It was a monumental year for Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. As the year draws to a close, we reflect on the most impactful developments and moments of 2019.

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Bitcoin 2019 in Lightning: What This Year Brought - Bitcoin Magazine

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Colin is an associate editor and staff writer for Bitcoin Magazine. He&#39;s proud to call Nashville his home, where he lives with his family and doesn&#39;t eat hot chicken as much as you might think.

Colin Harper

It was a monumental year for Bitcoin&rsquo;s Lightning Network. As the year draws to a close, we reflect on the most impactful developments and moments of 2019.

Read Part 1 of our series, Bitcoin&rsquo;s 2019 in Tech: What This Year Brought Us, here. Even as we entered 2019 in a bear market, the receding bitcoin price was matched by a rising tide of excitement for and development on Bitcoin&rsquo;s second layer payment protocol, the Lightning Network. Over the course of the year, we saw payment routing improvements, the introduction of mobile wallets, a flush of liquidity into the network and the emergence of Lightning fiat ramps. Oh yeah, and we also watched as a Lightning payment bounced around the globe over 275 times via Bitcoin Twitter, all started by an anonymous astronautical tomcat (this was one of many community developments that encapsulated the teeming excitement around the new technology). Here are our highlights for the Lightning Network in 2019. Wallets&nbsp; A dozen or so new Lightning wallets proliferated in 2019, overwhelmingly for mobile devices. One of the most anticipated, Lightning Lab&rsquo;s Lightning Wallet for iOS and Android, was one of the first to make use of Neutrino, a lightweight client that fetches data block-by-block so users can run a noncustodial Lightning wallet without having to run a full Bitcoin node. In its company is Zap, which also leverages Neutrino and launched a desktop and a mobile version this year, and Breez, the first Neutrino mobile wallet that is only available on iOS. All of the above were released in the summer and run on LND, Lightning&rsquo; Lab&rsquo;s implementation of the technology. For its own implementation, French Lightning development company ACINQ released Phoenix as 2019 was winding down. The Android-only mobile wallet runs a full, lightweight Lightning node on your device. We&rsquo;d be remiss if we didn&rsquo;t mention Tippin.me and the late Bottle Pay. Though Tippin.me technically launched in December 2018, the browser-based custodial wallet became a hit on Bitcoin Twitter in 2019 for sending and receiving tips. Bottle Pay launched halfway through the year and also became a favorite for social network micropayments before it shut its doors in response to new AML regulations. More than just a tipping app, Bottle Pay was an extremely user-friendly web wallet. It&rsquo;s in a class of custodial wallets like Wallet of Satoshi, another from the Lightning Class of 2019, that prioritizes convenience and a slick UX over self-sovereignty.&nbsp; On-Ramps&nbsp; Plenty of wallets proliferated in 2018, too, but none that offered options to purchase bitcoin on Lightning with fiat. In 2019, this is now a possibility thanks to a few new options. Two of these come from existing wallets, Sparkswap and Zap. Coincidentally, these onomatopoeic wallet providers both had the same idea: to integrate their products with a buy option. Sparkswap&rsquo;s desktop wallet was the first to offer this using atomic swaps; a user sends an ACH bank transfer to Sparkswap, and then it executes an atomic swap to transfer bitcoin from on-chain into the user&rsquo;s Lightning wallet. Zap&rsquo;s Olympus, which is actually still in development so it&rsquo;s not available yet, does something similar, except it uses what are called Turbo channels to &ldquo;push&rdquo; a Lightning channel to a user after they pay for the channel. &ldquo;If you want, you can buy bitcoin inside of Zap with a bank account, debit card, Zelle, whatever &mdash; and it will give you the bitcoins, from purchase to spending on Lightning, in less than five seconds,&rdquo; Zap founder Jack Mallers told Bitcoin Magazine in September 2019. Lightning also got its first major exchange integration this year. In partnership with Bitrefill, Bitfinex opened its coffers to Lightning bitcoin deposits and withdrawals in the final month of the year. Like trading regular bitcoin on a custodial exchange, Lightning Network balances are represented as IOUs, but they are paid out to a Lightning wallet upon withdrawal. It&rsquo;s not a fiat gateway, but you can also buy &ldquo;Thor&rdquo; channels on Bitrefill for bitcoin. Like with Zap&rsquo;s delivery method for Olympus, Thor channels are pushed to the user upon purchase, and Thor Turbo channels are instantly delivered without waiting for on-chain confirmations to lock the bitcoin into the payment channel. An added bonus: You can purchase these channels with cryptocurrency from your Coinbase account. As these options continue to develop, they&rsquo;ll be looking to solve one of Lightning&rsquo;s many UX problems: in this case, on-boarding. Channel Management, Routing and Payments&nbsp; As some teams look to enable smoother onboarding, others are focusing on making channel management, routing and payments frictionless. One of these channel management tools hopes to give users the option of moving bitcoin in and out of payment channels without closing them. When Lightning first came out, channel management was cumbersome in part because, if you wanted to lock more sats in a channel (or take a few out), you&rsquo;d have to close it and open an entirely new one. Lightning Loop opens this closed loop, so to speak. Using submarine swaps, the protocol by Lightning Lab&rsquo;s Alex Bosworth and Bryan Vu allows its users to move bitcoin in and out of channels without having to close the channels and broadcast their state onto the blockchain. This saves time, money and technical headaches. &ldquo;The vision for Lightning Loop is to allow users to securely move funds in and out of the Lightning Network using non-custodial Bitcoin contracts,&rdquo; Bosworth and Vu wrote in a blog post. &ldquo;With Loop, users, businesses, and routing node operators are able to keep Lightning channels open indefinitely, making the network more efficient, more stable, and cheaper to use.&rdquo; Currently, many wallets use a variation of Lightning Loop to the same effect. Lightning Loop makes lubricating channels with fresh liquidity easier, thereby relieving problems with inbound/outbound capacity. There&rsquo;s also the problem of payment routing, something another new feature, atomic multipart payments (also simply known as &ldquo;multipart payments&rdquo;), is trying to solve.&nbsp; This trick allows users to split a single payment into multiple payments; instead of piping one payment down a single payment channel, it can now be sent through several.&nbsp; &ldquo;This greatly reduces the headache of managing how many channels to open, and how to allocate funds to them, since you can now simply combine them as and when necessary,&rdquo; Christian Decker of Blockstream wrote in a blog post. Lastly, courtesy of Lightning Labs CTO Olaoluwa Osuntokun, sending Lightning payments is getting easier. Currently, you&rsquo;d have to receive an invoice for a specific saoshi amount to send a Lightning payment, but Sphinx Send promises users &ldquo;the ability to send a payment to a destination without first needing to have an invoice,&rdquo; according to Osuntokun. The feature is available now on LND but requires a user-activated update to install. It has yet to be introduced in a major LND release. Watchtowers&nbsp; This development gets its own section, partly because it&rsquo;s cool and also because it doesn&rsquo;t really fit into any of the other categories. Channel closing is perhaps the chief attack vector of the Lightning Network; that is to say, your bitcoin are only really vulnerable in a Lightning Network payment channel when the channel is closing. This vulnerability is largely subject to human error: If you&rsquo;re not paying attention when a channel closes, the party on the other side of it may try to swindle you by broadcasting an older version of the channel&rsquo;s transaction history, thereby claiming coins that aren&rsquo;t theirs. To protect you from rogue peers, Watchtowers monitor channels and their states so that you don&rsquo;t have to. These towers can act as an extra set of eyes and, in the case that one party is cheated in a channel closing, they have the ability to seize the contingent funds and return them to the honest party.&nbsp; LApps. Lightning Applications (or LApps) are like the cocky, reckless younger sibling of Ethereum-based DApps.&nbsp; Shortly after the Lightning Network&rsquo;s release, developers tinkering with Lightning began releasing LApps, either as side projects or full-time gigs, to test Lightning&rsquo;s use cases.&nbsp; Technically, Tippin.me and Bottle Pay count as LApps, but they&rsquo;ve already lapped up the limelight. So we&rsquo;ll focus on a few others, like Pollo Feed, the only place on the internet where you can use bitcoin to feed chickens (seriously, you pay a Lightning invoice and some chickens in Rhode Island are fed on a live stream right before your eyes). Another fun (and more relevant) application is LNCast, a Lightning-native alternative to Twitch that allows its users to accept micropayments (Marty Bent&rsquo;s &ldquo;Tales From the Crypt&rdquo; is featured, for example). Turns out Lightning might be a fit for monetizing others in the media landscape, too &mdash; particularly video game players. 2019 delivered the first Lightning-powered video games. One notable examples is Satoshi&rsquo;s Games, a hub for various titles (like the Super Mario clone Super Bro and the Agar.io copycat Lightning Agar) that convert in-game points into satoshis. In a similar vein, the Ledger of Szabo, developed by Neon District games, is a Legend of Zelda-inspired game that gives its players the option to purchase characters and gear with Lightning. Then there&rsquo;s Lightnite, a battle royale that includes satoshis as loot and has Lightning-purchasable gear, as well (Fortnite fever has gripped the international video gaming conscience, so this was probably inevitable). The game is currently in closed beta, but it will go live officially some time in 2020. Most of these examples stick to Lightning&rsquo;s core use case of payments, but a couple of other LApps push the boundaries into a new territory: messaging. Thanks to a recent software update, Lightning now supports more reliable and complex messaging, and two projects, Whatsat and Sphinx Chat, are leveraging this to power encrypted messaging with Lightning. Both utilize what are known as type-length-values (TLVs) to attach extraneous data (in this case, a message) to a Lightning payment. These messages can be routed through the network...

Colin is an associate editor and staff writer for Bitcoin Magazine. He's proud to call Nashville his home, where he spends his days shouting at peddle taverns and trying to find affordable parking downtown. If it wasn't already obvious, he holds bitcoin.

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“The Legend of Zelda” inspired game from Blockade Games, “Ledger of Szabo,” lets players solve in-game puzzles in exchange for bitcoin and ether.

Ledger of Szabo Brings Bitcoin to Legend of Zelda - Bitcoin Magazine

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“It’s dangerous to go alone. Here, take this.” Thus begins the latest computer game from crypto-focused gaming company <a href="https://blockade.games/">Blockade Games</a>.



“Just kidding! You must start your journey with nothing!” recants a wizard-turned-demon as you attempt to collect your would-be first weapon in the game, a fork, in an abandoned cave.



This is how you embark on your journey in the “<a href="https://pineapplearcade.net/szabo">The Ledger of Szabo</a>”: with nothing and no particular direction. The game’s initial interaction — as its name and gameplay would suggest — is an overt homage to “The Legend of Zelda,” the flagship game of the eponymous franchise which was released on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986. Thirty-three years later, its style and vibe are replicated and repurposed in the Bitcoin-facing “Ledger of Szabo,” a game whose difficulty, as presaged by the fact that you “Start your journey with nothing,” isn’t too far off from the original.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/u8ion8ts0PJgd-V8_SR3mCDKISl9WZ7Q4_yYamEAc3ObqVzRsanELgyrGQc27nkKXc31EaTbDAdVEvGIhDzBJEPlt-7AZPeD1SsroBjpNtlmbQTdKTL-178xutvW-Fv4BovvkBQU" alt=""/></figure>



<h2>Like Legend of Zelda … But With Bitcoin</h2>



Upon booting up the game and roaming around, veteran “Legend of Zelda” players will immediately feel the familiar sting of nostalgia. An immediately recognizable landscape harkens back the OG Zelda game, complete with its own lost woods, labyrinths of hedge rows, caves, crannies and secret passageways accessible only by way of bombing cracks in the cliff sides. The weapons, though, are a bit different; the first one you come across, for instance, is a green candle, which spits a flame that you can use to extinguish the bears that roam the overworld — a weapon that doubles as a very fitting metaphor for the Bitcoin market.



Avid “Legend of Zelda” fans in their own right, the Blockade Games team members took inspiration from the series’ puzzle-solving gameplay. So they took this model and added a bitcoin-bent — one that offers actual monetary rewards to its players.



“For many of us at Blockade Games, ‘The Legend of Zelda’ is the game that inspired us to become game developers and software engineers,” Blockade Games CTO Ben Heidorn told Bitcoin Magazine. “Zelda is a game that, at its core, is driven by discovery and solving puzzles. There is no game more fitting for hiding logic puzzles with real-world prizes than one of the earliest games in the genre.”



Blockade Games’ puzzle roots run deep. Its founder, Marguerite deCourcelle, who goes by the handle <a href="https://twitter.com/coin_artist?lang=en">coin_artist</a> on Twitter, was the visionary <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-28/your-bitcoins-are-waiting-in-the-painting-if-you-can-find-them">behind a series of Bitcoin art puzzles</a>. The greatest of these, The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto, encoded the private keys for 5 bitcoin within the oil painting’s puzzle-infused illustration: a flame-licked chessboard, on which rested a dove, a sprawling creeper plant and chess pieces set aflame.&nbsp;&nbsp;



deCourcelle took what she learned from these projects and instilled her artistic vision into the studio’s latest title. Unlike “The Legend of Zelda”’s logic puzzles, which net players digital rupees, new weapons or various quest items, “The Ledger of Szabo” fittingly rewards players in bitcoin and ether. A total of eight puzzles have hidden away eight prizes, ranging from payouts of 0.1 BTC and 1.69 ETH to 13.97 ETH and 0.3 BTC, among others, for a total sum of 1 BTC. Once one of these puzzles is solved and a key is found, it will no longer be available to new players.



<h2>Cracking the Code</h2>



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/Q-S2Z3nbR1kKN3ASv3lTHg4bsXhhQuwkjCNNT951Glu8WTTDQHtA68w2oFqI2GST3nIiAEu61088JJOUeIyjx7ayVF6toVoTrneQ4ACNW9B_1ai_K83kT10pT-QIq0IYAcjsuscl" alt=""/></figure>



To Blockade Games, the game’s code-cracking intrigue is ideal for the puzzling world of cryptography that makes Bitcoin so difficult and perception-altering for people.



“The crypto space, and solving crypto puzzles, are inherently difficult — anyone who wants to participate and succeed needs to be willing to study, explore, learn and think about problems and solutions they've never encountered before. And for most people, they may have never heard of cryptography or thought about monetary policy before discovering Bitcoin — it can be world-changing!” Heidorn said.



The keys for the game’s treasure trove of cryptocurrencies are hidden all over the overworld’s dungeons and even in its source code. For example, signs bearing quotes from the Bitcoin white paper pepper the map’s landscape, collectively encrypting one of the eight keys.



If this has you reaching for your adventurer’s cap, better grab it quick because three of the eight keys have already been found. Players can keep track of how many have been found by pressing “T” on their keyboards. This opens up the Puzzle Status screen, which depicts the found prize keys as shards of the “Legend of Zelda”’s most popular iconography, the Triforce. Don’t worry, though. Once these prizes are gobbled up, you can still solve the puzzles that engendered them and play through the story. In place of the monetary rewards you would have received from each puzzle, for example, you’ll receive a non-fungible token (NFT) proving that you solved it.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/0A2-DybJFS3o92xB46_OJpN0LEBcjQS9HrVdlIOOEP4iFzYafT3T5fmwFI2G8O7Fc0Lj-wbRMNZHkirnYjWICE2425ZLAH1WbCe43P_T04XiCMSdgG7fModhU7B6scibOYQXi4g0" alt=""/></figure>



<h2>Bitcoin and … Ethereum?</h2>



To get started with the game, you’ll need to set up either a MetaMask, Portis, Fortmatic or Wallet Connect web wallet.



But Colin, aren’t those Ethereum wallets? Yes, dear reader, yes they are. To play the game, you need to buy an NFT which represents your character. You can also buy power-ups to aid you on your quest. These NFTs, of course, must be issued on the Ethereum chain, but the game allows you to buy them with ETH and BTC (for 0.05 ETH or 52,000 sats).



That’s right, sats. The bitcoin payment portal for the game is Lightning-compatible. Once the team at Blockade Games receives a paid invoice, they mint the NFTs directly to the player’s wallet, giving them the benefit of Bitcoin’s secondary layer and Ethereum's ERC-721 standard for unique in-game collectibles.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/fKTr30CrAtbaAiwa0hFIYCw3yTRA9ddhfreXoO-UIrjjwwULeUSecX4DSoxy4OSCdjPzvxytE3X64hugFnqbAHu4p26c3XwUOwTboMxBkUODH_rFQjUnjkkK-fylL_-ZWeQTpbvu" alt=""/></figure>



This choice, along with including both bitcoin and ether in-game rewards, exemplifies Blockade Games’ nonpartisan approach to asset representation. When I asked them why they chose to not pick sides (for instance, they could have made the game entirely Ethereum-facing or left the NFT component out completely), Heidorn explained that each asset brings something to the table that the other does not.



Bitcoin, for example, is best used as hard money, while Ethereum’s smart contracts allow for unique in-game assets like NFTs.



“We believe that Bitcoin and Ethereum both play a fundamental long-term role in the development of cryptocurrency and decentralized digital assets,” Heidorn said. “We believe that while both Bitcoin and Ethereum function as money, Bitcoin has the momentum, security and stability that cements it as the future of the global monetary standard. However, it is inevitable that non-fungible digital assets, like decentralized game assets, will play a large role in the future of games and the overall digital economy, allowing people to trade not only money but ownership of digital property.”



Drawing on the team’s suite of blockchain-powered games, Heirdorn referenced “Plasma Bears,” one of Blockade Games free-to-play games, as another example of NFTs in use.



<h2>More Bitcoin Games in the Works</h2>



Indeed, Blockade Games has more where “The Ledger of Szabo” came from — in the way of both fun and funds. Its digital <a href="https://pineapplearcade.net">Pineapple Arcade</a>, featuring more than half a dozen arcade games like “Welcome to Crypto,” “Hack and Dash” and “Coin-Man” (a “Pac-Man” clone), has plenty of digital enjoyment to offer.&nbsp;



And plenty more coin to offer as well. Between all of its franchise titles, Blockade Games has stashed away 17.5 BTC and 15 ETH, or just over $185,000 at current prices. As suggested by the arcade’s name, this small fortune came courtesy of the <a href="https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/meet-pine-bitcoin-philanthropist-who-set-85-million-pineapple-fund">Pineapple Fund</a>, an anonymous philanthropic fund that distributed over 5,000 BTC to various organizations at the peak of the 2017 bullrun (at bitcoin’s all-time high the fund was worth $86 million).&nbsp;



Stacked with sats as these games are, they are just a teaser for Blockade Games’ magnum opus: “Neon District,” an online “‘Final Fantasy’ inspired cyberpunk RPG” complete with NFT weapons, gadgets and characters that will run on the Ethereum blockchain.



“‘Neon District’ is focused on appealing to the mainstream gamer,” said deCourcelle, adding that the game might integrate Lightning for micropayments. But first things first, the studio has to make blockchain technology sexy and seamless for the average gamer and not what she called “the experimental community” currently surrounding blockchain gaming.&nbsp;



First announced in January 2018, “Neon District” is more than halfway through development, according to its <a href="https://neondistrict.io/">website</a>. When it launches, it will be the most complex blockchain game to date.&nbsp;



And Satoshi willing, it will include a blend of Bitcoin and Ethereum compatibility like “The Ledger of Szabo.”

&ldquo;The Legend of Zelda&rdquo; inspired game from Blockade Games, &ldquo;Ledger of Szabo,&rdquo; lets players solve in-game puzzles in exchange for bitcoin and ether.

Ledger of Szabo Brings Bitcoin to Legend of Zelda &raquo; Bitcoin Magazine

&ldquo;It&rsquo;s dangerous to go alone. Here, take this.&rdquo; Thus begins the latest computer game from crypto-focused gaming company Blockade Games. &ldquo;Just kidding! You must start your journey with nothing!&rdquo; recants a wizard-turned-demon as you attempt to collect your would-be first weapon in the game, a fork, in an abandoned cave. This is how you embark on your journey in the &ldquo;The Ledger of Szabo&rdquo;: with nothing and no particular direction. The game&rsquo;s initial interaction &mdash; as its name and gameplay would suggest &mdash; is an overt homage to &ldquo;The Legend of Zelda,&rdquo; the flagship game of the eponymous franchise which was released on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986. Thirty-three years later, its style and vibe are replicated and repurposed in the Bitcoin-facing &ldquo;Ledger of Szabo,&rdquo; a game whose difficulty, as presaged by the fact that you &ldquo;Start your journey with nothing,&rdquo; isn&rsquo;t too far off from the original. Like Legend of Zelda &hellip; But With Bitcoin. Upon booting up the game and roaming around, veteran &ldquo;Legend of Zelda&rdquo; players will immediately feel the familiar sting of nostalgia. An immediately recognizable landscape harkens back the OG Zelda game, complete with its own lost woods, labyrinths of hedge rows, caves, crannies and secret passageways accessible only by way of bombing cracks in the cliff sides. The weapons, though, are a bit different; the first one you come across, for instance, is a green candle, which spits a flame that you can use to extinguish the bears that roam the overworld &mdash; a weapon that doubles as a very fitting metaphor for the Bitcoin market. Avid &ldquo;Legend of Zelda&rdquo; fans in their own right, the Blockade Games team members took inspiration from the series&rsquo; puzzle-solving gameplay. So they took this model and added a bitcoin-bent &mdash; one that offers actual monetary rewards to its players. &ldquo;For many of us at Blockade Games, &lsquo;The Legend of Zelda&rsquo; is the game that inspired us to become game developers and software engineers,&rdquo; Blockade Games CTO Ben Heidorn told Bitcoin Magazine. &ldquo;Zelda is a game that, at its core, is driven by discovery and solving puzzles. There is no game more fitting for hiding logic puzzles with real-world prizes than one of the earliest games in the genre.&rdquo; Blockade Games&rsquo; puzzle roots run deep. Its founder, Marguerite deCourcelle, who goes by the handle coin_artist on Twitter, was the visionary behind a series of Bitcoin art puzzles. The greatest of these, The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto, encoded the private keys for 5 bitcoin within the oil painting&rsquo;s puzzle-infused illustration: a flame-licked chessboard, on which rested a dove, a sprawling creeper plant and chess pieces set aflame.&nbsp;&nbsp; deCourcelle took what she learned from these projects and instilled her artistic vision into the studio&rsquo;s latest title. Unlike &ldquo;The Legend of Zelda&rdquo;&rsquo;s logic puzzles, which net players digital rupees, new weapons or various quest items, &ldquo;The Ledger of Szabo&rdquo; fittingly rewards players in bitcoin and ether. A total of eight puzzles have hidden away eight prizes, ranging from payouts of 0.1 BTC and 1.69 ETH to 13.97 ETH and 0.3 BTC, among others, for a total sum of 1 BTC. Once one of these puzzles is solved and a key is found, it will no longer be available to new players. Cracking the Code. To Blockade Games, the game&rsquo;s code-cracking intrigue is ideal for the puzzling world of cryptography that makes Bitcoin so difficult and perception-altering for people. &ldquo;The crypto space, and solving crypto puzzles, are inherently difficult &mdash; anyone who wants to participate and succeed needs to be willing to study, explore, learn and think about problems and solutions they&#039;ve never encountered before. And for most people, they may have never heard of cryptography or thought about monetary policy before discovering Bitcoin &mdash; it can be world-changing!&rdquo; Heidorn said. The keys for the game&rsquo;s treasure trove of cryptocurrencies are hidden all over the overworld&rsquo;s dungeons and even in its source code. For example, signs bearing quotes from the Bitcoin white paper pepper the map&rsquo;s landscape, collectively encrypting one of the eight keys. If this has you reaching for your adventurer&rsquo;s cap, better grab it quick because three of the eight keys have already been found. Players can keep track of how many have been found by pressing &ldquo;T&rdquo; on their keyboards. This opens up the Puzzle Status screen, which depicts the found prize keys as shards of the &ldquo;Legend of Zelda&rdquo;&rsquo;s most popular iconography, the Triforce. Don&rsquo;t worry, though. Once these prizes are gobbled up, you can still solve the puzzles that engendered them and play through the story. In place of the monetary rewards you would have received from each puzzle, for example, you&rsquo;ll receive a non-fungible token (NFT) proving that you solved it. Bitcoin and &hellip; Ethereum? To get started with the game, you&rsquo;ll need to set up either a MetaMask, Portis, Fortmatic or Wallet Connect web wallet. But Colin, aren&rsquo;t those Ethereum wallets? Yes, dear reader, yes they are. To play the game, you need to buy an NFT which represents your character. You can also buy power-ups to aid you on your quest. These NFTs, of course, must be issued on the Ethereum chain, but the game allows you to buy them with ETH and BTC (for 0.05 ETH or 52,000 sats). That&rsquo;s right, sats. The bitcoin payment portal for the game is Lightning-compatible. Once the team at Blockade Games receives a paid invoice, they mint the NFTs directly to the player&rsquo;s wallet, giving them the benefit of Bitcoin&rsquo;s secondary layer and Ethereum&#039;s ERC-721 standard for unique in-game collectibles. This choice, along with including both bitcoin and ether in-game rewards, exemplifies Blockade Games&rsquo; nonpartisan approach to asset representation. When I asked them why they chose to not pick sides (for instance, they could have made the game entirely Ethereum-facing or left the NFT component out completely), Heidorn explained that each asset brings something to the table that the other does not. Bitcoin, for example, is best used as hard money, while Ethereum&rsquo;s smart contracts allow for unique in-game assets like NFTs. &ldquo;We believe that Bitcoin and Ethereum both play a fundamental long-term role in the development of cryptocurrency and decentralized digital assets,&rdquo; Heidorn said. &ldquo;We believe that while both Bitcoin and Ethereum function as money, Bitcoin has the momentum, security and stability that cements it as the future of the global monetary standard. However, it is inevitable that non-fungible digital assets, like decentralized game assets, will play a large role in the future of games and the overall digital economy, allowing people to trade not only money but ownership of digital property.&rdquo; Drawing on the team&rsquo;s suite of blockchain-powered games, Heirdorn referenced &ldquo;Plasma Bears,&rdquo; one of Blockade Games free-to-play games, as another example of NFTs in use. More Bitcoin Games in the Works. Indeed, Blockade Games has more where &ldquo;The Ledger of Szabo&rdquo; came from &mdash; in the way of both fun and funds. Its digital Pineapple Arcade, featuring more than half a dozen arcade games like &ldquo;Welcome to Crypto,&rdquo; &ldquo;Hack and Dash&rdquo; and &ldquo;Coin-Man&rdquo; (a &ldquo;Pac-Man&rdquo; clone), has plenty of digital enjoyment to offer.&nbsp; And plenty more coin to offer as well. Between all of its franchise titles, Blockade Games has stashed away 17.5 BTC and 15 ETH, or just over $185,000 at current prices. As suggested by the arcade&rsquo;s name, this small fortune came courtesy of the Pineapple Fund, an anonymous philanthropic fund that distributed over 5,000 BTC to various organizations at the peak of the 2017 bullrun (at bitcoin&rsquo;s all-time high the fund was worth $86 million).&nbsp; Stacked with sats as these games are, they are just a teaser for Blockade Games&rsquo; magnum opus: &ldquo;Neon District,&rdquo; an online &ldquo;&lsquo;Final Fantasy&rsquo; inspired cyberpunk RPG&rdquo; complete with NFT weapons, gadgets and characters that will run on the Ethereum blockchain. &ldquo;&lsquo;Neon District&rsquo; is focused on appealing to the mainstream gamer,&rdquo; said deCourcelle, adding that the game might integrate Lightning for micropayments. But first things first, the studio has to make blockchain technology sexy and seamless for the average gamer and not what she called &ldquo;the experimental community&rdquo; currently surrounding blockchain gaming.&nbsp; First announced in January 2018, &ldquo;Neon District&rdquo; is more than halfway through development, according to its website. When it launches, it will be the most complex blockchain game to date.&nbsp; And Satoshi willing, it will include a blend of Bitcoin and Ethereum compatibility like &ldquo;The Ledger of Szabo.&rdquo;

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Bitcoin’s 2019 in Lightning: What This Year Brought Us (Part 2)

“Ledger of Szabo” Brings Bitcoin Compatibility to Zelda-Style Game