Company Name: THNDR Games
Founder: Desiree Dickerson, Jack Everitt, Greg Flor and Rafal Gawel
Date of establishment: Established in 2019 | Relaunched in 2021
Headquarters location: London, UK with remote team members
Amount of Bitcoin Held in Treasury: “Not enough” (Dickerson said jokingly)
Number of Employees: 6
Website: https://www.thndr.games/
Public or Private? What is confidential
Desiree Dickerson believes that games are a powerful way to get people on board with Bitcoin.
He suggests that, in recent history, games have been used to familiarize people with new technologies.
“They put games on early PCs so users get used to the mouse,” Dickerson told Bitcoin Magazine.
“This is like Snake and Nokia,” he added, explaining that the game Snake was added to Nokia’s original phones “to get users used to the Nokia handset.”
Dickerson sees games playing a similar role when it comes to getting people used to bitcoin on the Lightning Network.
That’s why, in 2021, he helped launch an improved version of THNDR Games, a company that developed a series of mobile games through which users can win sats just by playing.
And he was the perfect fit for the job considering his background both as a gamer and his experience working with the Lightning Network.
Dickerson’s History of Playing with the Lightning
Dickerson has been playing since he was a kid.
“I grew up playing with my father,” he said. “He had an NES, and I grew up playing Duck Hunt with him.”
Although he has been exposed to many different sports in his life, as his father “had all the sports that were played,” he said that he currently considers himself a “cool gamer” and is not into anything else. addictive (and scary) games like HALO.
“It should be as pointless as pulling weeds in Animal Crossing,” Dickerson said with a laugh about his favorite gaming experience.
Not only does Dickerson have a long history in gaming, but he has also been involved with the Lightning Network since its inception.
He started working at Lightning Labs in June 2018 and stayed there for three years before starting at THNDR Games.
Dickerson met THNDR’s original founder, Jack Everitt, while at Lightning Labs. He would realize that gaming is a way to distribute bitcoin, and Everitt, a game developer, was already hard at work developing THNDR.
The two started working together on a project called MintGox (a game on the Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox) where they showed what companies like ZBD, Satoshi’s Games and Donner Lab were building in the Bitcoin gaming space.
By October 2021, Dickerson was the CEO of THNDR.
Building Games for THNDR
In the following years, THNDR released 6 games, all of which were more like casual games than extended shooters or other types of games that required long-term engagement.
These games included Club Bitcoin: Solitaire, a classic Solitaire game; Tetro Tiles, a combination of sudoku and tetris; and Bitcoin Snake, a version of the aforementioned Snake.
In September 2022, Club Bitcoin: Solitaire was the 21st (numerical significance not lost on the THNDR team) most downloaded app on the Apple App Store.
Lucky number 21!🤩
#21 in the App Store⚰️
NUMBER 21!
Thanks to our community and new friends who downloaded Club Bitcoin: Solitaire♣️
This is just the beginning. Now is the time to help us deliver #bitcoin to everyone you know.
Copy, paste, send, repeat: pic.twitter.com/LqED2MWEWN
— THNDR (@THNDRGAMES) September 21, 2022
In October 2023, River’s Lightning Network report highlighted the fact that THNDR is responsible for the growth of Lightning Network transactions.
Despite this success, however, Dickerson and the team at THNDR are still concerned that it may not be enough to make the business as profitable as they wanted it to be.
“I think the problem we saw was that we launched these mobile games and they were a little successful, but is this like a business-backed company?” Dickerson shared.
“We started thinking ‘Hey, we created this new type of Bitcoin prize games, but does it really solve the problem?'” he added.
While pondering these questions, Dickerson and the THNDR team looked at the broader online gaming landscape and found its dimensions ripe for disruption.
Skill-Based Gambling and Betting: The Clinch and THNDR’s Next Frontier
In their research, Dickerson and the THNDR team found that the payment system for virtual casinos and online sports betting was antiquated and full of conflicts.
“Payments in those spaces are completely broken,” Dickerson explained. “There are very slow withdrawals, high fees and not much flexibility with entry and withdrawal – and Bitcoin solves that.”
Therefore, THNDR shifted its focus to developing a system that leveraged the Lightning Network’s near-instant payment times and its ability to process microtransactions in an effort to solve the payment problems it had discovered.
In October 2023, THNDR launched Clinch, an API that delivers fast, borderless, low-fee, and peer-to-peer betting on Lightning. Using Clinch, online casinos, sportsbooks and competitive gaming platforms can increase their payouts.
THNDR has also developed its own skill-based betting version of Solitaire that allows users to bet large sums of money.
“You can’t be a millionaire playing our game [original] It’s a game of Solitaire, but you can now if you start betting based on skill,” says Dickerson (not necessarily encouraging users to bet more than they can afford).
“85% of our users have actually requested it, and it unlocks the potential to monetize not just Solitaire, but a series of different games,” he added.
(To provide some context for how much monetization potential it unlocks, Dickerson shared that the most successful company with a skill-based Solitaire game makes $25 million a month from that one game.)
THNDR also looks beyond the business-to-customer (BSC) model, as it works to create white label solutions – pre-built products that a company develops and then sells to another company that then uses the product under its name – in particular. sports betting platforms.
“It’s a unique interaction and saving tool for sports betting because, in the middle of a match, users just leave the app because it’s like, ‘Okay, this game won’t be finished in another two hours. I will close the app. There’s nothing to do,’” Dickerson explained. “They want to keep people on the app and keep them betting on more things.”
Except for Bitcoin
The team at THNDR is also looking at what other assets they can use during the games.
“We would like to explore the assets of Taproot or other assets as well as 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 in fiat or USD, and everything happens in Bitcoin. I would like to expose them to bitcoin, but in fact it is Bitcoin architecture that solves the payment problems in sports betting and skill-based betting,” he explained.
That said, Dickerson and the team at THNDR have never been fiat maximalists. They are Bitcoiners at heart and one particular aspect of THNDR’s design proves it.
Disappearing Sats – For Your Good
Dickerson said many THNDR users end up going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, in part because THNDR prompts them to do so.
“We have three days until the rewards expire, and if you don’t claim those rewards, you lose them,” Dickerson said.
“You have to take it out [Lightning] wallet if you want your rewards. We take people a little further down the rabbit hole where they find a wallet on their phone. This is a big step, because 80% of our users are new to Bitcoin,” he added.
Dickerson added that THNDR will happily issue refunds to those who have expired. He pointed out that users can contact THNDR to make this request.
With that, he also noted that THNDR could have easily written in the terms and conditions of its service that the sats disappeared three days after they ended. The reason it doesn’t, however, is because it wants its users to learn how Bitcoin and Lightning work, not just to maximize profits.
“We want people to take out money and get sats for themselves,” said Dickerson. “That’s not a business move – it’s a Bitcoiner move.”
