Axie Finity

Axie Infinity

Source: Axie Growth Data

Axie Infinity may have been the pioneer of GameFi that jump-started the renaissance of Play-to-Earn and NFTs, but its days as a blockchain game powerhouse are now slipping. Even before its high-profile Ronin bridge hack in late March this year, Axie Infinity had already started bleeding in users, partly due to the rise of more profitable alternatives such as STEPN, Crabada, or Defi Kingdoms. But even some of these rising stars have also been in hot water lately (more on this later). 

Since its height at the beginning of the year, daily active users (DAUs) of Axie Infinity have been on a downward spiral, diving to 843,472 users - a whopping 65% drop since its height in early 2022. Even the launch of the (previously) much anticipated Axie Infinity Origin in April failed to revitalize its player base. All of these coupled with a slumping SLP price seem to foretell the tailend of a game past its glory days. If you are looking to get started on a Play-to-Earn game, there are alternatives out there with much better earnings potential than the current version of Axie Infinity.

That being said, how are the other games faring?

DeFi Kingdoms

Source: DappRadar

Another GameFi household name, DeFi Kingdoms, has also seen much better days. What was once the central driving force of the entire Harmony ecosystem is now but a shell of its former self. Since its exploit in late April, JEWEL price has been in a freefall and is now down >96% since its January highs. Daily user count for DeFi Kingdoms is also afflicted with a similar fate, dropping ~60% since the end of March. 

Source: Defi Llama

Its TVL didn’t fare any better as it dropped 75% since a month ago. DeFi Kingdoms was always more than just a game. It would be more accurate to describe DeFi Kingdoms as a DeFi ecosystem cloaked in the skin of an old-school game - one that forms the foundation (or entirety) of Harmony’s DeFi economy. It remains to be seen if Harmony would choose to pivot and diversify away from DeFi Kingdoms, or double down on its revival.

 Source: Defi Llama

Unfortunately, things are also not looking up for DeFi Kingdoms’ expansion into Avalanche - Crystalvale. On top of the aftereffects from its exploit, Crystalvale also had to fend off FUD that plagued Avalanche (AVAX) due to the LUNA / UST collapse, as Avalanche had just entered into a partnership with Terra to integrate UST. All these stripped DeFi Kingdoms: Crystalvale down to $26.8m in TVL, logging an eye-watering 84% drop within just a single month. 

Source: CoinGecko

Crystalvale’s token, CRYSTAL, suffered an even worse fate. Since the beginning of April, its price has been caught in a freefall that it never managed to recover from, registering a 98% decrease since its all-time-high of $36.40 on April 4th, 2022.

Crabada

Source: DappRadar

Speaking of Avalanche, we have Crabada, the leading play-to-earn game on the network that grabbed the headlines with its eye-popping earning potential. AVAX has been one of the largest recipients of collateral damage from the LUNA/UST fiasco, with a wave of market selloff coming hard and fast as worries about Luna Foundation Guard’s (LFG) AVAX holdings piled up. Similarly, CRA and TUS prices have also been crushed, registering -95% cliff drops since their respective all-time highs. Despite all these, Crabada still somehow managed to maintain its user base at ~7,000 DAUs (before 13 May).

Source: P2E Analytics

The play-to-earn game also recently migrated to Swimmer Network on 13 May, an Avalanche subnet that uses TUS for gas fees. This also partially explains the heavy dip in ‘Users’ above as the current iteration on Dapp Radar only tracks the Avalanche contracts. Like Axie Infinity’s SLP, TUS has also been plagued by a hyper-inflationary model that exerts downward pressure on its price. With its migration to Swimmer Network, we can see that the gap between TUS mints vs. burns have begun to close, even logging deflationary days (burns > mints) in the last 3 days. Granted, the data is only tracking Avalanche and not the Swimmer Network yet.

In addition to the Swimmer Network, Crabada also recently released their Battle Game, a gameplay which is similar to their predecessor’s, Axie Infinity. Crabada’s signature Idle Game system will still be preserved but they have hinted major overhauls in the future, on top of the recent adjustments (i.e. decrease) to reward emissions for both CRA and TUS. A level system will also be introduced to Crabada, and players will have to spend TUS for upgrades at certain levels, creating another token sink for TUS.

It’s worth noting that Axie Infinity also adopted a similar band-aid solution for SLP’s hyperinflation, but without compelling token sinks in place to manage the emission and burn cycle properly, this was simply delaying the inevitable. So far, Crabada’s taken an active approach to curb this issue for TUS. Time will tell if Crabada’s utility and token sink for TUS will be able to sustain its price, and ultimately the game’s earning potential to retain its users.

STEPN

Source: CoinGecko

STEPN’s governance token, GMT, might have retreated a long way down from its all-time high of $4.11 in late April, but the forerunner of the Move-to-Earn segment is still displaying strong growth in other metrics. The fitness game blew up to >300,000 users a day, way up from merely ~15,000 DAUs in just 3 months ago. At the current price of GST, newcomers can still expect to earn upwards of $50 a day with 3 pairs of shoes, which is a tad bit better than the expected earnings of an Axie Infinity player averaging 150 SLP (or ~$0.80) a day. Users who are interested in a more gamified (read: Pokemon-like) version of Move-to-Earn can also look into Genopets, another highly anticipated Solana NFT game that is slated to launch within the year. Floor prices of Genopets and Genopets Habitat NFTs have been on the rise, and if the trajectory of STEPN is of any indication, we should be seeing some healthy growth for the new Move-to-earn game when it launches.

Top Collections of the Week

Source: OpenSea; Snapshot taken 22 May 2022

With new revelations coming into the light, Milady Maker suffered a massive crash from 1.5 ETH to just over 0.5 ETH at the time of writing. Suffice to say, the wider crypto community was utterly shocked and disgusted as new allegations surfaced against the founder of Milady Maker, Charlotte, who has since stepped down. There were claims that Charlotte, under the alternate accounts of Miya and Sonya, was involved in many explicitly racial and homophobic tweets. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg, as there were even several instances where Miya openly tweeted about rape, underage grooming, and suicide. Even Martin Shkreli, who adopted one of the Milady NFTs as his profile picture on Twitter, has since sold it and is heavily against the project now. We won’t go into too much detail here but 0xngmi, the creator of DefiLlama, has written a comprehensive thread surrounding the Milady Maker project and its founders.

While Yuga Labs is still heavily dominating the top 5 collections for the week, a different kind of ape project has managed to slip its way in. Chimpers, a collection of 5,555 pixelated NFTs featuring apes reimagined in various fantasy elements, has surpassed the Mutant Apes in terms of weekly trading volume, generating over 6,400 ETH (~$13 mil) in secondary sales on OpenSea. 

Elsewhere, it seems that the volume for most anime PFPs have fallen drastically across the board. Trading activity for PXN: Ghost Division and even Azuki decreased by over 82% and 93%, respectively. Daily volumes on the recently launched Karafuru Gachapons have also tapered off and are now sitting below their public mint price of 0.475 ETH. 

While Okay Bears are still sitting comfortably at 2nd place for the week, floor prices have since cooled off by 16%, decreasing from 250 SOL to just over 210 SOL. As the only Solana NFT project in the top 15 on OpenSea, one might think that ‘Solana NFT Summer’ was merely a fad. But perhaps, the trading volume is somewhere else instead, maybe on a more native marketplace?

What else are we paying attention to

1. Such Odd Droppings

In the nest, the Oddities appeared. 

Moonbirds Oddities’ Twitter account was launched in relative stealth in mid-May, but it didn’t escape the attention of certain NFT collectors such as @Zeneca_33 and @DeezeFi. Shortly after our coverage on it in Gecko Ramblings, the Moonbirds’ official Twitter account announced the airdrop of Oddities to all Moonbirds HODLers. Not much is known about Moonbirds Oddities yet, with the collection being expected to be revealed in July this year. This however did not stop the hype wave that ensued.

Within the first day of release, Oddities shot up the charts to become a Top Collection on Opensea, recording over 2,000 ETH in sales and 3.8 ETH in floor price. Both its volume and floor price have cooled off since then, just as most derivatives projects tend to do. Perhaps we might see a wave of renewed interest in the collection when more information is revealed closer to July.

The floor price of Moonbirds and Moonbirds Oddities are 25.25 ETH and 2.89 ETH respectively at the time of writing.

2. Serial Ruggers on the Loose

In the wake of all the FUD hitting various NFT collections across Ethereum, it seems that Solana NFTs have not been spared as well. The founder of Reptilian Renegades, an NFT collection of 4000 lizard profile pictures, was revealed as the mastermind behind several rug-pulled NFT projects, which were also on Solana. Going by the moniker of ‘Fuopist’, the anonymous founder was behind the Balloonsville and Doodled Dragons NFT projects, with both projects declaring themselves as rug-pulls on their Twitter accounts.

Hydra Launchpad, the project that exposed Fuopist and their previous misdeeds, has since taken control of Reptilian Renegades and cut off all external flow of funds and royalties to the former founder. While sudden waves of FUD and rug-pulls in the NFT space are certainly nothing new, the frequency of which these events are happening during these uncertain times is quite troubling. As more NFT projects with anonymous founders are popping up, even with the current bearish market sentiment, we definitely urge all NFT enthusiasts to stay vigilant, as rug pulls can happen to any project in just a blink of an eye .

3. An Interesting Proposition from Merit Circle

In a rather strange turn of events, user Honey Barrel has proposed to remove Yield Guild Games (YGG) as a seed investor of Merit Circle, a Metaverse and Play-to-Earn DAO. In the proposal, Honey Barrel cited a ‘lack of value’ provided by YGG to Merit Circle, compared to other seed investors such as Maven11 and DeFiance Capital. Honey Barrel further outlines that if the proposal is accepted, YGG will return their Merit Circle tokens in exchange for a refund of their initial $175,000 investment.

While this is certainly the first proposal of its kind, it does call into question the specifics regarding what was expected of YGG’s involvement in the first place. It’s hard to say whether there was a clear distinction between what YGG agreed to do versus what Merit Circle expected them to do, without the actual agreement being displayed for all to see. In either case, a simple refund may not be enough to just call it a day, since the value of YGG’s investment has risen by over 30x. While the proposal is not open for voting yet, we will likely see some adjustments to the final proposal, with several other alternatives on the table. Some possible ones would be a public buy-out for YGG’s stake or even a vested sale (at a considerable discount) to other existing investors of Merit Circle.

4. The Magic Continues

Magic Eden caught eyes last week when it toppled OpenSea in total daily transactions, heralding the rapid rise of Solana NFTs. OpenSea however retained its crown in total users and sales volume in USD. Not anymore.

In the past week from 18-23 May, Magic Eden edged out OpenSea in user count every single day, according to DappRadar. In terms of sales volume however, OpenSea still remained a good distance ahead of MagicEden with additional $5-6m in daily volume. Nonetheless, Magic Eden has been going toe-to-toe against OpenSea and time will tell if the strong momentum of Solana NFTs can lead to a flippening in the near future.  

This article was produced in collaboration with Khor Win Win. You can follow him on Twitter here.