ChainDuel V2: What Happened on the First Week

After nearly four years of development, Chain Duel's new online version is live. This first-week report looks at what happened after launch: organic growth through Nostr and WhatsApp, visitors from 68 countries, real in-game activity over the Lightning Network, and the key insights we learned from the first six days of real-world usage.

Francis Mars

26. Juni 2026June 26, 2026 · 2 Min. Lesezeit2 min read

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After nearly four years of building ChainDuel and deploying it at Bitcoin conferences around the world, we finally launched the new version.

Six days later, here's what happened.

The Numbers#

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A Surprise: WhatsApp#

The biggest surprise was WhatsApp.

On the second day after launch, the number of WhatsApp link previews jumped from around 110 to more than 1,000.

Traffic peaked at 860 visitors in a single day, entirely through organic sharing.

Built for Nostr#

Most visitors came from Nostr. The most common clients were Amethyst, Primal, Nostur, Ditto, and other Nostr apps.

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The game also saw visitors from countries including Germany, Kenya, Bolivia, Brazil, South Africa, Peru and Thailand, showing how global the Bitcoin community already is.

We Also Learned Where the Friction Is#

The first week wasn't about celebrating. Testing and logs showed where people got stuck.

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The biggest obstacle was the challenge eligibility system. Several players reached the challenge screen but couldn't continue because they were missing a NIP-05 identity or hadn't yet followed the ChainDuel account on Nostr.

This Is Just the Beginning#

The goal of this launch was to answer a simple question:

Will people discover, share and actually play a Lightning-native game online?

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After six days, the answer looks encouraging. Now it's time to improve onboarding, reduce friction, and keep building.

Thanks to everyone who played, shared the game, reported bugs, or sent feedback.

See you in the arena

Follow Chain Duel: ⁠Chain Duel

Play: https://game.chainduel.net/

#BITCOIN#Lightning Network#Nostr#gaming

Written by

Francis Mars

thoughts of a Bitcoin human • https://chainduel.net • https://pubpay.me

Comments2

Constant

Awesome. I am one of those people that could not get through because i don't really follow anyone, let alone 100 people, nor have a nip-05 for this profile. Perhaps @Pip the WoT guy can supply some profile scoring ( get the requirement to follow the chaindual profile, thats fine)
Open in a Nostr client

Francis MarsAuthor

We're still tuning those requirements, in an attempt to reduce spam or exploits, the 100 follows its cheap to compute, but not the best approach. Perhaps @Pip the WoT guy can help me figure out a better way. But you could've followed a few people to pass the verification, test the game, earn some sats.. there's more than 100 cool accounts on nostr 😁
Open in a Nostr client

Contents

5 sections

  1. The Numbers
  2. A Surprise: WhatsApp
  3. Built for Nostr
  4. We Also Learned Where the Friction Is
  5. This Is Just the Beginning