Niantic, the studio being the smartphone hit Pokémon GO, has lent its AR platform to payments company Fold to create a new kind of 'catch 'em all' adventure – but this time, players are hunting for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin rather than monsters.
Payments company Fold has leveraged Niantic's AR platform to create an in-app experience where users can earn Bitcoin by exploring a virtual environment based on their immediate surroundings, described by the firm as a "real-world metaverse".
Users will be able to discover and collect Bitcoin and other prizes around them using the app. Every 10 minutes, a new block containing a fresh prize is dropped in the vicinity of a player. By claiming the block, the user earns 'Satoshis', the smallest unit of Bitcoin, alongside other rewards. However, if you collect a 's**tcoins' or 'Poison Pills', you could end up losing all of the Bitcoin you've collected.
Here's how Fold describes the experience on its blog – it's even cheeky enough to use a gif of Mario collecting coins in Super Mario World:
The AR experience acts as a natural extension of the Fold App which already gives you the ability to earn bitcoin going about your daily life: buying coffee, going shopping, paying bills, and even paying your taxes. While the experience is open to anyone, Fold Cardholders can collect extra spins and rewards boosts to increase their rewards on the Fold Card.
The complete experience will drop next year and will enable individuals to find, trade, and hide bitcoin and other rewards throughout the world IRL, and will also give merchants the ability to engage the community with incentives and offers. It all started with someone saying ‘let’s make PokemonGo but for bitcoin’ and ended with ‘let’s build a new way to exchange and share bitcoin with others.’
Fold CEO Will Reeves also had this to say:
This is the easiest, most fun way to get your first piece of Bitcoin. Anyone can use our [Fold] app to earn Bitcoin and other rewards by exploring the world around them. For us, it's always been important to make participating in the Bitcoin economy easy for anyone, regardless of education or technical expertise.
What do you make of this venture? Let us know with a comment.
[source gadgets.ndtv.com]
Comments 28
This is gonna get delisted for sure!
This looks like an absolute scam.
described by the firm as a "real-world metaverse"
Kill me now.
So either you find real life money or you find something that takes all that money away. Which is gambling.
All this crypto crap seriously needs to go. While the technology behind blockchain is interesting, the fact is, it's just unsustainable and bad for the environment
@Asciidan Like it or not, crypto in some form is here to stay.
Take a walk and enjoy the world whilst simultaneously destroying it!
Can't wait for it to start selling NFTs as well.
… Is this a gag game? This is a gag game, isnt it? Reading carefully, it has to be.
Cannot wait for Cryptomon the game.
@Ogbert NFT's the game
this and the nft stuff really are just a complete waste of resources bruh
Dang, guess this is what happens when Niantic says it's going to make it's AR tech available to literally anyone who wants it
@Edwirichuu who doesn't love artificial scarcity on an infinitely reproducible product? With the added bonus of no actual increased, and in many cases reduced, security on your newfound possession. All just at the small cost of killing the planet!
looks very scammy to me... they gather your data and you maybe get a little bit of bit coin lol... i would never "play" anything like that nor would i recommend anyone doing this...
When I feel like making money I go to work.
A lot of people in the comments are dumping on Bitcoin but it's actually very useful if you need a way to buy [REDACTED] or child [REDACTED] without the authorities breathing down your neck.
@nessisonett the article doesnt say you have to put any real money into the game. So you arent gambling.
The article doesnt try to explain much actually, but what I came away with is that while getting the coin that would be temporarily live, you can lose some of it. But I assume you would be able to transfer that coin later to a regular account where it would be safe.
Either way, if you dont have to pay to start playing, then you arent losing money. At the worst you would play a free game and walk away with nothing. I would assume there would be optional in app purchases where you could end up losing money, but yeah thats the case with a lot of modern games and it’s optional.
@Asciidan Considering how politicians are always carrying on about energy and the environment, it seems asinine to just completely ignore the elephant in the room that has become crypto mining.
@Dragwhite I'm sure Beeple would argue NFTs are rather nice.
In Hebrew meta means death, real world death verse.
This will just be another thing in the top ten reasons people are still virgins
1. Nft
2. Crypto Go
Have no idea what the next 8 will be
@skwaark /S hopefully?
@MrHonest actually that exists, and it's In the form of Revomon for vr. Which allows you to sell the revomon you catch for Bitcoin.
@Travisemo007 Oh wow.
When niantic made it's platform availible to the public it's only natural that the first products to get news coverage are trendy crypto developers who think flashing techno lights and memes are considered a brand identity.
They got free publicity out of this for minimal efffort and their get-rich-quick side-hustle lives annother day. I doubt these are the apps Niantic envisioned but I'm not surprised they're the first headliners.
Give it a year and we'll see what lightship can really do. While these crypto apps fade into obscurity.
@Asciidan I totally agree
Just one question; on what page of what paragraph in which line of the ToS gives them the right to use your device as part of the mobile mining machine?
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