European firm Bitnplay are developing a new Bitcoin only poker site, to be launched on 1st february 2015. In order to fund an initial marketing campaign to promote its new service the company has announced a unique crowdsale in which 200 tokens will be sold for 2 bitcoins each.
Each of the 200 tokens, which are issued using the Counterparty protocol and can therefore be held in any Bitcoin wallet with user-controlled keys, entitles its owner to 100% rakeback for life. In poker terminology ‘the rake’ is the service fee charged by the house for each hand played – so the token effectively offers its owner the ability to play poker on the Bitnplay site without ever paying any fees. Each token can be paired with the account of just one player, but this relationship can be dissolved at any time by the token holder. Because the tokens can be traded on Counterparty’s peer to peer distributed exchange, they can also be sold on quite easily and paired with new accounts. This allows for some interesting investment options, including the trading of tokens, but also including the opportunity for token holders to share the rakeback with another player whilst keeping hold of the token.
Gambling has so far proven to be amongst the most popular uses for Bitcoins, and there is currently a race on to extend this to cover poker – one of the worlds most popular forms of peer to peer betting, with projects such as Break Out Gaming and NXT’s Pangea currently working to develop the first popular crypto-currency poker platform.
Bitnplay is due to launch on 1st February with their first freeroll – a game which anyone can join in with for free.