Baidu’s new blockchain game allows you to gamble on the World Cup

In Du Yuzhou, players grow planets and gamble with virtual tokens

Reading Time:2 minutes

The two major stats in Du Yuzhou are the amount of elements you own and the strength of gravity on your planet. (Picture: Baidu)

Published: 7:09pm, 15 Jun 2018Updated: 8:28am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Baidu is testing a new blockchain-powered game that allows you to build planets… and bet on the World Cup.

Du Yuzhou, or Du Universe, went live on Thursday. I won’t lie, after downloading the game I was a little confused, because the objective and goals of the game aren’t immediately clear.

As soon as you log in, you get a virtual token representing an element. You have to collect these elements to build planets. The bigger the planets get, the greater their gravity -- and the greater their gravity, more likely they are to attract other elements.

Sounds pretty epic, right? But it turns out that right now, one of the only things you can do with elements are to gamble them away on a planet called Soccer Fairy.

We checked just a couple of hours before Friday’s match between Egypt and Uruguay and saw that more than 38,000 people used their elements to place bets (and 26,000 of them bet on victory for Uruguay).

If Uruguay does emerge victorious, players will be rewarded 1.48 times their initial investment. And if Egypt wins, players will get 7.6 times their initial bet… y’know, like gambling.