The idea was born in early 2017 by Adam who wanted to merge crypto payments with old-school arcade systems. After months of development and financial support from Scott (BittyBot), Adam had modified a once defunct 1999 arcade claw machine into a bitcoin accepting, fully working arcade machine and CryptoGrabber was born.
CryptoGrabber was showcased at CoinFestUK on April 7th & 8th 2017. The machine was well received and we had some awesome feedback. Over 30 people played the machine (many winning apparel!).
Having formed new merchandise partnerships in 2018 and following further successful developments on the payment system in early 2019, CryptoGrabber was present at CoinFestUK 2019 (On April 4th, 5th & 6th), for the 2019 event we have modified the payment system to accept various 'altcoins' including MonetaryUnit, Litecoin and Digibyte expanding its potential.
At the 2019 event the machine was played over 80 times with payments being made in all of the different altcoins. We again had great feedback on the machine and further ideas on how to improve the machine. You can see some old CoinFest attendee tweets about our machine here: @Aizzaku, @BCB_ATM, @Tokyo_fafa, @coinjournal, @patcrypt, @hackerfantastic, @DigibyteDavey and @CoinFestUK. We also had a promo video made of the machine at the 2019 event, check it out on Vimeo
Moving into 2020 we started working on a Bitcoin Lightning payment module for the machine and after months of testing, the payment module is ready!
You can see our Crypto Grabber live at our CoinFestUK 2020 event! Checkout the Crypto Grabber on Twitter for updates: https://twitter.com/BitcoinGrabber
