How I learned to stop worrying and love the gamification of finance

Gamification has a bad name in finance, and rightfully so. Trading apps fired confetti when you bought options. Meme stocks turned rent money into casino chips. Say “gamified finance” today and people picture slot machines packaged as financial products.

The gamification itself was not the problem. The problem was the mechanisms powering these experiences: leveraged bets where you could lose everything. Game mechanics are tools that have been leveraged for nefarious purposes, to make gambling more addictive. However, when built into the right products, they can bring tangible benefits to users.

Three questions separate gambling and gamification.

First, what’s the worst case? In gambling, it’s losing everything you put in. In good gamification, the worst case is small, known, and capped before you start.

Second, where does the upside come from? In gambling, winners are paid out of losers’ principal, minus the house’s cut. In good gamification, prizes come from pooled yield, fees, or activity. Nobody’s savings fund anyone’s jackpot.

Third, does playing more increase your risk? At a casino, yes, by definition. In a well-built product, you can play as much or as little as you want without ever touching your principal.

We’ve been doing this for centuries

Tontines appeared in the 1600s. Investors paid into a common pool and split the income among surviving members, so your payout grew as the others died. A morbid game, but it sat on top of a real income-producing pool, and by the early 1900s tontine-style insurance held a serious share of American household wealth.

Britain’s Premium Bonds are the cleaner example. Since 1956, the UK government has sold bonds that pay no interest to individual holders. Instead, the interest on the whole pool is raffled off every month as tax-free prizes. Your principal is never at stake, and you can redeem at face value whenever you want. It’s a lottery where the ticket is refundable, and more than 20 million Britons hold one.

The idea keeps working. “Save to Win” accounts at American credit unions raffle prizes funded by pooled interest, and the model did well enough that Congress legalized it nationally in 2014. South Africa ran a “Million-a-Month” account on the same design. The research on these programs found something worth pausing on: they attract people who never saved before, and they pull habitual lottery players toward saving. The same psychology that casinos exploit pointed the other way.

The pattern across all of them: the game runs on the yield. It never touches the principal.

The same design, rebuilt on blockchains

Premium Bonds needed a national treasury and an act of Parliament to guarantee the floor. Blockchains offer a different route: financial rules can be written as code that executes as published, so fees route themselves and floors are harder to change quietly. But code can fail, and it offers none of the protection of a government guarantee.

The increase of financial gamification

People respond to games, and finance will keep using that whether we like it or not. The real choice is where the game stands: on a floor, or over a trapdoor.

Premium Bonds settled the argument seventy years ago. Give people a lottery with a refundable ticket and millions of them will save who otherwise wouldn’t. What’s new is that some of these rules can now be written into code, although code brings its own risks, from bugs to swings in the value of the underlying asset.

Gambling asks you to risk everything for a chance at more. Good gamification should never ask you to put your savings on the table.