Niantic & Fold launch new AR game that lets you grab Bitcoins instead of Pokémon

Zohaib Ahmed — Fri, 26 Nov 2021 13:47:08 +0000

Niantic has collaborated with financial company Fold to create an augmented reality game called Fold AR. The game allows users to earn bitcoin and in-app benefits by exploring their physical surroundings. It is currently undergoing testing and the Fold AR team will allow a small fraction of users to test the game for a limited time daily.

Pokémon Go is an obvious inspiration for the game, but Fold’s press release has gone a step further by calling it a part of the metaverse. The difference between the two games lies in the prize – while Pokémon Go revolves around capturing cute monsters, Fold AR is based mostly on finding cubes and tapping them to reveal a prize.

And it’s the prizes bit that makes the game special, as some of them are in the form of Bitcoin in the denomination of Satoshis. Satoshis is currently a very small unit worth 1/20th of a penny. The reward also contains power-ups for the Fold app.

There’s another difference, however, concerning the world it’s set in. Fold AR doesn’t virtual locations that correspond to real-world places. Instead, the game spawns a block between 1 and 50 feet away from the player every 10 minutes, corresponding to the rate of real Bitcoin mining.

The Fold AR team hopes to add more features with time, even including one that lets players hide Bitcoins for friends to find as well as some form of NFT.

Fold CEO Will Reeves says that the goal of the game is to partly make a virtual currency feel real by creating an AR setting for it. The game is full of cryptocurrency-related memes and other related stuff, but it’s still supposed to appeal to both crypto-enthusiasts as well as regular players.

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Niantic & Fold launch new AR game that lets you grab Bitcoins instead of Pokémon