ZBD, Bitcoin payments gaming company, has integrated Bitcoin rewards into Idle Bank, a game title from TapNation with over 12 million downloads. TapNation is one of the world’s leading mobile game publishers with over 1 billion total downloads. The announcement comes weeks after ZBD launched what is possibly the first mobile app on Apple phones with bitcoin rewards.
ZBD, a Bitcoin payments company launched in 2019, was founded by Simon Cowell, Andre Neves, and Christian Moss to address payment issues in the gaming industry using Bitcoin. Ben Cousens, a former venture capitalist and Bitcoiner, joined as an investor after being introduced to the founders, drawn in by their vision. In an exclusive interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Cousens recalled, “I got introduced to Simo, the CEO, by phone, and we jumped on the call, and he just said, ‘I have seen how the games industry’s got a payments issue and I think Bitcoin is the solution.’ And my ears pricked right up.”
Born out of the 2018-2019 growth of the Lightning Network, the company has developed a mature set of development tools that make it seamless for game developers to integrate Bitcoin rewards into their video games, including an API and an SDK (Software Development Kit).
Today, the company is focused on the mobile gaming market. There are over 3 billion gamers worldwide, with a majority of them playing on mobile devices, and generating $95 billion in annual revenue.
“What really made me bullish on the business was the commercial acumen of the team. A lot of Bitcoin startups are fighting the good fight for Bitcoin adoption, but consumer adoption outside of investing and saving has been a challenge. Blocks are still empty today in 2025. That usage problem is solvable when you build something consumers engage with, and I felt gaming was a powerful overlap. There are three billion gamers in the world. It’s a very large industry.” Cousens added.
Play Counter Strike, Earn Bitcoin
The startup made headlines in the Bitcoin industry with an early test case of its payments technology. In 2021, ZBD launched a modded Counter-Strike server — a popular first-person shooter video game among PC gamers — which included Bitcoin drops for kills, creating a real-money competitive dynamic, described at the time as the ‘next generation of esports’. Cousens explained, “If I shot you, you dropped coins in the map, and if I ran and collected those coins, you’d pick them up instantly in the game.”
The Counter-Strike demo was a major success, capturing the imagination of bitcoiners and grabbing the attention of gamers alike. In fact, it was such a successful demo that hackers and “try-hard” gamers started to play, finding ways to exploit the game and maximize Bitcoin reward payouts. “When we did Counter-Strike, the first thing that happened was obviously people farmed the servers and they just joined the games, killed everyone, took all the money and quit, using wall hacks and whatever. And it was ‘Oh yeah, forgot about that.’” Cousens recalled adding that “we then introduced actually, quite a simple mechanic for the Counter-Strike example that worked, which was you had to pay to join the server. That immediately deterred like 85-90% of the bad actors.”
The game “blew up” in Brazil, growing their discord community to over 100,000 people, some of whom volunteered to “sit on the server and watch for cheats” to manually boot bad actors, rewarding reports with 100 – 500 sats over the lightning network, depending on the situation. “it wasn’t scalable. It was like Mechanical Turk style.” Cousens noted.
Eventually, ZBD shut down the Counter-Strike demo. “We’re in the business of providing the tools to the game devs, not building games or running games ourselves,” Cousens explained. The company shifted focus to the massive mobile gaming market, but the experience led ZBD down a deep cyber security rabbit hole, which informed their developer tooling services. Game developers and advertisers alike should not have to worry about deep cyber security to integrate Bitcoin into their games, after all.
As an example of the lengths ZBD goes to prevent ad fraud in their games today, Cousens shared that they keep an eye on the phone’s accelerometer, a sensor that measures the device’s movement, to know if the phone is in a user’s hand. This is to protect against farms of devices running auto-clicking software to defraud advertisers.
Reflecting on his experience working in the Bitcoin industry now for over half a decade in a highly adversarial niche, fighting off gamers who tend to be particularly tech savvy and cunning, Cousens noted that “bitcoiners are bloody good cryptographers. I mean, if you’re in the Bitcoin community, you always talk yourself down, right? ‘We don’t know what we don’t know’ or ‘nothing is ever risk-free’, blah blah blah. But this is an industry built around cryptography and encryption. And that is also cybersecurity. The overlap there is just insane. And as a result, Bitcoin engineers and bitcoiners tend to make quite good security people. We’re all quite paranoid by nature, right?”
The ZBD SDK and API
The SDK, which was recently announced by ZBD and is being used in the latest partnership with the Idle Bank integration, is also available for game developers. Cousens told Bitcoin Magazine, “We just released the ZBD SDK, which packages together everything, all of our security into a very simple and easy to use package, and that’s not sales hyperbole. People are able to integrate this in two or three days because it’s genuinely drag-and-drop. Create a little Bitcoin asset for your video game, drop it in the game, and choose how and where you want to pay people.”
ZBD is now actively working with close to 40 game developers, according to Cousens, all of whom are working to integrate bitcoin rewards into their video games, paid out using Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. Cousens, who is a big fan of the Lightning Network, defended the protocol, saying that “there’s still FUD about Lightning and I don’t get it… ZBD has no on-chain offering. Lightning is amazing.”
The integration of bitcoin rewards into mobile games is far from a gimmick; it is having measurable results on user retention for ZBD’s clients. Discussing the impact on Fumbgames’ “Bitcoin Miner” video game, Cousens said, “I’m not going to share their numbers because I can’t, but they’ve grown more than 10x as a business as a result of this. And we see this quite consistently, when you distribute Bitcoin to players, you’re paying them to play. The engagement goes through the roof. And we’ve done surveys of Gen Z and worked with gamers to validate what’s going on here.”
The model is simple. Advertisers pay game developers for views and clicks; a portion of that revenue gets turned into bitcoin and returned to players as rewards. The bitcoin rewards increase user retention, which increases advertising dollars. The same process plays out with in-game purchases as well.
“We focused on the ad monetization side of the gaming industry, hence rewards and bitcoin payouts. Our proposition to the games industry was ‘hey, why don’t you take a small amount of your ad revenue and redistribute it to the players, and we bet you they’ll play more, especially if it’s bitcoin.” Cousens remarked.
SaraTobi’s Bitcoin Microtransactions on Apple Phones
Following the aftermath of the Epic vs Apple lawsuit in the EU, which ruled against Apple’s monopolistic app store practices, the door was now unlocked to do micropayments inside mobile apps without having to pay an exorbitant fee to the device manufacturer. ZBD walked right through that door, getting approval for the first mobile game with in-app bitcoin purchases and microtransactions, SaruTobi. The game features a cute little monkey that has to swing from tree to tree to collect bananas, which in turn can be traded in for satoshis. “SaruTobi got through Apple’s review, where you could make purchases in Bitcoin. That was us doing some R&D,” noted Cousens.
Idle Bank Integration – Bitcoin in Mainstream Gaming
Most recently, ZBD announced a partnership with TapNation, a leading mobile publisher with “over 1 billion total downloads,” according to the press release. Their flagship game is called Idle Bank, which already has over 12 million downloads. Idle Bank is the first mainstream mobile game to deliver native Bitcoin rewards to players via the Lightning Network. ZBD reports that since launch, the game has achieved a 355% increase in 30-day player retention and a 124% boost in revenue per player, demonstrating Bitcoin’s impact on engagement and monetization.
Commenting on the integration, Cousens said, “We’ve known Philippe at TapNation for quite some time. He’s very interested in looking for ways the games industry can adopt new technologies, and he had faith in us that this bitcoin rewards model is powerful and works, so his teams agreed to integrate the ZBD SDK. They did find it very easy. Idle Bank is a game where you print fiat money and mine Bitcoin secretly to screw over your customers. I recommend people play it because you can stack real sats, simulating being a real central banker.”
