Dribble dribble. Whump-whump-whump. SCREECH! A shot flies through a lighting fixture’s glowing white stare, and, as it descends, it slides down perfectly into the net. A swoosh later, and the first 3 points of the game have been taken by the #30 player in blue and yellow. I watch in amazement as the points begin to rack up for both teams—20, 40, 60, and suddenly the game is over—and my Blue-Yellow guy won!

I’m not watching a professional NBA game, but instead a pixelated matchup between the Sloths and the Kangaroos, two of the animal races in the part-basketball, part-cryptocurrency, part-investment, and all-amazing gaming platform Dime.

Dime, the brainchild of Sage entrepreneurs and programmers Ryan Simpson, Timothy Guo, and Jackie Ni, is a fresh take on the musty genre of sports video games, as seen through the lens of a cryptocurrency investor. A player can assemble a team of skilled animal Ballers, choosing to create new team strategies or profit off buying and selling ballers on the game’s internal marketplace.

Dime is “blockchain based,” which means that it runs off a digital assembly line in the Cloud known as a blockchain. Every 10 minutes, new and randomized basketball players are created and added to the Dime marketplace, where new or experienced players can find them and recruit them for their rosters.

This past week, Guo, Ni and Simpson took their project to the AngelHack international competition in the Bay Area, holding their own against college-level teams as widespread as China, Colombia, and Washington DC. They were mentored on how to call up Silicon Valley venture capitalists and the best ways to develop and grow a nascent company.

For their project capstone, they flew in to the Bay Area to pitch to angel investors with real money to give to the company that impressed them the most.

While the team didn’t end up winning, they still felt that they learned plenty from attending and participating. Jackie Ni reflected on how his startup experience gave him a realistic impression of what being an entrepreneur is like—doing every job under the sun and loving it all.

“Before Dime, I solely focused on the code side of applications”, Ni said, “[But] as Dime progressed, I started to enjoy the process. I learned a great deal about entrepreneurship, taking code and making a business out of it”.

Although Dime’s current trajectory is now complete with the conclusion of the AngelHack program, the team has no intentions of stopping, and they’re right now looking to grow goals bigger and better.

“We got interviews with angelpad and other accelerators and we are really hyped to be possibly working with some of their teams,” said Guo. “We have a super ambitious product roadmap ahead and plan on pushing our a ton of new features.”

While the competition is over, Guo, Ni and Simpson’s journey is definitely not. They look forward to enhancing the program by building off of everything that they have and continue to learn.