A mix of skill and chance: Bitblox on the potential for crypto prediction games

The rise of cryptocurrency over the last few years has been inescapable. From the launch of new tokens to Bitcoin reaching record highs, the world of crypto is slowly becoming much more popular – and the iGaming space has been no exception to its influence.

Making its debut earlier this year, Bitblox has already made its mark on the iGaming industry with a new vertical: crypto prediction games. With games such as Up or Down, Up or Down Turbo and BitSlap making up its portfolio, Bitblox prides itself on blending games of skill with games of chance, thereby offering something completely new for players.

Brandt Page, Chief Executive Officer of Bitblox, walks us through the company’s journey so far and how crypto prediction games can help operators to tap into the elusive Millennial and Gen Z player bases.

Can you start by giving us a very quick elevator pitch – who is Bitblox, and how are you bringing something new to the industry?

Bitblox is really bringing something new to the market that players haven’t seen before. We don’t build slots, or crash games. We are creating games that are a genuine combination of games of skill, and games of chance. Our first games are centred around players making a prediction on the price of Bitcoin – one game runs in 60 second intervals, while the other is much quicker at 20 seconds.

What we have done is really quite bold for the industry. If you walk around the expo floor of any conference now, you’ll see so many different slot titles or crash games. It’s the same in casino lobbies online too. These types of games are fantastic, but our mission was to create something unique for the players.

We also wanted to find a way that would allow us to introduce the iGaming industry to cryptocurrency in a way that is easy to understand. After some internal discussions, and chats with people at industry events, we settled on the idea of cryptocurrency prediction games – they are straightforward, engaging and can act as a platform to introduce players to the world of crypto without overwhelming them.

You describe yourself as offering a blend between games of skill and games of chance. Can you tell us what you mean by that? 

You could look at this from two different angles. Firstly, if you are making a prediction on the price of Bitcoin over a set time period, theoretically speaking, you could actually build a model to look at fluctuations in the price of Bitcoin over the last six months or year. If you were smart enough, you could then build a model that might allow you to extrapolate some of that data and offer some sort of prediction on what might happen in the future, based on particular market conditions.

There will be players that try to do this, especially those that are really interested in the trading element. Our odds provider uses an on-chain probability protocol that helps power the odds for our fixed odds games.

On the pools side of things, the probability protocol also ensures that every pool has sufficient funds to pay out winnings.

The other angle that you could look at this blend is that if you look at some of our future games, such as BitSlap, players are still making a prediction on the Bitcoin price, but others may be more interested in which character will win the slap fighting bout.

In that case, we’ve almost flipped the Bitcoin price to become a random number generator in itself. Players are cheering on a fighter, and becoming invested in an individual character, rather than simply just looking at the fluctuations in price.

You can almost think of our games as the perfect mix between trading and gambling. The reality is, we wanted to create an enjoyable experience for players that delivers something new and unique; players have the opportunity to win, unlike in other verticals where the RTP is unbeatable over time.

How will this blend of games of skill and games of chance enable Bitblox, and its operator partners, to engage with both sports bettors and casino players? Does UX play a role here, or is it more about the game itself?

I think it’s hard to say just yet because we are still in the early stages of launching. But based on the discussions we’ve been having at industry events, our games offer operators a way to reach, and engage with, a younger audience that tends to be much more technological and crypto savvy.  This is a generation of bettors who are more likely to be comfortable using a Web3 wallet and trading different cryptocurrencies.

If operators can tap into that player base, they can then start to cross-sell much more traditional content – whether that’s sports betting or casino. Engaging with this audience has been notoriously difficult; this is a topic that has dominated industry discussions for years now, and we believe that it is content such as ours that can help bridge that gap.

On the flip side, you then have the more traditional bettors who haven’t had much exposure to the crypto world. We are bringing crypto to players in a way that is easy to understand and engage with. This can then open the doors to introduce those more ‘traditional’ players to newer content that they may have not tried before.

From the conversations that we’ve been having with operators that we’re working with, a clear pattern that we’ve seen is that games such as ours seem to be getting a lot of traction in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Of course, we are aiming for our games to be popular right across the world.

We’ve seen a growth in popularity for crash games, for slots, and now is the time for crypto prediction games. Players like to feel like they are in control of the outcome – by adding cash out features, we are giving players that sense of control that they might not get with other types of games. But I’m very excited to see how our games are received in different markets around the world.