infuse, which allows players to earn bitcoin while playing Counter-Strike Global Offensive, or CSGO. The special servers for the unofficial game extension launched Friday evening UTC time. Infuse uses the Bitcoin Lightning Network for fast and free transactions between players.
Infuse is basically an overlay over existing software. In this case Infuse taps into the APIs from Counter-Strike: GO. Every player pays a certain amount of satoshis, a fragment of a bitcoin, to join an Infuse server. During the Counter-Strike match players earn bitcoin by shooting other people, while they lose sats when being hit.
At the moment there are only Deathmatch servers, but Zebedee wants to support more game modes in the near future. In addition Counter-Strike won’t be the only game, as more are planned. Rocket League would be a very obvious addition to their line-up. Gamers who want to earn bitcoin from playing CSGO, will need a Zebedee wallet. However, please realize that you can also lose your sats if you really suck at the game.
What is the Lightning Network?
The Lightning Network is a second layer on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. In this case we are talking about the Bitcoin network, but technically the Lightning Network can run on top of any blockchain. It’s a payment protocol for fast transactions between participating nodes. Many developer believe the Lightning Network to be a solution for the scaling problems that Bitcoin is facing.
What the Lightning Network does, is creating a temporarily communication channel between two parties. Here these two parties can make as many transactions as they want. Only after closing the channel, the nodes can communicate the outcome of these transactions to the Bitcoin network. As a result a transaction on the Lightning Network only needs to cost a fraction of a cent.
For those who are not familiar with bitcoin. You can divide a bitcoin into smaller units, and the smallest possible amount is called satoshi, or sat. On the Lightning Network, a second layer solution on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, these sets can even be divided into millisats. Anyway, one satoshi equals 0.00000001 BTC.
Lightning Network and gaming
Several other developers are using the Lightning Network to add bitcoin payments to video games. For example, Satoshi’s Games has created the battle royale shooter Lightnite. This game even uses the Liquid Network to embrace the concept of non-fungible tokens. However, Lightnite isn’t a household name in the gaming landscape. It needs to battle with thousands of yearly released games for the limit time a consumer spends per day on video games.
In February Zebedee already released toolkits for developers. These would allow game developers to implement Bitcoin Lightning Network payments and monetize gameplay within their video games. The SDK allows developers to for example monetize points collected in games. This means that value and rewards will be digital, programmable, and they will have universal value.
Mandelduck Studios was one of the first game studios using the Zebedee SDK. Raiki is a fighting game in which two players commit some bitcoin and the winner takes it all. The game also has a way to make viewers interact with the game, as they can spend fractions of bitcoin to add challenges or aesthetics. Mandelduck Studios showed the game in February during the Advancing Bitcoin Conference in London.
Robert Hoogendoorn is a gamer and blockchain enthusiast. He got in touch with crypto in 2014, but the fire really lit in 2017. Professionally he’s a content optimization expert and worked for press agencies and video production companies, always with a focus on the video games & tech industry. He’s a content manager and creator at heart, started the Play to Earn Online Magazine in early 2020.
