Dylan Abruscato on building Crypto: The Game — from HQ Trivia roots to Uniswap acquisition

Summary

Dylan Abruscato built Crypto: The Game out of a lifelong obsession with Survivor and a career that ran through HQ Trivia's rise and fall. The core format is a 10-day on-chain elimination game: players buy in at 0.1 ETH, compete in daily immunity challenges — arcade games, crypto puzzles, digital scavenger hunts — and vote each other out each night. Last player standing takes the entire prize pot.

Season one launched in early 2024, deep in the bear market, which Abruscato now considers good timing. What he didn't anticipate was how consuming it would become for players. The assumption was that people would log in for a morning challenge, head to work, and return to vote. Instead it turned into a 24/7 game — players were requesting PTO around season schedules.

The bot controversy

Right before entries locked for season one, a player named Anish deployed bots to buy up most of the available slots. Abruscato's instinct, shaped by his HQ Trivia background, was to boot them and refund the entries. Crypto Twitter turned on him immediately. He quickly realized that bots don't carry the same stigma in Web3 that they do in Web2 — they're closer to rational economic actors in a financialized system. He refunded Anish, they settled things in the DMs, and the game continued.

Web2 brand partnerships

After season one's virality, Adidas reached out and sponsored a challenge in season two. CTG ended up with six sponsors that season, a mix of crypto-native brands and Adidas — one of which was Uniswap, which later acquired the game. Abruscato is candid that neither the Adidas nor Nike's NFT experiment (Artifact) went particularly well for the brands involved. His read is that large Fortune 500 companies are still scared off by crypto Twitter pile-ons, and their crisis comms teams aren't built to handle that kind of reply-army pressure. The path to broader brand participation probably runs through better UX abstraction — tools like Privy that make wallet creation invisible — so brands don't think of it as a "crypto integration" at all.

The decision not to raise

Abruscato was approached by funds early on and chose not to raise. His reasoning: CTG was conceived as a personal drop, not a venture-scale platform. The game embraces seasonality and goes off-air for months between seasons — by design, because the intensity demands it. Taking VC money would have pressured him to build a scalable platform where communities spin up their own versions, a direction he didn't think was right for the product. Not every idea needs to be venture-scale.

What he's watching

For live interactive crypto entertainment, Yapster is the project that excites him most — an HQ Trivia-influenced show where players submit and vote on memes in real time, with the winning meme launched as a token. He sees the live speculation mechanic as the key to engagement, though he's skeptical a live memecoin show reaches mass adoption. The addressable audience is tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands on Crypto Twitter, not the mainstream.

Beyond entertainment, he's watching Pixie Chess — a Nouns-style daily auction for on-chain chess pieces with special powers, with auction proceeds funding tournament prize pools — and Vertigo, an anti-sniper decentralized exchange on Solana designed to prevent bots from buying up token supply and immediately dumping. He also flags Token Works as the closest thing to a crypto-native creative mischief operation, running token drops with a distinct curatorial sensibility.