A relatively new platform is trying to expand bitcoin (BTC) usage – beyond trading or investments – by building games on the Bitcoin blockchain that offer payouts on wins, among other uses.

New Bitcoin City, which went live last week, currently offers casual games, board games, and strategy games on both web and mobile that run on Bitcoin. The platform also offers NFT auctions and a marketplace, all native to the Bitcoin network.

“We want to make Bitcoin as generalized as possible — usable for far more than just a currency,” said @punk3700, one of the developers at New Bitcoin City said in a post on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “We started first with Art, then AI, and DeFi is the natural next area to add.”

Bitcoin’s usage in DeFi applications has so far been limited to tokenized representations of bitcoin on other chains, such as Ethereum or Solana.

The introduction of “Bitcoin Request for Comment” (BRC-20) standards earlier this year has allowed developers to issue tokens and build DeFi applications on Bitcoin. This has spurred the development of digital artwork and meme coins built on Bitcoin in recent months.

@punk3700 previously built Trustless Market, a Uniswap fork on Bitcoin, amid the Ordinals protocol hype to jumpstart BRC-20 token activity on the blockchain. Shortly after launch, the protocol racked up daily volumes of $500,000, attracted over 2,000 users, and let liquidity providers earn a 2% cut on all swaps conducted on the network.

As such, New Bitcoin City developers say using blockchains keeps games and wins fair – unlike opaque online games which may tamper their mechanism behind the scenes and make it difficult for a player to amass big earnings.

Meanwhile, to combat Bitcoin’s infamous slow transactional speeds, New Bitcoin City developers built NOS, a layer 2 network, using an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on top of Bitcoin – allowing for smart contract functionality, similar to Ethereum, and faster speeds. EVMs are the software environment in which all Ethereum accounts and smart contracts work.

Such developments are what the likes of @punk3700 say takes the ecosystem forward. “It’s best when we can combine the best of both worlds, i.e. Ethereum and Bitcoin, together, rather than pitch Ethereum versus Bitcoin,” he stated.