I’m at the blackjack table. My dealer is a humanoid frog who wears a bow-tie. He doesn’t speak much. The frog deals me a 17 and himself a 16. I stay. The frog deals himself another card. He busts.
I win!
Immediately after I win the hand, chips fall from the sky like confetti. I “make it rain” by flicking money from my stack.
Then I win again. And again. This frog can’t beat me! Then I win five times in a row. Except I’m not winning money in the traditional sense of U.S. dollars, and I’m not even winning in the crypto sense of bitcoin (BTC) or some alternative cryptocurrency. I’m playing a free, no-stakes game in the metaverse of Decentraland, which doesn’t really feel like gambling at all.
And this is the paradox of ICE Poker, the casino-that’s-not-a-casino in the heart of Decentraland . The casino has a simple hook: You can’t lose money. It’s not gambling. You can play poker all day and you earn free crypto but you won’t lose a nickel. “We officially pivoted away from gambling,” says Miles Anthony, the founder of Decentral Games, which created ICE Poker. It turns out that people like free money. With their initial model of casino games, Anthony saw around 200 daily active users. When they flipped to a model of play-to-earn, the daily users exploded to 12,000. ICE Poker is now the most highly-visited site in Decentraland, accounting for 60% of the metaverse’s total traffic.
None of this is what Anthony expected. I first spoke with him in the summer of 2020, back in my early reporting on Decentraland . At the time he was a 25-year-old kid who, after graduating from UCLA in 2017, became a digital nomad who ran an e-commerce company while living in Portugal. He made some money during the 2017 initial coin offering (ICO) boom, he scooped up early real estate in Decentraland, and he thought that a metaverse casino was a no-brainer. “It just makes sense to be able to wager your crypto assets,” Anthony told me in 2020.
Here’s what’s supposed to happen: In the […]
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