By developing games on the Bitcoin blockchain that provide payouts on wins, among other purposes, a relatively new platform is attempting to broaden the usage of bitcoin (BTC) beyond trading or investing. Games that use Bitcoin are currently available on the web and for mobile devices through New Bitcoin City, which launched last week. Along with a marketplace and other core Bitcoin network features, the platform also provides NFT auctions.
“We want to make Bitcoin as generalized as possible — usable for far more than just a currency,” said @punk3700, one of the developers at New Bitcoin City said in a post on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “We started first with Art, then AI, and DeFi is the natural next area to add.”
Until now, only tokenized versions of bitcoin on other chains, like Ethereum or Solana, have been used in DeFi applications. The “Bitcoin Request for Comment” (BRC-20) specifications that were introduced earlier this year have made it possible for developers to create DeFi applications and issue tokens on Bitcoin. This has sparked the creation of Bitcoin-based digital art and meme currencies in recent months. As the Ordinals protocol gained popularity, @punk3700 constructed Trustless Market, a Uniswap fork of Bitcoin, to spur BRC-20 token activity on the blockchain. The protocol quickly attracted over 2,000 users, amassed daily volumes of $500,000, and allowed liquidity providers to get a 2% cut of all swaps executed on the network.
As a result, according to the architects of New Bitcoin City, employing blockchains keeps games and wins fair, as opposed to opaque online games that might tamper with their mechanism in secret and make it challenging for a player to accrue significant winnings. In the meantime, New Bitcoin City engineers created NOS, a layer 2 network, employing an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on top of Bitcoin to counteract Bitcoin’s infamously poor transactional speeds. This allowed for speedier speeds and smart contract features akin to Ethereum. The operating system that powers all Ethereum accounts and smart contracts is known as an EVM.
- Such developments are what the likes of @punk3700 say takes the ecosystem forward. “It’s best when we can combine the best of both worlds, i.e. Ethereum and Bitcoin, together, rather than pitch Ethereum versus Bitcoin,” he stated