From Lagos to Mauritius: We Paid People to Play Mario Kart with Bitcoin

Picture this: a room full of developers, business owners, Bitcoin enthusiast etc. at a conference in Mauritius. The usual networking vibes gets overshadowed by Mario Kart music and people yelling at a screen.

The conference in Mauritius was like every other Bitcoin conference. Everyone is talking about Bitcoin, products, and scalability. Talks around Cashu, growth adoption in the global south; the panels run long, and the speeches longer. Then Mario Kart is set up as a form of play-to-win entertainment system. You race. You win. Bitcoin hits your wallet. No "processing", just the game, the finish line, and sats in your wallet before you've put down the controller. This was our experience at BTrust's Dev Day. We wanted to show people a new way Bitcoin could work through gaming, where a video game pays real money, instantly.

For this, the game used is the famous Nintendo’s Mario Kart. The setup was simple: race, win, get paid in Bitcoin instantly directly to your Bitcoin wallet.

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\ December 2024, I got to meet the amazing D++, an exceptional software engineer who has been at the forefront of  Bitcoin adoption using creative and innovative approaches. One of the ways she has been making an impact is by building Bitcoin integrations with games, making learning about Bitcoin more engaging and interactive.

In my years with Bitcoin, I've seen different use cases. But gaming? That was new.

The first was Jenga. The same block stacking game, except this time it carried Bitcoin into the conversation. Bitcoin Jenga turns privacy from theory into something you can touch, literally. You stack, you crash, you talk. It makes the abstract feel close. Good thing is, anyone can set up the game set and start teaching Bitcoin privacy in an interactive way. Want to learn more, and set up one for your community? click this link

Then in June 2025, D++ showed me something she'd built: Bitcoin on top of Mario Kart. You race like normal, but whoever leads at each lap gets paid in sats. When the race ends, the winner gets paid instantly, no delays. Lightning does it in real time.

I knew where to test it. I run BitDevs Lagos, a Bitcoin developer community in Lagos, Nigeria, where we talk Bitcoin protocols, research, and open source work. We meet once a month, last Saturday. If you're around Lagos, come through. You’ll find us on X.

We played the game at one of our gatherings. People connected their Lightning address, raced, and watched sats land in their wallets based on where they finished. No one needed Bitcoin lightning explained to them. They just saw it work

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\ The energy in the room that Saturday was different. The room erupted. People didn’t want to stop playing. We stayed longer than we normally do. You could hear it in their voices. "Wow." "Wait, did I actually win money playing a game?" "I get it now."

After the races, something shifted. People who had never used Lightning before started asking questions. About protocols. About wallets. About running nodes. About how they could build this into other things. The game had done what hours of technical talks sometimes can't.

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\ The setup was easy. No special device. No complex steps. Just a game people already knew, and Lightning beneath it. You start the game, run the script, input the Lightning addresses, and let people play.

It wasn't just Lagos. The game works anywhere. It had been played in other communities across the world. So we took it to Mauritius.

Mauritius was different in every way. Different country, different crowd, different energy. Same game. Same result.

We set it up at the conference venue. Sats started flowing. People submitted their addresses, raced, and got paid.

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\ The races were intense. Competing for sats, shouting at screens, and celebrating wins. And just like in Lagos, when those Lightning payments landed in their wallets in real time, you saw it on their faces. Bitcoin wasn't a theory anymore. It was in their hands. Working fast and borderless.

and as Brianna, founder of Evento said here:

What amazed me was how quickly people got it, regardless of where they were from. Conference attendees from Europe, Global south, and across Africa gathered around the screen. Some were Bitcoin developers who understood the technical elegance. Others were newcomers, curious about this "Bitcoin thing". The game bridged that gap.

By the end of the conference, people were asking how they could set it up back home or build something similar with other games.

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\ D++'s work taught me something fundamental about Bitcoin adoption: the best way to teach Bitcoin isn't always to talk about Bitcoin. Sometimes, you just let people use it. This is how Bitcoin education should be handled. Less explaining. More designing experiences.

Bitcoin Jenga made privacy concepts tangible. Mario Kart made Lightning intuitive. Both proved that the best education doesn't always feel like education at all, it feels like fun, like competition, like real life.

As I continue building with BitDevs Lagos and connecting with innovators, I am more than convinced that future of Bitcoin adoption won't come from more whitepapers or technical explainers. It'll come from builders who understand that the technology should fade into the background while the experience takes center stage.

Whether you're in Lagos, Mauritius, or anywhere else in the world, the message is the same: make it simple, make it fun, and let people feel the magic of Bitcoin for themselves.

If you're in Lagos, come play with us at BitDevs Lagos. If you're anywhere else, find your community, and let people experience Bitcoin for themselves.

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