How Dylan Abruscato is Turning Crypto into the Ultimate Survival Game

It was a chilly January evening in Los Angeles in 2018. I was sitting in the lobby of the Andaz West Hollywood, stunned beyond belief. After months of playing HQ Trivia religiously, I had finally answered all 12 questions correctly—winning the viral live trivia game show for the first time. The prize money was a few paltry dollars, well below the cash-out minimum, but it didn’t matter. The euphoria of beating out hundreds of thousands of players, coupled with hearing host Scott Rogowsky’s signature “Show me the money, baby!” is a feeling I’ll never forget.

Such is the magic of live, interactive entertainment when done right.

It’s that exact magic that Dylan Abruscato helped bring to life seven years ago as part of the HQ Trivia team. And now, he’s doing it all over again—this time, onchain—with his very own creation: Crypto: The Game, otherwise known as CTG. “HQ Trivia was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment,” Dylan recalls. “It was the most memorable stop in my career, and the most fun place I’ve ever worked.” And while HQ may be a thing of the past, Dylan is convinced he can combine his experience at HQ with his decades-long obsession with the reality TV show Survivor to create crypto’s next cultural phenomenon.

CTG is now entering its third season—Resurrection Island—a twist that lets eliminated players battle their way back into the game, just like Survivor’s Redemption Island or more recently, Top Chef's Last Chance Kitchen. For Dylan, who has watched every single season of Survivor since its premiere in 2000, CTG is a natural evolution of his lifelong passion.

“When Survivor first aired, I was in fifth grade, and I’d go to my best friend’s house to watch it every week,” Dylan tells me. “By college, I was recording episodes on my VCR and watching them after a night out at the bar.” His passion became so contagious that his college friends—who once made fun of him for it—became diehard fans themselves. Survivor fantasy leagues soon followed, and nearly 50 seasons later, Dylan’s love for the game hasn’t wavered.

Dylan’s career in live television began far from the world of blockchain. After hearing about NBC’s Page Program—a prestigious media rotational program—he applied and got in. “The application process felt like being on The Voice or American Idol, because I had to give a presentation to three senior NBC executives,” Dylan explains with yet another reality TV reference.

As an NBC Page, Dylan landed his dream assignment working on Saturday Night Live (SNL) Season 38, assisting a cast that included Jason Sudeikis, Fred Armisen, and Kate McKinnon. Spending time at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, home to SNL, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and Late Night with Seth Meyers, deepened his love for live TV.

So when the opportunity to join HQ Trivia came along a few years later, it was a no-brainer. After all, he was already an avid player.

“This felt like the future of live TV,” he says. “The way HQ took a traditional game show format and made it live, mobile, and interactive, it felt like you could do the same for any TV competition—dating, talent, survival.” Of course, as a Survivor superfan, Dylan couldn’t resist pitching a Survivor-style game for HQ. But just like HQ’s creators were ahead of their time—they also founded short video sharing platform Vine well before TikTok gained mass popularity—they passed on the idea. Little did we all know that their loss would eventually become crypto’s gain.

Dylan first dipped his toe into crypto in 2017, buying modest amounts of Bitcoin and Ethereum. “I doubled my investment, sold, and thought I was the next Warren Buffett,” he laughs. “Looking back, it’s hard to think about what that would be worth now.”

But it wasn’t until the NFT boom that Dylan had his real "holy shit" moment.

An avid collector of anything and everything from baseball cards to Beanie Babies as a kid, Dylan immediately understood NFTs as digital collectibles. As he minted his first NFT—an Invisible Friends piece—he felt a familiar rush. “It was the exact same feeling as opening a pack of baseball cards,” Dylan says. “That anticipation of seeing what you got, and then deciding whether to trade, sell, or hold.” That’s when it clicked: crypto makes the Internet more fun.

While HQ had come and gone, Dylan found himself leading marketing at Party Round, a fintech startup building tools for founders raising capital. There, he began experimenting with viral onchain drops, including a CryptoPunk-inspired collection called Helpful VCs, which transformed investors like Ben Horowitz into pixel art characters. When Party Round got acquired, Dylan knew it was finally time to revive his old idea from HQ.

At the same time that Netflix’s dystopian survival thriller series Squid Game had taken the world by storm, Dylan saw an opportunity to turn his idea for a high-stakes, interactive survival game into reality—and convinced a few former Party Round colleagues, Tyler Cagle and Bryan Lee, to help build it.

While CTG wasn’t initially conceived as a blockchain game, Dylan quickly realized that crypto was the perfect fit. Firstly, with the team bootstrapping development, player entry fees were the only way to fund the prize pool—something crypto communities were more likely to be comfortable with. Further, having dealt with PayPal’s withdrawal minimums and transaction delays at HQ, Dylan saw crypto as a frictionless way to pay winners instantly. “I always told myself—if I ever built a game that paid out winners online, it would have to use crypto,” he added.

And just like that, Crypto: The Game was born. 

As a first-time founder, Dylan built CTG in public, leveraging his Twitter following of a few thousand. He posted a simple screen recording with the caption: “What if HQ Trivia and Survivor had a baby?” The tweet blew up instantly. Season 1 drew 410 players, including founders and investors from top-tier crypto VCs like Paradigm, Dragonfly, and a16z.

Dylan Abruscato

@DylanAbruscato

What if HQ Trivia and Survivor had a baby?

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12:33 PM • Dec 20, 2023

With the popularity and success of Season 1, Dylan had to move towards capping the number of entries for subsequent seasons at 800 players. “I was nervous that people wouldn’t like the idea of there just being one winner,” Dylan says. “But I have had hundreds of people tell me this is the most fun they have ever had online and onchain, and that CTG is well worth the price of admission.”

Season 2 saw deeper onchain integrations, including the ability to trade participation spots via NFTs. That inevitably also led to more brand partnerships from crypto-native companies. As decentralized exchange Uniswap started to explore a multiyear sponsorship, the opportunity arose for Dylan and CTG to officially join the Uniswap family. The synergies, while not immediately obvious, are now apparent. Season 3 is built on Unichain - a new Layer 2 network launched by Uniswap.

But despite CTG’s crypto roots, Dylan is careful not to force blockchain into the game. “My advice to any founder? Come up with the idea first, then decide if building it onchain makes for a more fun or better experience,” Dylan explains. “If we had started with ‘how do we make a crypto game’, we would never have had the success we did.” 

At the time of writing, CTG Season 3 already has 615 entries, just less than two days before tribes are assigned and the game officially begins. While it remains to be seen who will be crowned this season’s winner, Dylan has his sights set on future seasons, including international versions and adapting CTG’s live onchain formula to other reality game formats (think: The Amazing Race).

“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my career,” Dylan says. “Because this is the game I’ve always wanted to play.” As CTG’s gamemaster and its own Jeff Probst, Dylan is still holding onto his ultimate dream—to compete on Survivor himself. In fact, he’s just submitted his casting application for the 10th season in a row.

But while Survivor’s casting is out of his hands, the beautiful and permissionless nature of crypto is that anyone can play—and anyone can win. The real question is: Will that be you?

Entry to Crypto: The Game costs 0.1 ETH (~$220) and is open until Monday, March 10, at 12 PM ET. Think you have what it takes to outwit, outplay, and outlast? Join Dylan and hundreds of other players on the island at cryptothegame.com.

Want to read this in print? Drop me a DM on X or Farcaster for a link to download a print-friendly PDF once you've collected Dylan's story onchain.

Interested in more stories like these? Digital Mavericks by Debbie Soon is an accessible guide to crypto and features inspirational stories from 13 onchain trailblazers. Grab your copy today from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.