The Panda Global Circuit and Smash World Tour are both in full swing right now, but a new tournament has just been announced with a bit of a twist. The C9 Mang0 Nation Tour is going to be a bitcoin-only Smash Bros competition for Melee held online. This is pretty different from other tournaments. It’s been controversial heavily utilizing cryptocurrency, but the tournament is adding to diversity in smaller tournaments for Melee.

This is an event featuring a decent prize pool, but one that’s being payed exclusively in bitcoin. It’s more for newer players than the biggest names in Melee. It could be a good chance to get some fresh talent into the game.

Bitcoin C9 Mang0 Nation Tour Details

The Mang0 Nation tour is going to be a Smash Bros Melee tournament organized by Mang0 and Blockchain.com. the event features a prize pool of $35,000 in total, which is decent for Smash Bros Melee at this level. This is going to be an open online Smash Melee tournament, which is another unconventional way to play.

The tournament will be played online through the Slippi Melee online. This has been used for past tournaments but it’s also been the source of problems with Nintendo for some events.

Players can register in different regions of North America. It will be broken up into West, Southwest, Northeast, Southeast, and Midwest. Each of these regions also has its own prize pool and competition which breaks down like this:

• 1^st Place – $2,500
• 2^nd Place – $1,250
• 3^rd – $1,000
• 4^th – $750
• 5^th/6^th – $500
• 7/8^th – $250

This prize pool will be given out to players directly as a crypto payment in Bitcoin. This is supposed to be the value of the bitcoin payments at the time of payout. The 1^st place winner will also receive travel fare paid for to compete at the Big House 10 in October.

All participants will receive $75 for playing a match in the qualifiers. Although, sing-up is also limited to 1024 players per region. This does significantly drive up the amount being given to players as a whole.

How has the crypto prize pool been received?

Cryptocurrency getting further embedded in esports and gaming is a bit of a controversial topic these days, and the Mang0 Nation Tour’s reaction has been representative of this.

Some players aren’t too happy with the use of the asset as the prize. Although, as an online-only tournament with a fairly evenly spread-out prize pool, it’s hard to argue it’s hurting anyone. However, some have found fault with some of the ways it’s being promoted. That includes the $75 payout to each competitor.

i hate that crypto has invaded our scene and no one cares to talk about it https://t.co/PjTpEasems pic.twitter.com/yewmtcZp4K

— Panda | Jut ⛷ (@ProbablyJut) July 8, 2022

Some crypto evangelists have even referred to C9 Mang0 Nation Tour as having the ‘potentially largest Smash prize pool in history’. This is a weird statement if you consider the past prize pools for Melee majors. The tour is sponsored by a cryptocurrency company, and it doesn’t seem likely that this would have taken place at all without their involvement.

This isn’t however, a crypto company taking over a major, but adding in a minor online competition to expand the grassroots Melee scene. The complaints about how some things are phrased do have some merit though.

While some will always have problems with crypto prize pools, it’s never a bad thing to see more tournaments with prizes for smaller players.  Even if some might have to quickly sell the prize.