Reality TV, As An Online Game

This week, I joined Crypto: The Game, an online competition with 741 players.

It's an onchain game, which means you need a crypto wallet to play and authenticate yourself as a player. To enter, each player contributed 0.1 ETH (about $200) to play, creating a total prize pool of 74.1 ETH—roughly $150,000 at today's prices.

Like a lot of reality game shows, Crypto: The Game so far has proven to include all of the classic moves.

While the game runs on onchain wallets for authentication and voting, most of the actual gameplay happens in Telegram chat communities.

If you've ever wondered what happens when 50+ people, all competing for a major cash prize, are thrown into a messaging platform together—it's a chaotic, real-time experiment in behavioral psychology, team dynamics, virality, and outright manipulation. In just a few days, I’ve seen everything from fast friendships to ruthless betrayals. It's...intense.

While it would obviously be great to have an extra $150,000 right now (particularly as an early-stage startup founder), I'm not playing with any expectation of winning. I'm playing to learn.

Let me explain.

Gameplay Through Technological Innovation

One of the things I've found most fascinating about emergent new technologies is how games become a proxy for pushing boundaries and exploring new possibilities.

I knew this intellectually from my time working in venture capital, but I didn't know this viscerally until I met the players of Dark Forest, a crypto-native game, back in 2022.

Back then, I was diving deep into decentralized communities, and someone suggested I check out the gaming sub-conference at a big developer event in Europe. At the time, Dark Forest was the game for onchain builders. You can think of it like a mix of Battleship (hidden maps and secret attacks) and Game of Thrones (alliances, conquests, and betrayals). The entire "board" was built on cutting-edge cryptographic tech, and the only way to win was to program smart contracts that could scan the board, spot enemies, and take them down.

As a non-gamer, I was intimidated, but the event turned out to be the most fun I’d had in months. That's where I met PhD game theorist, Will Robinson who was so obsessed with Dark Forest that he formed a team to play around the clock.

At one point, his team discovered a loophole that let them target and destroy an opponent’s planet—an infamous moment in gaming lore that “broke the internet.” As I wrote about here, how Will described it:

“Our team watched the fallout with glee. We were sleep deprived and elated to finally be making Orden squirm after three rounds of losing. We didn’t know if it was ethical or fair, and at that particular moment… we didn’t care. We had just built a machine gun planet, and as far as we knew, it was within the rules of the game!

That moment crystallized something for me—games aren’t just entertainment; they’re proving grounds for technological experimentation. In Dark Forest, where gameplay required people to build better tools, the real reward wasn’t just winning—it was the high-pressure environment that sparked real-time collaboration and innovation.

(Kinda brilliant, when you think about it.)

We're Having Fun on the Internet. (And We're Making It Better At the Same Time.)

If Crypto: The Game is nothing more than an excuse for me to invest a little money and time for a pressure-cooker environment that forces me to conceptualize and deploy inventive micro-solutions to niche problems on a daily basis, it's well worth the entry fee.

In just four days, I've already built three tools for my orange team in Crypto: The Game:

1. AI-powered friendship bracelets – A site that auto-generates bracelets to rally support for the orange team. Cute idea, but it didn’t create the viral effect I hoped for.

2. Daily news digests – Text-based summaries of everything happening in the Telegram chats. This was an instant hit since it solved a major pain point.

3. AI pinball bot – A bot designed to play a daily challenge for me. Unfortunately, it failed—I couldn’t get it to bypass the crypto wallet authentication. But notably it was the first time I used Claude's "browser takeover" feature to build something.

Some wins, some flops—but all interesting experiments.

And I'm not the only one. Others have built spreadsheets, dashboards, leaderboards, and profile pic generators that let you pledge your alliance to a tribe with a visible signal. There's daily commentary on social media and a nightly live podcast with an anonymous tipline where people can share gossip and inside intel from other tribes.

In short, this game is less about just winning and more about what happens when a group of internet strangers, armed with creativity and tech, turn a competition into a collaborative, ever-evolving experiment in strategy, storytelling, and culture-building.

And since I fell pretty squarely into the "goodie-two-shoes" end of our tribe's player spectrum, I’m pretty sure I’m a walking target for elimination—so I wouldn’t be surprised if I get voted off soon. Until then, let me just leave you with this:

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