After introducing a free-for-all server earlier this year, Infuse now allows gamers to play Counter-Strike in teams with bitcoin for the winners. The plugin by Zebedee lets players compete in 5v5 and 3v3 plant-the-bomb games with a best of 30 rounds.
It’s the first time that gamers can compete in Counter-Strike teams for prizes paid in bitcoin. Zebedee introduced Infuse earlier this year with the promise to add a lot more options. Infuse is a software layer that they place on top of a Counter-Strike server. Gamers will need to install the Infuse plugin, pay a bit of bitcoin to join a Counter-Strike game, and then compete to eventually leave the game with profits.
Infuse uses the Bitcoin Lightning Network for fast and free transactions between players. Every player pays a certain amount of satoshis, a fragment of a bitcoin, to join an Infuse server. When you’re playing free-for-all you earn or lose bitcoin based on your K/D ratio. However, when you’re playing in team modes, Infuse pays the bitcoin prizes to winning teams.
Right now Infuse works only with Counter-Strike, but they want to embrace a whole bunch of other games. The most important criterium would be, that these games should offer the option for private servers.
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.
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.
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