Meet ZEBEDEE – A FinTech Built To Serve The Modern Gaming Industry

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Below is our recent interview with Simon Cowell, Co-Founder and CEO at ZEBEDEE:

Q: What is ZEBEDEE?

A: ZEBEDEE is a FinTech built to serve the modern gaming industry. We’re essentially a platform that processes payments instantly anywhere in the world, but it’s way less boring than that makes it sound. Imagine this: you’re playing Super Mario and you pick up a coin in the game. The game developer would use ZEBEDEE to make that coin worth actual money that you, the player, receives instantly and can also spend instantly. Obviously, this coin can’t be worth a lot of money or no game dev would use this kind of feature. So we need to be able to process tiny transactions, as small as a fraction of a cent, and do that instantly once the game triggers a payment using our API. To make that work, we built ZEBEDEE on top of the Bitcoin Lightning Network. So basically, we’re using Bitcoin to move tiny amounts of money instantly between games and players. But we’re not a blockchain company, we really see ourselves as a financial service provider that just happens to use Bitcoin as the best form of money for what we want to achieve.

We do also have a really cool app for gamers to find ZEBEDEE-powered games, get their rewards and spend them, but our main business is serving game developers as a payments platform created specifically for games.

Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?

A: Which one? We’ve done so many recently, it’s hard to even know! The big announcement we made recently is about our Series B funding round, where we raised $35M to scale ZEBEDEE, after we had an extremely successful year and achieved around 20x user growth within 10 months of our last funding round. Beyond the money we raised, this round also got us some phenomenal industry connections, as our investors include Square Enix, the gaming giant behind Final Fantasy, as Raine Group, the biggest investment bank in the entertainment sector.

More recently than that, we announced a couple of new game launches on our platform as well as a new integration into a browser extension called Slide, which lets anyone earn small amounts of Bitcoin just by browsing the web. Basically it gives you a piece of the revenue generated by ads you see while you browse. That’s not a very major partnership for us, but it is interesting as it kind of shows the power and flexibility of our platform outside our main gaming use case.

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Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?

A: We have a B2B side, where the flagship product is the ZEBEDEE Developer Dashboard, but that’s really focused on developers, so not something readers could go check out right now.

On the B2C side, we have quite an extensive portfolio of products at this point, centered around the ZEBEDEE app. My suggestion to anyone, including potential developer partners, would be to just get ZEBEDEE from the App Store or Play Store and take it from there. The app will show you games you can play for Bitcoin, so it’s really the only thing you need to get started and understand our whole ecosystem. Then once people actually play a game and earn some Bitcoin rewards, everything else becomes clear. The experience of it is surprisingly simple too, so we always just try to get people to try using the app and getting a game. The word Bitcoin can be intimidating, but this is actually a very simple product and a fun experience. It’s not finance, it’s gaming with payments just weaved into it in a natural way.

We do then have a bunch of products around that – ZBD Bots for Discord and Telegram allow you to tip people Bitcoin right in the chat with a simple command, ZBD Streamer lets content creators collect tips easily, ZBD Streamer lets you play CS:GO for Bitcoin, zbd.gg profile pages let anyone request Bitcoin from you or pay you Bitcoin over the Lightning Network. But it’s all centered around the ZEBEDEE app.

Q: What can we expect from your company in next 6 months? What are your plans?

A: More games, new features in all our products, the ability to transfer money seamlessly from your bank account to ZEBEDEE and back, including cashing out rewards from games in your local currency to a bank account or card, updated UX with some slick new designs and some really big new partnerships, including gaming industry names that everyone has heard of.

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Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?

A: Well the best thing is that we pay you Bitcoin for playing games, but people know about that. I’d say it’s pretty cool that we’ve been fully remote from day 1 and managed to get a really great team of talented people all over the world – I think we’ve got teammates in over 12 countries right now! People also get a bit shocked over the fact that our products are free to use and you get paid actual Bitcoin, not any sort of token.