Esports and Bitcoin have always been called a natural match. As esports players tend to understand and value Bitcoin more than other people. That means more and more esports tournaments are rewarding gamers in the form of cryptocurrencies.
What is Esports?
Esports is short for “Electronic Sports”. It’s competitive, professional, and ruthless online gaming. Being around since the ’70s, Esports took off after the introduction of multiplayer games, like in actual sports. Despite only being a small part of the entire online gaming industry, it’s one of the main factors gaming online is becoming popular in many countries, especially Japan.
Esports is where gamers with years of experience compete in official matches and tournaments to rank in the top in their season-standings. In normal gaming, you can make almost $10,000 in a month. With Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies added to the picture, based on the popularity of the tournaments, you can now win $15 million in the form of the prize. It’s a win win for both, as cryptocurrencies have found a use case with an audience that is willing to take the volatility that they are associated with for now. And gamers see the risk tradeoff between higher value of prizes and the use of cryptocurrencies.
How can you play?
The steps aren’t difficult and the same throughout other games:
- Choose a game- Do your research on the variety of esports played and play whichever ones you’re most comfortable/familiar with.
- Choose your favored platform- Either pc or console.
- Explore and analyze- Study your game thoroughly. Even if you’re familiar, new strategies are found every day.
- Upgrade/remodel your equipment- You might be an awesome player but having old equipment could pull you down at a high level. New equipment helps immensely in your performance, for both experienced and non-experienced players.
- Practice appropriately- There’s no other way around this, unfortunately. Practice for a good 2-3 hours. Too much practicing could backfire so practice smartly.
- Create your team OR join one- team experience is mandatory. So, join a team, get better and then go on to join better and more experienced teams. Or start your team while leading and recruiting. Playing on your own gives a lot of time to skill development as well.
- Compete in tournaments- The last step, compete in tournaments and win prizes in normal currency or cryptocurrencies.
Games and Sites
Since becoming a recent trend, betting has started on these games, not with normal currency but with Bitcoin. Due to the trust factor showed by small and big Bitcoin vendors, the prize pools have reached whopping amounts of more than $20 million per tournament.
These are some of the sites which reward gamers in cryptocurrency:
- Cloudbet- Being the original Bitcoin casino and sportsbook, it has recently launched betting in-play with cryptocurrency on live-streamed esports events every day on their new website. Esports represented a fifth of all game’s wagers put with Cloudbet in April, driven by FIFA 20, CS:GO, and Dota 2. Cloudbet approves Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum and the following games are available on it starting from CS:GO, Dota 2, FIFA 20, StarCraft, League of Legends, Rainbow Six, NBA 2K, Rocket League, Overwatch, Call of Duty and King of Glory.
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO)– Being a classic and popular fps (First Person Shooting) game, it hosts games and tournaments to watch and bet on. A Bitcoin startup, ZEBEDEE, plans to release a platform that would allow players to earn in Bitcoins while they play CSGO. Launching its first 10 servers with Infuse Technology for Bitcoin, transactions will be handled by Lightning Network. The game having a million existing players at a single moment having peaked at 1.3M players in 2020.
- League of Legends– Quickly becoming one of the biggest multiplayer online game, it is also known as the father of all multi-online battle arena or MOBA for short. Partnering with Refereum, a cryptocurrency that operates on the Ethereum platform, the users can now win rewards and prizes in the form of cryptocurrencies. The more they win games, the more $RFR can be collected which can later be exchanged for different cryptocurrencies.
- Play2Live – Being a live-streaming company, it offers many crypto revenue options. They have their distribution system called LUC (Level Up Coin). They were one of the first to hold an Esports tournament with a first-place cryptocurrency prize of $100,000. It was being awarded in the game Counter-Strike.
- DOTA 2- It is a MOBA game on the Esports platform FirstBlood with cryptocurrency prizes. This specific platform takes advantage of Blockchain which allows the players to review the results of their match if they’re scraped. It also has an annual 2 million viewership count.
The Future?
(image source: Newzoo)
According to analysts, at the rate cryptocurrencies are being spread and used, the Esports Industry will be worth $100 billion by 2025. Every year the record of games and users grows longer. Cryptocurrency may even become the norm in online gaming. Now, with cryptocurrency involved, these additions are increasing every day and could reach 645M people by 2022.
If the hype of cryptocurrency stays steady there is a very exciting future awaiting gamers and others alike!