Blast – Savings Account Funded By Playing Games (From The Founders Of Acorns)

Blast is a new start up, started by the founders of Acorns. The idea behind Blast is that you earn money that goes into your Blast savings accounts by playing games. They recently raised $5 million in funding and reader @mizzpenny21 asked if we would take a look. They are currently in a semi open beta (there is a waitlist) and it’s only available to people with an Android device.

There seems to be three primary ways to earn money through blast:

• Set a trigger. This basically just lets you move money from your existing accounts into Blast when you complete an action in a game (similar to how Acorns will round up a transaction and transfer funds into your Acorns account). For example if you play league of legends you could automatically transfer $0.50 every time you win (or lose) a game.

• Complete a mission. Some companies will offer rewards for completing certain missions, for example Candy Crush might offer you $0.25 if you beat two levels. Or you might get $0.50 for downloading an playing a new app

• Leaderboard. If you’re in in the top of the leaderboards then you can win a share of $10,000.

 

Financial technology companies are obsessed with gamification and this is just an extension of that. Companies paying to download/use an app isn’t a new concept, in fact it’s been around for some time. These companies are hoping one of two things happen:

• You download the app/game to earn a reward and enjoy it enough to keep playing
• Enough people download & play the app/game that it rises up the app store rankings and then more people download it

A lot of ‘get paid to’ sites and apps offer rewards/cash back for app downloads/usage. The problem has always been the rewards are usually small enough that they aren’t actually worth completing. I suspect it will be almost impossible to earn any meaningful amount through these complete a mission. If Obviously some people will do well from the leaderboard, but most users won’t. I also don’t see any value add from the triggers system. Realistically the best way to save is going to be by creating a budget, sticking to it and saving a set amount each pay. Having a variable savings system based on how many games you played that week doesn’t seem like a long term winning strategy to me.

The Blast savings account is FDIC insured and earnings 1% APY. 1% isn’t a horrible rate, but the current best basic savings rate is double that at 2% so it’s not exactly competitive either. If Blast is able to get enough game developers in the system and restrict the offers they show to be of $1 or more, I can see this gaining some traction especially with the younger demographic. Compound interest is a beautiful thing and anything that aims to help people save money at a younger age can only be seen as a good thing.