Within hours of Haste launching their alpha mobile game in January 2021, the Unbounded Capital team was hooked. The power of their revolutionary Instant Leaderboard Payout (ILP) incentive mechanism transformed an otherwise simple game into something that had us coming back over and over throughout the days and weeks after discovering it. What Haste created in a little more than a weekend was an “ah-ha” moment for what Bitcoin could provide the internet through micropayments. Most exciting, this ingenious new mechanism could be extrapolated to predict what we now see to be a key component of the future of gaming. My experience of that first time playing Haste was outlined in our blog Bitcoin Unlocks the Future of Gaming which is worth a read if the concept of Haste or ILP is new to you.
Since this successful alpha game, Haste has continued to develop their vision, team, and product offerings. Beyond creating their own games, Haste is building tools and a platform to facilitate a future where ILP gaming is ubiquitous. To accomplish this, Haste’s original founders Joe DePinto and Dan Wagner expanded the team by bringing on technical co-founders Eric and Keith LaForce, adding decades of experience in software and product development. With this team, and in less than a year since their alpha game, Haste now boasts a recently launched Developer SDK, a toolkit to facilitate the creation of 3rd party ILP games, and the Haste Arcade, a portal for gamers seeking to try their hand at a variety of ILP games for a chance to earn real-time payouts with Bitcoin, tokens, and other rewards.
The power of experiencing ILP gaming with Haste cannot be overstated. Take as an analogy the quintessential internet “ah-ha” moment of sending one’s first email in the 1990s which for millions transformed a theoretical concept like “a global and interconnected network of computers” into the rails which delivered the experience of achieving instantaneous communication across vast distances. For many early Bitcoiners, an extension of this experience became available through a demo of Bitcoin, witnessing the transfer of value from one wallet to another on computers or smartphones in the early days after Bitcoin's 2009 launch. Today, however, the magic of this experience for Bitcoin has been largely diminished with the arrival of applications like Venmo or CashApp which deliver competitive user experiences for the casual $20 payment for dinner among friends.
Haste renews the magical “ah-ha” moment for Bitcoin. Today, with Haste and ILP gaming, Bitcoin has an entirely new “ah-ha” moment ready for the billions of internet users and game players who either missed the opportunity to experience their first mobile wallet Bitcoin transfer, dial-up 1990s email, or simply want to experience that feeling once again. Real-time micropayment transfers experienced through a medium as fun as a game in an online arcade is something entirely new and available today thanks to Haste. We look forward to the Haste team continuing to expand what is possible online today by creating new and valuable experiences for billions around the world.
For more information about Haste, or to try it out for yourself, visit HasteArcade.com!