You Can Now Earn Bitcoin for Playing This Candy Crush Clone

Deep down, I know that Candy Crush Saga isn’t a particularly clever or inventive puzzle game—but nearly a decade after first savoring its specific brand of freemium dopamine hit, I still can’t help but get lost in its mindless, color-matching glow from time to time. And now there’s a version that pays you cryptocurrency for playing it.

Granted, Sweet Bitcoin isn’t an official Candy Crush Saga game, and it’s not created by mobile giant King. Like so many iOS and Android games, it’s a pretty convincing knockoff that matches the feel and flow of the juggernaut franchise. In this case, however, Bling Financial’s copycat game nails the basics while rewarding you with bits of Bitcoin or Ethereum along the way.

Sweet Bitcoin doesn’t fuss with the classic formula. Here, you’re still trying to match three or more like-colored candies on a grid, with the aim of completing some basic objective—clearing X number of this candy, or spreading a bubble-gum sheen across the whole board by making matches—within a limited number of moves.

Bling’s facsimile packs in hundreds of levels, and from the few dozen I played, Sweet Bitcoin amiably recreates the real deal. In fact, it feels less prone to serious difficulty spikes—a trademark feature of Candy Crush that’s tied to its freemium model, thus potentially nudging players to spend real money to buy more in-game lives instead of waiting to play again.

Sweet Bitcoin is a free-to-play game too, but it’s anchored around full-screen video ads that you’re forced to watch after each and every level you play. The downside, of course, is that you have to pause to watch obnoxious ads for scammy-looking games, some of which promise to pay you hundreds of dollars a day for playing them. That’s surely not legit.

I know that because Sweet Bitcoin itself pays you crypto for playing, and it doesn’t come anywhere close to that kind of payout. In fact, my earnings tallied up to around $0.05 per hour worth of Bitcoin. After about two hours of playing, I had a dime’s worth of BTC sent to Coinbase.

It’s not much, but that’s pretty much par for the course for games like this. It varies by game and developer, but in my experience, you’ll typically only earn a few cents per hour worth of crypto. With Bling games, you’re rewarded with “Bling points” that can be converted into BTC or ETH and cashed out, but the end result is the same: free crypto for playing amusing mobile games.

The repetitive and overlong ads quickly turn tiresome, however, plus the amount of points you earn per level appears to diminish over time. After a few hours, I was ready to flee back to the safety of one of the handful of official Candy Crush incarnations for my next fix.

Even so, Sweet Bitcoin served up the most fun I’ve had playing any of these crypto-earning mobile games to date. What it lacks in originality it makes up for with… well, free crypto for playing a solid imitation of an addictive mobile game. If you can put up with the ads, that is.