ZBD

Simon Cowell, the chief executive, and André Neves, the chief technology officer, founded the company under the name Zebedee and later shortened the brand to ZBD. According to its own figures, ZBD has about 65 employees who work fully remote, has raised 90 million dollars and reaches more than four million players.

Its backers include Blockstream Capital Partners, the games publisher Square Enix, Kingsway Capital, Raine and Lake Star. Members of the team previously worked at companies such as PlayStation, Xsolla, Meta and Bitstamp, according to the company.

The Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets approved the license application of Zebedee Europe B.V. in December 2024, and the license took effect on 30 December 2024 when MiCA began to apply to crypto-asset service providers. ZBD called itself the first company to receive approval for an EU license of this kind.

The interim register of ESMA records the authorization under Article 63 for custody and administration of crypto assets, exchange of crypto assets for money and transfers on behalf of clients. The entry names 30 states of the European Economic Area, the Netherlands included, which is the reach of a CASP license under the MiCA passport.

BlockchainGamer reported that ZBD later added a license as an electronic money institution from the Netherlands and a partnership with ClearBank. With the e-money license ZBD can issue debit cards and virtual bank accounts to players and let them pay into one game in euros while they earn bitcoin rewards in another.

In the United States ZBD holds money transmitter licenses in several states. The company also names PSD2 and SOC 2 among its compliance credentials for the payments it runs for game studios.

ZBD is embedded financial infrastructure for games: a studio connects its game to ZBD and can then pay players rewards, let them cash out and give them accounts or cards. The company describes its products as Embedded Rewards, Embedded Payouts, Embedded Accounts and Branded Debit Cards.

The ZBD wallet is the app in which players collect their rewards, hold bitcoin and send it to other users or wallets. Players use it to receive the payouts of games that work with ZBD and to move the balance to a bank account, a digital wallet or a debit card.

Games that work with ZBD pay players small amounts of bitcoin, often counted in satoshis, for in-game actions that the studio chooses. The rewards travel over the Lightning Network, which settles such micropayments within seconds and at fees low enough for amounts of a few cents.

A ZBD account comes with a Lightning address, an identifier in the format of an email address to which other wallets can send bitcoin. A player can also pay out the balance from the app, and the address lets creators receive payments from their audiences as well.

Players cash out their balance in the app straight to a bank account, a digital wallet or a debit card, which closes the cycle of money that enters, moves through and leaves a game. For players in the EU the e-money license of Zebedee Europe B.V. covers the euro side of these payouts.