What KamaGames learned from its failed cryptocurrency experiment

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
February 8, 2019
Updated June 18, 2025
19 min

Last August, KamaGames, a big European operator of social casino games, said it is moving into blockchain and cryptocurrency with the launch of its own KamaGames Token. The idea was to make it easy for the company’s 100 million social casino game players to buy in-game currency for the game Pokerist, using any kind of currency they wanted for the purchase.

But the experiment was a big hassle, and it turned out to be disappointing, said Andrey Kuznetsov, CEO of KamaGames, in an interview with GamesBeat. That was a letdown after predictions that games and other apps would drive cryptocurrency and blockchain to become a $60 billion industry, according to an October report by DMR Business Statistics.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.