Bringing Teamwork, Strategy, and Sabotage Onchain
Celebrating Crypto: The Game
Max Segall
|Mar 19, 2024
If you’re active on Farcaster or crypto Twitter, you’ve likely seen thousands of posts about Crypto: The Game, with descriptions ranging from dramatic and insanity-inducing to the most fun crypto experience seen in years.
At Privy, one of the crypto trends we’re most excited about is seeing crypto apps evolve from discrete single-transaction experiences to engaging multi-session user journeys. Few projects embody this trend more than Crypto: The Game, a Survivor-inspired gameshow reimagined for an onchain audience.
After participating in Season 1 and partnering with the team on their Season 2 buildout, we’ve gotten an inside look at the most exciting consumer app in our market. Let’s dive in!
What is Crypto: The Game?
CTG is a massive crypto survival game, where many will play, but one will win. To play, participants must buy in for 0.1 ETH and connect their Twitter accounts. Proceeds from the entry fees fund the prize pool (41 ETH was up for grabs from 410 players in Season 1), and Twitter accounts bootstrap players’ social identities. Season 1 pulled in the “who’s who” of the crypto market, ranging from 3LAU to Packy McCormick to Bored Elon.
Players are then divided into "tribes," and each night over a 10-day period, they face the threat of being voted out by their tribemates. However, they can earn immunity by either referring new players to the game or winning various tribal immunity challenges (think classic arcade games, crypto puzzles, and digital scavenger hunts). The challenges were fun, the social dynamics were fascinating, and the end result left us excited to see where the CTG team can take this moving forward.
During the final night of Season 1, all participants (including those voted off) voted on who would win the entire prize pot. The winner, a Tokyo-based member of the Hyperloot community named 'MFL', didn't receive a single negative vote, largely thanks to his infectious positive energy and endearing poems about other players throughout the season.
Time will tell if similar tactics lead to victory in Season 2.
Why we’re hooked
Beyond the fun we had playing the game in Season 1, CTG immediately struck our imagination for a few reasons. It embodies many of the elements that we’ve come to recognize as making social products in crypto special. Specifically, it brings together
The right amount of speculation–players competing for a prize,
Massive coordination over time against an evolving state–daily coordination of player in the face of elimination,
And an evolving meta strategy—as evidenced by innumerable side chats and strategies being run around the game.
We are starting to see a new class of onchain activity emerge which uniquely leverages the shared state and simple payments of onchain systems. While Season 1 made use of crypto mostly as part of simple payments to the prize pool, we are excited by all of the subtle ways in which the game leverages onchain dynamics and a native internet culture to create a whole new experience.
Looking Ahead
In the coming weeks, CTG will launch their second season, “Anon Island”. While most of the season’s details are tightly under wraps, we’re so excited to help the team introduce its new NFT-based entry. Unlike in Season 1, where players essentially sent 0.1 ETH to the game’s multisig, in Season 2, all players will mint an NFT, which will represent their spot in The Game.
When they’re voted out, the NFTs turn from Player NFTs to Jury NFTs. But this also means that players can sell their NFT at any point for your spot in the game, similar to hedging a parlay.
While “crypto” is in the name, the team’s ambition is to eventually scale one of the most engaging onchain experiences to a much broader audience then their initial crypto native cohort. We couldn’t be more proud to support them on this journey.
CTG feels like a new generation of onchain experience with around-the-clock engagement, deep cross-user collaboration, and perhaps most interestingly, no speculative incentives. The team is just getting started, with tons of new surprises teed up for Anon Island. May the best player win - we can’t wait to see you there.
