Nova Shots at BLAST Open Rotterdam

Nova Shots is a live, free-to-play prediction game for BLAST.tv Counter-Strike 2 tournaments. It is powered by the Polkadot and Hydration blockchains.

Nova Shots is for Counter-Strike 2 fans who want to engage with top-tier professional tournaments in a new way. It is perfect for crypto-curious gamers who are ready to dive into blockchain-powered gaming. Nova Shots is ideal for strategically minded players who enjoy prediction and competition games.

Nova Shots acts similarly to a stock market, where the in-game value of each team’s token¹ rises or falls depending on the activity of other players. This adds a level of strategic complexity for savvy players, who, in addition to accurately predicting the winners of individual games within the tournament, also attempt to predict swings in sentiment among their fellow players.

At the end of the tournament, the prize pool is split proportionally between the eligible winners who hold the tournament winner’s team token.

You can find out information about the previous tournament in Malta here.

BLAST Open Rotterdam Highlights

The BLAST Open in Rotterdam gathered 16 of the best CS2 teams in the world together to compete for the $1,100,000 prize pool. Nova Wallet & Nova Shots were displayed prominently throughout the tournament, with the broadcast presence spanning live analyst desk features, pre-recorded educational ad segments, and persistent in-game broadcast integrations — reaching an audience that generated 27.4 million hours watched, with peak viewership hitting 821,221.

The in-game on-chain metrics show that 2.5k users claimed their BLAST Tokens to participate in the game. These users generated 17,734 on-chain transactions whilst playing Nova Shots throughout the tournament.

Impact for the Polkadot ecosystem

Nova Shots serves as an onboarding funnel for crypto-curious gamers, lowering the barrier to entry through a familiar format — competitive predictions tied to live esports matches. New users are onboarded directly into the Polkadot ecosystem via Nova Wallet, where account creation is streamlined into a simple sign-up flow, where users can choose to create a wallet using their Google or Apple logins, meaning that no prior crypto knowledge is required, such as how to securely store passphrases.

Crucially, Nova Shots is entirely free-to-play with subsidised transactions, meaning users can engage with on-chain activity without any financial risk or upfront cost. This removes one of the biggest psychological hurdles in blockchain adoption — the fear of losing money while learning. By the time a user has placed their first prediction, they’ve already interacted with a live dApp without even thinking about the underlying technology.

Every new user downloads Nova Wallet to participate, and in doing so gains access to the broader Polkadot ecosystem — from staking and governance to a full catalogue of dApps across DeFi, staking, and more.

About Novasama Technologies

Novasama builds user-focused applications for the Polkadot ecosystem.
Our products include:

• Nova Wallet — the leading mobile wallet for Polkadot & Kusama
• Nova Spektr — advanced multisig & asset management for teams and power users
• Polkadot Vault — the air-gapped security standard for Polkadot
• Nova Shots — an interactive esports onboarding experience

Website | X (Twitter) | Medium | GitHub

¹ See Section 6 of the Nova Shots Terms & Conditions, accessible within the Nova Shots dApp.