Seals with Clubs, Breakout Gaming, Michael Mizrachi's Get Lucky Poker and to a lesser extent NXT's Pangea Poker are just some of the names attempting to establish themselves as Bitcoin based online poker venues. Into this mix comes a new site named Bitnplay who hope that their Bitcoin only online poker site will be enough to entice players away from competitors when they launch February 1st 2015.
In the run up to the launch, Bitnplay are seeking to raise 400 BTC by selling 200 tokens via Counterparty at a price of two BTC per token. These tokens will enable the holder to earn 100% rakeback on the account for which the token is associated with. If Bitnplay are successful in raising the funds, they intend to use an undisclosed amount on an initial marketing campaign while the remainder will be held for use as a liquidity buffer. A breakdown of projected operating costs, which does not include actual values but percentages, includes:
- 58% for marketing.
- 26% for salaries
- 10% for software and server costs.
- 6% for other.
At first Bitnplay will provide MTTs and heads up SNGs but hope to make cash games available within a few weeks of the launch. The reasoning for the delay is that Bitnplay will be test driving their anti-collusion and identity verification partner Veridu. Using Veridu, Bitnplay hope to confirm via a player's social media account that they are aged 18 and over, do not have additional accounts with Bitnplay and are not colluding with other players.
The people behind Bitnplay include:
Core Team
Co-Founder – Andreas Anastatsiades
Co-Founder – Illias Makropoulos-Lalaounis
Principal Analyst – Alkis Georgiadis-Harras
Software Development Team
Lead Developer – Angelos Hadjiphilppou
Bitcoin Developer – Kypros Lambrou
Backend Developers – Marios Agathokleous and Michael Skitsas
Frontend Developer – Marios Kourras
Networks and Security – Christos Karaviotis
External Advisors
Henrik Witt and Mikel Ruiz.
With unconfirmed rumours that PokerStars is considering accepting bitcoin for deposit1, one might argue that all of these startups have a short window of opportunity to establish themselves as the defacto venue for bitcoin based poker.
Investor information can be found at http://bitnpartners.eu/ and the poker site itself can be found at http://www.bitnplay.eu
Although it is likely it would be converted to dollars ↩