Company Name: THNDR games
Founder: Desiree Dickerson, Jack Everitt, Greg Flor and Rafal Gawel
Date of establishment: Originally founded in 2019 | Relaunched in 2021
Location of the head office: London, UK with remote team members
Amount of Bitcoin in Treasury: “Not enough” (Dickerson said jokingly)
Number of employees: 6
Website: https://www.thndr.games/
Public or private? Private
Desiree Dickerson believes games are a powerful way to introduce people to Bitcoin.
She states that games have been used in recent history to get people used to using new technologies.
“They put games on the original PCs to get users comfortable with a mouse,” Dickerson told Bitcoin Magazine.
“This is similar to Snake and Nokia,” she added, explaining that the Snake game was added to early Nokia phones “to familiarize users with the Nokia handset.”
Dickerson sees games playing a similar role in getting people used to using bitcoin on the internet Lightning network.
That’s why she helped launch a revamped version of THNDR gamesa company that has developed a series of mobile games that allow users to win sit just to play.
And she was the perfect person for the job, given her background as a gamer and her experience working with the Lightning Network.
Dickerson’s history with gaming and lightning
Dickerson has been gaming since she was a child.
“I grew up gaming with my dad,” she says. “He had 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, as her father had “every gaming console,” she said she currently considers herself a “fun gamer‘ and that she doesn’t like more consuming (and terrifying) games like HALO.
“It just has to be absolutely mindless, like picking weeds in Animal Crossing,” Dickerson said, chuckling about her current gaming preferences.
Dickerson not only has a long history with gaming, but has also been involved with the Lightning Network since its inception.
She started working at Lightning laboratories in June 2018 and stayed there for three years before joining THNDR Games.
Dickerson met THNDR’s original founder, Jack Everitt, while she was still at Lightning Labs. She had come to the realization that gaming was a way to spread bitcoin, and Everitt, a 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 Mountain Gox) in which they showed what companies like ZBDSatoshi’s Games and Donner Lab were building Bitcoin gaming space.
In October 2021, Dickerson was CEO at THNDR.
Building THNDR games
Over the next few years, THNDR released six games, all of which felt more like fun games than extended first-person shooters or other types of games that required longer engagement.
These games included Club Bitcoin: Solitairea classic Solitaire game; Tetro tiles, a combination of Sudoku and Tetris; And Bitcoin snakea version of the aforementioned Snake.
In September 2022, Club Bitcoin: Solitaire was the 21st (de numerical meaning of which was not lost on the THNDR team) most downloaded app in the Apple App Store.
Lucky number 21!🤩
#21 in the App Store⚰️
NUMBER 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 deliver #bitcoin for everyone you know.
Copy, Paste, Send, Repeat:https://t.co/WvPTIDWLL6 pic.twitter.com/LqED2MWEWN
— THNDR (@THNDRGAMES) September 21, 2022
In October 2023, Report from River’s Lightning Network highlighted the fact that THNDR was responsible for 3% of the Lightning Network’s transaction growth.
But even with this success, Dickerson and the team at THNDR were still concerned that it might not be enough to make the company as profitable as they wanted.
“I think the problem we saw was that we had launched these mobile games and they were semi-successful, but is this really a venture-backed company?” Dickerson shared.
“We started thinking, ‘Hey, we’ve created this new genre of Bitcoin rewards games, but does it really solve a problem?’” she added.
As they pondered these questions, Dickerson and the THNDR team looked at the broader online gaming space and discovered a dimension of it that was ripe for disruption.
Gambling and Skill-Based Betting: 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 outdated and full of friction.
“Payments in those spaces are just completely broken,” Dickerson explains. “There are super slow withdrawals, high fees and not much flexibility with buy-in and withdrawal thresholds – and Bitcoin solves that.”
So THNDR shifted its focus to developing a system that took advantage of the Lightning Network’s near-instantaneous settlement time 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 enables instant, borderless, peer-to-peer betting on Lightning at a low cost. Using Clinch, online casinos, sportsbooks and competitive gaming platforms can take their payment systems to the next level.
THNDR has also built its own skill-based gambling version Solitaire which allows users to wager significant sums of money.
“You can’t become a millionaire playing our (original) Solitaire game, but now you can if you start with skill-based betting,” said Dickerson (who doesn’t necessarily encourage users to bet more than they can afford to lose).
“85% of our users have actually requested it, and it really leverages the monetization potential of not just Solitaire, but a range of different games,” she 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 alone.)
THNDR also looks beyond the business-to-customer (BSC) model as it works to create white label solutions – off-the-shelf products that one company develops and then sells to another company that then sells the product under its own name – mainly for sports betting platforms.
“It’s an engagement and retention tool specifically for sports betting because users will just leave the app between matches because it says, ‘Okay, this game isn’t going to be over for another two hours.’ I’m just going to close the app. There is nothing to do,” Dickerson explained. “They want to keep people in the app and get them to bet on more things.”
Beyond Bitcoin
The THNDR team also looks at what other resources they can use within games.
“We would like to explore Taproot assets or other assets and like stablecoins,” Dickerson told me.
However, don’t expect THNDR to use tether (USDT) on Tron anytime soon.
“Users don’t actually need to see the Bitcoin piece,” Dickerson began.
“They can bet in fiat or USD, and it’s all done on Bitcoin. I would love to expose them to Bitcoin, but it is actually the properties of Bitcoin that solve the payment problems in sports betting and skill-based betting,” she explained.
That said, Dickerson and the team at THNDR have hardly become fiat maximalists. They are Bitcoiners through and through and a specific element of THNDR’s design proves this.
Disappearing sats – for your own good
Dickerson said many THNDR users end up going down the proverbial Bitcoin rabbit hole, in part because THNDR pushes them to do so.
“We have a three-day validity period for prizes, and if you don’t redeem those prizes, you lose them,” Dickerson said.
“You have to download a (Lightning) wallet if you want your prizes. We get people partially 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 is happy to refund sats to those whose sats have expired. She said users can contact THNDR to make this request.
That said, she also noted that THNDR could have very easily written into the terms and conditions of its service that the sats that disappear after three days are gone forever. However, the reason this doesn’t happen is because it wants its users to learn how Bitcoin and Lightning actually work, and not just to maximize profits.
“We just want people to cash out and have the sats for themselves,” Dickerson said. “That’s not a business move – it’s a Bitcoiner move.”