Bitcoin: CoinLab Earns Gamers In-Game Gold and Developers Real Dollars, CoinLab Announces Game Monetization Service and Successful Fundraising

Seattle, WA, April 26, 2012 --(PR.com)-- CoinLab, Inc. is announcing their game monetization service. CoinLab can monetize an average gamer's spare compute cycles at approximately $15/month.

Several services have partnered with CoinLab for their initial launch, including Wurm Online, an MMORPG that allows players to reshape the land and create their own structures, and Grafighters, a browser-based game where players upload doodles of “fighters” which are animated to battle against each other. These partners give their players the option to buy “silver coins” or “ink,” virtual currencies which can be used to purchase in-game items. Players running the CoinLab computation client will earn these virtual “silver coins” in return for generating real US Dollars for the developers.

“I am super excited to offer our services to gaming companies,” said CEO Peter J. Vessenes. “We are going to be able to monetize the long-tail of zero-ROI gamers at huge dollars for game developers. We are remaking game development economics.”

CoinLab is also exploring other non-gaming incentives, such as computing for coffee: earning Starbucks gift cards in exchange for your computer's computation.

Initially, all computation will be monetized through Bitcoin mining, the computationally intensive process that creates new Bitcoins while strengthening the security of the Bitcoin network. CoinLab will add video encoding, protein folding and other scientific computation to their network by the end of the year.

CoinLab, Inc. is simultaneously announcing the close of a $500,000 seed funding round. Investors include Draper Venture Capital, and Geoff Entress, a prolific Seattle-area angel investor. CoinLab is the first company dealing in Bitcoins to be financed by traditional venture capital investors, marking an industry first for the infant financial technology.

“We really appreciate the trust placed in us by industry heavyweights like Tim Draper and Geoff Entress; we're working hard to exceed their expectations in this distruptive new arena where finance intersects with technology,” said Mr. Vessenes.

The initial team includes Mr. Vessenes, CTO Mike Koss , and CFO Jack J. Jolley.

Mr. Vessenes is a serial entrepreneur, and graduate of Brown University with an emphasis in theoretical math and cryptography.

Mr. Koss worked at Microsoft for 19 years, helping engineer the first versions of Excel, Outlook and Sharepoint. He is an MIT alumnus.

Mr. Jolley is a University of Washington alumnus, former Assistant Treasurer at Microsoft, and formerly launched Quellos Fixed Income Advisors.
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