The game “blew up” in Brazil, growing their discord community to over 100,000 people, some of whom volunteered to “sit on the server and watch for cheats” to manually boot bad actors, rewarding reports with 100 – 500 sats over the lightning network, depending on the situation. “it wasn’t scalable. It was like Mechanical Turk style.” Cousens noted.

ZBD is now actively working with close to 40 game developers, according to Cousens, all of whom are working to integrate bitcoin rewards into their video games, paid out using Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. Cousens, who is a big fan of the Lightning Network, defended the protocol, saying that, “There’s still FUD about Lightning and I don’t get it… ZBD has no on-chain offering. Lightning is amazing.”

Most recently, ZBD announced a partnership with TapNation, a leading mobile publisher with “over 1 billion total downloads,” according to the press release. Their flagship game is called Idle Bank, which already has over 12 million downloads. Idle Bank is the first mainstream mobile game to deliver native Bitcoin rewards to players via the Lightning Network. ZBD reports that since launch, the game has achieved a 355% increase in 30-day player retention and a 124% boost in revenue per player, demonstrating Bitcoin’s impact on engagement and monetization.