I’m crouching in a seedy alleyway off Trafalgar Square, London, with my MacBook teetering on one knee. The heady reek of piss fills my nostrils. I’m hurriedly punching emoji into a dialog box in my web browser, which is prompting me for the answer to a puzzle. It’s day nine of Crypto: The Game.
CTG is an elimination game that takes place over 10 days, almost exclusively online. It’s a sort of mutant conglomeration of ideas from Survivor, Squid Game, The Hunger Games, and The Traitors, except everything is crypto-inflected in some way. Each of the 716 players that signed up for the third season, myself included, purchased an entry NFT for $200 in cryptocurrency. The last player standing would win the $140,000 pot.
I had raced to Trafalgar Square on that Tuesday afternoon—barreling through tourists like a shoplifter fleeing the law—following clues that promised a route back into the game. I had been voted out by my fellow players the previous night, but if I could solve the puzzle quickly, I might be “resurrected” and have another shot at victory.
A group of allied players and I had decoded an alphanumeric cipher to arrive at a second peculiar code. When I entered it into ChatGPT, it led to a text file that read, “Congratulations on decoding the clue! The treasure is hidden at coordinates 51.5074° N, 0.1278° W.” I was only five minutes away.
But when I arrived, panting, it was clear I had it wrong. ChatGPT had apparently hallucinated the coordinates. By the time the real answer—the string of emoji—was circulating in the chat, other players had beaten me to it. My game had come to an end.
The first two editions of Crypto: The Game, which took place in February and April 2024, were an instant hit among crypto fans starved of ways to have fun with crypto beyond trading it.
Developers have long struggled to blend crypto functionality into games and services that people want to use because they’re enticing, not just for the opportunity to turn a quick profit. But CTG players waxed lyrical about the game, which became the talk of Crypto Twitter during the first two seasons.
“Financial incentives are the greatest [user] acquisition tool in the world, but very bad for retention,” says David Phelps, founder of crypto startup JokeRace, who played in the second season of CTG. “Tapping into social incentives is almost radical in crypto.”
CTG is partly a game of skill; each day, tribes of players compete in a challenge—typically some sort of crypto puzzle, scavenger hunt, or arcade game—with the goal of earning temporary immunity from elimination. But it’s predominantly a social game; one of politicking, alliance-building, maneuvering, and backstabbing. Each night, the tribes without immunity are tasked with voting out a varying number of their own players until only a handful remain. On the final day, a single winner is crowned by the eliminated players.
“You can’t just backstab your way to the top,” Dylan Abruscato, the creator of CTG, told WIRED in an interview last spring. “You need to play a ruthless but respected game.”
Nearly a decade ago, Abruscato was an executive at HQ Trivia, a live quizzing game that became a viral hit before the operation ran out of cash. CTG is a spiritual successor of sorts, pitched at a narrower audience: chronically online crypto fanatics.
After the debut season, each subsequent edition has had its own twist. In season two, all players were anonymous, and entry NFTs could be traded on the secondary market. This time, players had to register with an X account but were given a small chance to earn their way back into the game by way of resurrection. “Every season is its own unique social experiment,” says Abruscato. “I always want to keep players on their toes.”
When I spoke to Abruscato again ahead of the third season, he was careful not to say anything that might give me an undue advantage. But we did discuss the possibility that high-profile players might be targeted for elimination. I’m far from a household name, but given the animus toward journalists in some quarters of cryptoland, I decided to go undercover.
In my two-and-a-half years covering crypto, I have reported on all manner of frauds, bankruptcies, scams, and other morally dubious shenanigans. The common thread has been the extraction of wealth, which generally flows into the pockets of an already-wealthy or nefarious few at the expense of those who can least afford to lose.
But CTG struck me as different. It was an opportunity to embed among technologists convinced of the latent potential of crypto technologies, in an experiment that is far less about profit—despite players competing to win a pot of money—than about expressing crypto’s hacker culture and colorful lore.
I asked a random name generator to assign me an alter ego: Leo Westley. It had a ring to it. Then I created new Google and X accounts and picked up a burner SIM, knowing that players would be communicating over Telegram and working in shared spreadsheets, which they use to coordinate voting.
As Leo’s profile image, I chose a picture of a floppy-eared spaniel that I sometimes look after. What could be more disarming?
Before the game began, I listened back to my conversations with CTG players from previous seasons, hoping to glean some essential wisdom that might help me to survive at least a couple of nights.
Their advice was generally to fly low; not to do anything that would mark me out as either particularly competent or overly hapless. Leaders are quickly eliminated, as are deadweights.
“To some degree, almost being invisible was a super strength,” said Phelps. “You don’t want to be absent, because you’ll get killed for not contributing. And you don’t really want to stick your head up. Then people think you might be a risk to them.”
Katy Jeremko, founder of developer cooperative Indie and another former player, had given me an equally precious piece of advice: “Your vote is your most valuable currency.”
With those warnings ringing in my ears, I entered the game on March 10 and was placed into the Gold Tribe along with around 70 other players.
Immediately, people fell into archetypal character roles: there were leaders, organizers, data nerds, hype artists, and wallflowers. One person set up a Telegram group and began to ferret away in a spreadsheet. Another “vibe-coded” a program that scraped blockchain data to track who remained in the game. Others shitposted in the chat. Paralyzed by fear of saying the wrong thing, I said very little more than hello.
Privately, I created my own spreadsheet to make notes on my tribe members, recording their every minor infraction. “Kinda annoying,” I scribbled next to one guy’s handle. “Muppet, get rid,” I wrote next to another. I had met them barely hours earlier.
Initially, I floated through the nightly eliminations by being performatively present. I contributed to the challenges, updated the spreadsheets when required, and posted in the chat at intervals. The tribe adopted “Gold morning” as a greeting, so I started saying it too.
Things came to a head on day three. To earn immunity, we had been tasked with achieving the highest possible pinball score. After somebody found a way to cheese the game by rhythmically tapping the up key, it became a challenge of endurance rather than skill. I spent hours improving my score—far longer than my manager would care to know. One player said they felt like they were in an episode of Severance: “I heard if we hit 10M points we get a waffle party,” they quipped.
Afterward, my tribe having been comfortably outscored, the talk turned to the impending vote. The simplest option was to eliminate the lowest scorers. But one player, Luke Cannon, proposed the tribe abstain from voting entirely. It was a high-risk, high-reward strategy: In theory, everyone could be spared, but a single vote in the final minutes of the voting period, which lasted an hour, would be enough to eliminate an undeserving player.
The vote began at 8 pm ET, midnight for me. The abstinence strategy lasted all of four minutes before someone received a vote. As panic spread, more votes piled in. Players began to point fingers at one another: It was you, wasn’t it?
“I am declaring martial law in Gold,” wrote Cannon, who had himself received a stray vote. “If you do not dm to contribute your vote you are at risk,” he added, appending a passive-aggressive smiley.
My heart began to throb a few beats faster. I was reluctant to side with the renegade, but if I was going to be eliminated, I didn’t want to go down twiddling my thumbs. I messaged Cannon privately and voted at his instruction.
Though Cannon’s intervention saved a few worthy players, replacing them on the elimination board with nonparticipants and low pinball scorers, he was unable to save himself. The display of pacifism and tribe unity had descended into a bloodbath. But I had survived.
The following day, the gamemasters had prepared a surprise: Everyone would be changing tribes. I was swapped into Silver, bidding farewell to almost all of my old team members. Strangely, though really they were only strangers, I missed them.
I was greeted by another set of self-elected leaders who were busy deploying a labyrinth of spreadsheets and Telegram chats, which this time could only be accessed with a Silver Tribe NFT. The idea was to prevent any infiltrators from sowing disorder—sabotage is not uncommon in CTG—but the more convoluted system bewildered some players.
It seemed a fitting allegory for the very crypto tendency to overcomplicate, where a manual process would do. “The most crypto experience ever,” remarked one player. “It’s 2025 we gotta do better 😂.”
Meanwhile, I splintered into a separate chat made up of seven former Gold members that now belonged to Silver, who would become the closest thing I had in the game to a cabal.
The days began to blend together as I settled into my strange new routine: I woke up late, participated in the challenge, performed any necessary spreadsheet admin, kept abreast of conversation, and shuffled back to my desk for the vote at midnight. My unlucky partner, much-neglected for the duration of the game, was rudely awoken each night as I clambered over her to reach my side of the bed. As I tried to fall asleep, my mind replayed the conversations of the day, as if projected onto the inside of my eyelids.
Players who failed to spend every waking moment with the tribe were marked out for potential elimination, professional duties and family life be damned. Though my partner gladly had a go at the arcade game challenges, she was otherwise bemused by my new preoccupation with my tribe. One day, I tried to solicit her advice on a point of in-game strategy. “I don’t know how crypto nerds think!” she responded with a laugh, shooing me back to my desk.
Unlike in my previous tribe, the Silver leaders attempted to exercise total control over each elimination, assigning specific votes to specific players and even demanding proof of compliance. To help determine who should be voted out, one of them coded up a Telegram bot that required players to “check in” and recorded how frequently they contributed to the chat. Along with each player’s scores in the challenges, this data was fed into the spreadsheet.
In our splinter group, the former Gold members and I bristled at the idea of voting on rails but caved to the demands. “Tonight, servitude feels like the move? Lol,” wrote Nick Prince, one of my fellow conspirators. He was right.
On day eight, the game changed again. There would be no challenge, players were told, but all tribes would merge into one. “This is now an individual game,” the CTG website declared.
With 315 players still in play and only two days left until the finale, there was an undercurrent of tension. On Telegram, players started to talk about the “Red Wedding,” a famously bloody scene in Game of Thrones.
Before the vote, an anonymous person defaced the spreadsheet shared among all remaining players. “Dear Data Grunts,” the note read. “The data you’re inputting is just busy work. Hope you made friends this season. They’re all that’s going to save you now.”
The strategy among former Silver members was to arrange truces with a handful of other groups, thereby deflecting votes elsewhere. The trouble was knowing whether anyone could be trusted to keep their word. After allowing myself on previous nights to be cowed into voting as somebody else instructed, I resolved to vote as I pleased, come what may.
That night, 100 players were up for elimination, but potentially more if a large number of people received the same amount of votes. The statistical probability meant that a single vote would likely be fatal.
For the first few minutes, I watched the votes peel in. Then my gut flipped; my icon had flashed up onscreen, framed in red. I understood that my game had probably come to an end—and I would probably never find out who was responsible.
I spent my own bullet on a player who, at least in my estimation, had behaved condescendingly in the chat. They and 157 other players went out with me.
On the final day, 68 players remained. Instead of voting against one another, they now had to pitch for the votes of everyone who had previously been eliminated. The individual with the greatest amount of support would win the $140,000 prize.
A few of the finalists appeared on the CTG companion podcast that aired nightly during the CTG season, to plead their case. Many said they would split the pot, either with people who voted for them, their tribe members, charitable organizations, or along some other lines. Others said they would spend the winnings on their children or use it to pay down medical debt. “I beg for your votes. This is life-changing money for my family,” said one player.
At the end of the first season of CTG, an anonymous player from Japan was crowned victor after wooing their peers with abstract poetry. The prize fund in the second season was claimed by a player who promised to commit the winnings to the legal defense of two developers behind crypto service Tornado Cash, who had been charged with money laundering.
This time, it came down to a single vote. Two front-runners leapfrogged one another on the leaderboard throughout the day. The prize was ultimately claimed by Ted, a player from California who had come in second place the previous season, who pitched voters on her redemption arc: Ted had been eliminated on the eighth night, like myself, but was given an NFT to participate in the final by a close ally, who believed that she had a better chance to win.
“I still can’t believe it’s real. I feel manic,” said Ted, appearing on the CTG companion podcast after the vote. “I’m still speechless.”
After I left the game, the immediate feeling was a sinking disappointment; though I never imagined I might win, I had invested a piece of myself in the competition. But that sensation was quickly swallowed by relief.
At the end of nine consecutive days spent consorting with strangers on the internet, I was emotionally and physically exhausted. The game demands constant outward performance and careful introspection from players, and even a brief lapse could result in their eviction. My exit felt like emerging from a fugue.
I was reminded of something another player had said after they were eliminated from the game. “Off to touch some grass,” they told the tribe, signing off on Telegram. I decided I would do the same.
