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EXCLUSIVE: “Playing With Payments” – Marca Wosoba and Ben Cousens, ZBD in ‘The Paytech Magazine’

ZBD’s Marca Wosoba and Ben Cousens discuss how bringing real-time payments into gaming is opening new horizons

What if you could earn money playing video games? For people of a certain generation, it’s the stuff of dreams. In fact, for many, it may sound too good to be true.

Innovation in payments is opening up such opportunities. If we have the ability to send anyone online a fraction of a cent instantly and at (near) zero fees, suddenly players around the world can earn a bit of cash from games. Not life-changing amounts, but enough to make their time spent playing feel much more worthwhile.

After all, playing a game is, almost always, a revenue-generating activity. If a player is generating revenue for the game studio, why not share some of that revenue back?

The problem is, bringing in payments capabilities that allow players to claim these rewards and also use them in the real world introduces too much friction. Interacting with financial tech in the middle of a game simply isn’t fun or immersive player engagement. This in turn leads to much better monetisation per user, especially in games that monetise primarily through ads.

Bridging the gap between money and games

Building a system that allows mobile games to share revenue with players in a sustainable way that benefits both sides requires three things: the ability to send minuscule amounts of money to anyone online, the scalability to process high volumes of these nanopayments in real-time and the UX that makes it feel like part of the game, not an interruption.

To solve the first two requirements, ZBD turned to an unlikely candidate – the Bitcoin Lightning Network. This is a highly scalable payments system that runs on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, as a second layer. The Lightning Network has existed for a number of years but was considered experimental tech until recently, with ZBD being the first company to utilise its potential at scale for a commercial use case.

While Bitcoin has firmly established itself as an investment asset among retail investors and is quickly being recognised by institutional investors with the rise of ETFs and increasing regulatory clarity, oversight and approval, it is still rarely seen as a medium of exchange. For many people, when they hear Bitcoin, they think of price volatility and speculativeinvestments.

This thinking, though, is quickly becoming outdated, as the $1.3trillion asset, now 15 years old, has matured far from its unstable beginnings. ZBD is showing that not only does Bitcoin have a place in the world of payments, it can enable use cases that are simply not possible without it. You cannot send a fraction of a dollar cent instantly to the other side of the worldwith zero fees.

ZBD currently does it millions of times per day with Bitcoin. And it all happens seamlessly as users play fun games.

This is a proposition that naturally resonates strongest with younger generations. And that’s not just a guess – ZBD has done its research. A recent report, released by ZBD but based on data gathered by a third-party market research firm, showed that 25 per cent of Gen Z in the UK and US already own Bitcoin, which is higher than any other asset class, including equities.

Furthermore, independent research showed that 65 per cent of Gen Zers game for more than three hours a day. There is also extremely strong interest in earning money by interacting with games, with over 90 per cent of those surveyed saying that is something they would be interested in.

And as Cousens says, “the market exists, as shown both by our business growth and research. The interest we see is not driven by Bitcoin, but it is also not hindered by it. Users only care that the system works, is simple to use, and gets them real value, which they can use in their everyday lives.”

Using the ZBD app, players can go from earning rewards in a game, to cashing out to a gift card, cryptocurrency exchange, or an app like Cash App, all within seconds, with all payments settled instantly. For most of them, the fact that Bitcoin powers all these transactions is an afterthought.

“We’re on a mission to transform the interactive entertainment industry”

This is not a Bitcoin product, and ZBD is not a cryptocurrency company.

It is a payments product launched by a US-licensed financial services company that needed to find new ways to address problems traditional approaches to finance are unable to solve.

“We use Bitcoin, because it is the best tool for the job. It also provided us with a route to market that allowed us to validate our proposition with over a hundred gaming partners and millions of users,without needing to invest into expensive fiat infrastructure beforehand,” says Marca Wosoba, COO of ZBD. “Now that we understand what the gaming industry needs from us, are generating scalable revenue and have a clear vision of how to build additional services, expanding from Bitcoin into USD, EUR, GBP and other fiat currencies is a much simpler and less risky step.”

Wosoba joined ZBD after building an impressive career across traditional banking and fintech, having held director-level positions ranging from derivative sales to Transaction FX at the Royal Bank of Scotland, to leadership roles in fintech and embedded payments, including a stint as managing director of Europe at Modulr.

ZBD was her first role working directly with Bitcoin as a foundational piece of the tech stack but says she “immediately understood the utility of the asset and how it fits as just one piece of a bigger puzzle built to unlock massive potential for finance in interactive entertainment.

“We’re on a mission to transform the interactive entertainment industry”.

Changing payments

Gaming is also only the beginning.

“We’re starting with gaming,” Wosoba says. “Because we’ve got the specialism and because it’s a huge market for us,” but there’s no reason why the model and technology can’t be applied to other verticals too. ZBD is already applying its tech to podcasting and music, powering pay-per-minute models for audio consumption as well as earn-per-minute models, where creators can pay users for listening to their content, with money streamed in real-time alongside audio, for as long as the user keeps listening.

Stop listening, the money stops flowing – in either direction.

And there are seemingly endless uses for this kind of instant and flexible payments. Cousens points out that for those who have grown up with social media and virtually unlimited internet access, even the use of social media is starting to be seen as a value exchange.

“‘I’m giving you access to my life and you’re surveilling me. What am I getting in return?’” he says.

More platforms are looking at ways of paying users but there are hurdles to overcome. Creating the seamless, native, frictionless experience that users expect becomes challenging when trying to embed traditional payment capabilities into a fast-paced digital environment designed primarily to entertain.

“Regulatory challenges and conversion fees have to be considered. Bitcoin’s Lightning Network is part of the solution, since it’s a digital rail already embedded in the internet,” says Cousens. “The other part is simply us doing the hard work of getting licensed, maintaining the highest standards of compliance and building the infrastructure that will allow our system to interface seamlessly with legacy financial systems all over the world.”

Wosoba adds: “We were able to build the Bitcoin-based rails and ledger ourselves, but the fiat world is a bit different. To extend our functionality into USD, EUR and more – not just as a cash-out mechanic for our users after they’ve earned rewards, but as a currency option for the kind of embedded payments we’re providing the interactive entertainment industry – we need to build a network offorward-looking partners, from banks to card acquirers and exchanges.

“That’s what we’re working on now and I’m very excited about the solutions we’ll be bringing to market in 2025.” So while the common narrative positions Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as something that may be useful in the future, ZBD is flipping that script on its head. Bitcoin is something that’s working for them today and proving transformative as a tool for next-gen embedded payments in entertainment.

The next step, ZBD says, is replicating this system with dollars.


 

This article was published in The Paytech Magazine Issue 15, Page 20-21

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