Company Name: Thunder games
Founder: Desiree Dickerson, Jack Everett, Greg Flor, and Rafal Gawel
Date of Establishment: Originally founded in 2019 | Relaunched in 2021
Headquarters location: London, UK with remote team members
The amount of Bitcoin held in the vault: “Not enough,” Dickerson said jokingly.
Number of Employees: 6
website: https://www.thndr.games/
Public or private? private
Desiree Dickerson believes that gaming is a powerful way to attract people to Bitcoin.
It posits that in modern history, games have been used to accustom people to using new technologies.
“They put the games on the original PC to introduce users to the mouse,” Dickerson told Bitcoin Magazine.
“This is similar to Snake and Nokia,” she added, explaining that Snake was added to early Nokia phones “to familiarize users with the Nokia phone.”
Dickerson sees games playing a similar role when it comes to getting people used to using Bitcoin on the Lightning Network.
That’s why, in 2021, I helped launch a revamped version of Thunder gamesa company that has developed a line of mobile games in which users can win prizes just for playing.
She was the perfect person for the position given her background as a gamer and her experience working with the Lightning Network.
Dickerson’s history with games and lightning
Dickerson has been playing games since she was a child.
“I grew up playing with my father,” she recounted. “He had an NES, and I grew up playing Duck Hunt with him.”
Although she has been exposed to a variety of different games over the course of her life, with her father owning “every game console,” she said she currently considers herself a “personality gamer.”Comfortable player“And she doesn’t like more consuming (and scary) games like HALO.
“It should be as mindless as picking weeds in Animal Crossing,” Dickerson said with a chuckle of her current gaming preferences.
Not only does Dickerson have a long history in gaming, but she has also been involved with the Lightning Network almost since its inception.
I started working on Lightning Laboratories in June 2018 and stayed there for three years before starting THNDR Games.
Dickerson met THNDR’s original founder, Jack Everett, while she was still at Lightning Labs. I realized that games were a way to popularize Bitcoin, and Everett, the game developer, was already hard at work developing THNDR.
The two began working together on a project called MintGox (a play on the defunct Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox) where they showcased what businesses preferred. ZPDSatoshi Games and Donner Lab have been working to build out the Bitcoin gaming space.
As of October 2021, Dickerson was serving as CEO of THNDR.
THNDR GAMES BUILDING
In the following years, THNDR released 6 games, all of which were closer to relaxing games than extended-play first-person shooters or other types of games that required longer engagement.
These games included Bitcoin Club: SolitaireClassic solitaire game; Tetro tiles, a mix of Sudoku and Tetris; And Bitcoin snakea copy of the aforementioned snake.
By September 2022, Club Bitcoin: Solitaire was the 21st (which has not lost its numerical importance THNDR Team) most downloaded app in the Apple App Store.
Lucky number 21!
No. 21 in the App Store⚰️
No. 21!
Thank you to our community and new friends who downloaded Club Bitcoin: Solitaire♣️
This is just the beginning. Now it’s time to help us bring #Bitcoin For everyone you know.
Copy, paste, send and repeat:https://t.co/WvPTIDWLL6 pic.twitter.com/LqED2MWEWN
– Thunder (@THNDRGAMES) September 21, 2022
In October 2023, River lightning network report He highlighted the fact that THNDR was responsible for 3% of the network’s accelerated transaction growth.
Even with this success, Dickerson and the THNDR team still worry that it may not be enough to make the business as profitable as they wanted.
“I think the problem we saw was that we launched these mobile games and they were semi-successful, but does this really scale as a venture-backed company?” Dickerson shared.
“We started thinking, ‘We’ve created this new type of Bitcoin reward game, but does it really solve a problem?'” she added.
While pondering these questions, Dickerson and the THNDR team looked at the broader online gaming space and found a dimension ripe for change.
Skill-Based Gambling and Betting: Grab and the Next Frontier for THNDR
In their research, Dickerson and the THNDR team found that the payment system for virtual casinos and online sports betting was outdated and full of friction.
“Payments in those places are completely broken,” Dickerson explained. “There are very slow withdrawals, high fees, and not a lot of flexibility in terms of subscription and withdrawal limits – and Bitcoin solves this problem.”
Therefore, THNDR turned its focus to developing a system that used the accelerator network’s near-instant settlement time as well as its microtransaction processing ability in an effort to solve the payment issues it discovered.
In October 2023, THNDR launched Clinch, an application programming interface (API) that facilitates instant, limitless, low-fee, peer-to-peer betting on Lightning. With Clinch, online casinos, sportsbooks and competitive gaming platforms can level up their payment systems.
THNDR has also built its own skill-based version of betting from Solitaire Which allows users to bet large amounts of money.
“You couldn’t become a millionaire when you played (the original) solitaire, but now you can become a millionaire if you start practicing skill-based betting” (not necessarily encouraging users to bet more than they can afford to lose), Dickerson said.
“85% of our users have already requested it, and it limits the monetization potential of not only solitaire, but also a range of different games,” she added.
(To provide some context on how much monetization potential it opens up, Dickerson shared that the most successful skill-based Solitaire company makes $25 million a month from that game alone.)
THNDR is also looking beyond the business-to-customer (BSC) model, creating white label solutions – pre-built products that a company develops and then sells to another company that then uses the product under its own name – particularly for sports betting platforms.
“It’s an engagement and retention tool specifically for sports betting, because between games, users leave the app because it’s like, ‘Well, this game isn’t going to be over for another two hours.’ I’m just going to close the app. There’s nothing to do,” Dickerson explained. “They want to keep people in the app and keep them betting on more stuff.”
Beyond Bitcoin
The THNDR team is also looking for other assets they can use within games.
“We would like to explore Taproot assets or other assets like stablecoins,” Dickerson told me.
However, don’t expect to see THNDR using Tether (USDT) on Tron anytime soon.
“Users don’t actually need to see a piece of Bitcoin,” Dickerson began.
“They can bet with fiat currency or US dollars, and it all happens via Bitcoin. I would like to introduce them to Bitcoin, but it is the properties of Bitcoin that solve the payout problems in sports betting and skill-based betting,” she explained.
However, Dickerson and the THNDR team did not become regime extremists. They are Bitcoiners at heart, and one specific element in THNDR’s design proves that.
Disappearing Sats – for your own good
Many THNDR users end up falling down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, in part because THNDR demands it, Dickerson said.
“We have a three-day shelf life on prizes, and if you don’t cash out those prizes, you forfeit them,” Dickerson said.
“You have to download the (Lightning) wallet if you want your rewards. We are partly putting people down the rabbit hole where they get a wallet on their phone. This is a big step, because 80% of our users are completely new to Bitcoin,” she added.
Dickerson added that THNDR will happily refund those who have expired. It stated that users can contact THNDR to make this request.
However, it also noted that THNDR could have easily written into its terms and conditions of service that satellites that disappear after three days are gone forever. But the reason it doesn’t do this is because it wants its users to learn how Bitcoin and Lightning actually work, not just maximize profits.
“We just want people to get their money and have their seats for themselves,” Dickerson said. “This is not a commercial move – this is a Bitcoin move.”