ZEBEDEE — Hello, World!
ZEBEDEE EBEDEE BEDEE EDEE Digital Economy Engines
Today we announce the launch of ZEBEDEE.
Our mission is to build the next-generation digital economy engines for the post-Bitcoin world, and make it trivial for new users to onboard into the future of digital money.
The term ZEBEDEE is a recursive acronym that stands for ZEBEDEE Empowers Bitcoin-Enabled Digital Economy Engines.
Yes. We really did that!
ZEBEDEE will develop software and infrastructure to introduce first-class Bitcoin and Lightning support into digital experiences and environments. This will allow players, developers, streamers, and watchers to interact and instantly exchange value in a frictionless manner. We are building the engines that will help power the emerging digital economy, and the fuel that powers that engine is Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has changed the world — the implications of its invention have begun to reflect onto the global macro stage. And while many remain skeptical of its future role in society, one thing is known for certain: Bitcoin will continue to influence how individuals interact with each other online, especially with regards to their purchases and activities. Nearly a decade after Milton Friedman’s famous interview predicting the creation of a Bitcoin-like currency on the internet, humans are finally able to securely store and transfer digitally-native value, in a decentralized peer-to-peer fashion. Recent Bitcoin Layer 2 developments such as the Lightning Network are paving the way for a natively digital world, one where individuals can participate in a truly private global payment network.
“Lightning has revolutionized gaming and social media. Individuals are able to use the network to make streaming micropayments to each other. The best video game players in the world make money in a flow over time. […] We consume media and articles on an à la carte basis, paying tiny amounts via our Lightning accounts.“
— Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation discussing a future with the Lightning Network.
Through the use of Lightning microtransactions, Bitcoin can enable new types of features and interactions between peers in a digital experience. Value is now becoming natively part of the internet protocol stack as was originally intended. Not only are users able to watch, listen, write, and interact with others online, but they can now attach true digital value to any of their interactions.
We will help build and power this Bitcoin-enabled digital future.
ZEBEDEE empowers games with Bitcoin.
Gaming has the potential to become one of the largest digital economies in the world, as long as we free it from fiat.
The gaming industry has seen tremendous growth over the past decade, outpacing both the film and music industries combined. Annual revenue is expected to top a staggering $150B in 2019 continuing a trend of roughly ~10% growth year-over-year for the better part of the decade. The rise of mobile games and new industry verticals such as e-sports, livestreaming, and F2P (free-to-play) games have allowed for entirely new revenue models for companies and development studios.
The market is primarily dominated (80%+) by F2P games which monetize by selling in-game digital assets to players (think custom avatars, skins and addons). Epic Games’ Fortnite earned a record $2.4B in 2018 and is en route to top that in EY 2019. However, these purchases are most often one-way transactions as players are unable to sell items for their respective cash value, or even trade them with others. On top of that, limitations and inefficiencies in the current financial system forces games that seek deeper player-to-player interactions to roll out custom siloed digital currency economies — EVE Online, World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and RuneScape to name a few. Though, attempting to build such systems are not easy and do not come cheap. Not only do they inherit the traditional issues with card and bank fraud, chargebacks, and high service fees, but it also introduces an entirely new set of burdens relating to monetary policy, currency issuance and price stability concerns.
Bitcoin fixes this.
Bitcoin’s Lightning Network presents itself as an enormous opportunity to drive the evolution of this growing market. The use of streaming microtransactions allows players to self-custody their assets while maintaining the ability to transfer them in a trustless manner.
Gamers are already accustomed to creating digital value and accumulating digital wealth, and so gaming universes are ripe for building more enhanced digital economies. Instead of each game creating its own points system or game-specific digital currency, value can now be denominated and owned in terms of the internet of value protocol — Bitcoin.
ZEBEDEE empowers gamers and developers.
ZEBEDEE will roll out development tools and infrastructure to allow easy integration for Bitcoin and Lightning into digital gaming environments. We want to give game developers the tools to build with Bitcoin without needing to know how to code bitcoin. We have also brought onboard MandelDuck Studios to lead the development of our in-house Lightning-powered web, mobile, and desktop gaming experiences.
By providing the tools to integrate Bitcoin in games, ZEBEDEE’s mission is to:
- Empower gamers by allowing them to actually own the value they create. Denominated in Bitcoin, value created in one game will be interoperable with value created in another game. Hopefully, this will enable more gamers to make a living playing games.
- Empower indie game developers by creating financial incentives to develop games with new revenue models. This disaggregates the current oligopoly of large game studios and walled garden app stores by making it easier to earn revenue directly through the games one develops.
- Empower creativity by allowing users to explore entirely novel interactions between players of a game. Once the platform is publicly launched, we hope to spark a wave of new creative game concepts uniquely enabled by streaming, self-custodied, peer-to-peer digital micropayments.
Simon Cowell, André Neves, and Christian Moss are ZEBEDEE.
With many years of experience in traditional finance ranging from venture capital to private equity and asset management, Simon brings a sharp understanding of financial markets and corporate strategies to ZEBEDEE. He has keenly followed the progress of software eating the world, and since 2014 his working life has been dominated by the realization that software is now eating finance — through the open decentralized network of Bitcoin. Currently, Simon heads Corporate Development at Bitstamp, the world’s longest-standing Bitcoin exchange. Bitstamp is excited by the potential for the Lightning Network to power payment systems of the future and Simon is committed to supporting the infrastructure and applications that will make this vision a reality.
Having led software engineering teams over the years on mobile, web, and desktop product development, André brings expertise in solving business and product issues with an engineering technology perspective — keen eye for design systems and extensive understanding of information architecture. As Director of Engineering, André led projects for institutions such as TD Ameritrade Bank, MetLife and Time Warner, as well as startups such as Checkr, Gemini, and Lifion. In late 2018, André was invited to participate on the first Lightning Network Residency program hosted by the venerable Bitcoin research group Chaincode Labs. André also partnered with the Zcash Foundation in early 2019 to develop the open-source Zepio Wallet, a cross-platform wallet for Zcash to improve the UX of a truly private user. Most recently André was part of the team behind Koala Studio / Lightning Chess, an online Chess game super-powered with novel player-to-player interactions enabled through the use of Lightning micropayments. André brings deep technical knowledge and product design understanding to develop the best user experiences for Bitcoin and Lightning users.
In 2014 Christian Moss (aka MandelDuck) released the popular Bitcoin games SaruTobi and Takara, making him one of the first developers working on Bitcoin-enabled mobile and web games. Since then Christian has focused full-time on Bitcoin development and its integrations in gaming universes and experiences. In addition to releasing the open source Lightning Network Pebble Wallet, as an early adopter of the technology he worked closely with Nayuta (a Lightning Network spec-contributing team) on building Lightning-enabled products and services. Most recently Christian won the 2019 Lightning Network Gaming Hackathon with a trilogy of mobile games that stream payments between players. At ZEBEDEE Christian will continue pushing the boundaries of innovation on gaming features that can be empowered by Bitcoin and Lightning microtransactions.
We would like to thank our amazing investors and advisors for sharing in our vision and making all this possible.
What’s Next?
The Lightning-enabled future of gaming has arrived. To stay tuned with ZEBEDEE’s latest releases and updates make sure to follow us on Twitter @zebedeeio and visit our website.
Find us at the first Lightning Network Conference in Berlin.
