Bitcoin Price: US$ 38,386.88 (-4.22%)
Ethereum Price: US$ 2,622.00 (-5.12%)
Gaming Insights – Immutable X Ecosystem
- 2021 was a breakout year for NFTs and gaming, with blockchain games having generated $2.32B of revenue in the third quarter of 2021 alone. Axie Infinity was the first of the lot to surpass $1B in NFT sales. As a result, there has been a flood of capital, founders, developers, and even entire gaming studios now entering into the blockchain gaming space. This has fueled many new projects being built that we’ll see come to life in 2022 and beyond.
- The Immutable X ecosystem is coming out of the gate strong, riding atop both gaming and ZK rollup narratives. This is especially true after having onboarded Ember Sword last quarter while continuing to achieve significant traction and interest for existing games such as Illuvium and Guild of Guardians.
- Ember Sword is a free-to-play sandbox blockchain MMORPG, which announced its move from Polygon to Immutable X just 2 months ago. The reason for this migration boiled down to features such as accessibility, custodial wallet solutions, and payment via credit cards.
- Bright Star Studios, the creators of Ember Sword, aim to open up alpha testing for NFT owners in the first quarter of 2022. They will also announce the second land sale, which will take place around the same time period. Bright Star aims to continue releasing more gameplay-focused alpha versions throughout 2022.
- Ember Sword will be released on PC first (browser), or as a stand-alone client, and gradually build mobile cross-play.
- Illuvium is an open-world RPG adventure game featuring deity-like creatures called Illuvials. Even though January was bumpy for the project, with sILV and Discord exploits taking place, the team has bounced back with many releases scheduled for the coming months.
- Soon, a small selection of private beta testers will be allowed to get their hands on the first taste of Illuvium gameplay via their “Survival Mode” beta. In Survival Mode, players will have to battle wave after wave of Illuvials to see how many rounds they can endure without being defeated. Alongside this, the Illuvium team is also internally beta testing one of the four regions in “Overworld” (open world) modules of the core Illuvium game.
- Besides the Illuvium beta tests, fans can also soon expect the first mini-game of Illuvium to be released called Illuvium Zero. ILV Zero will be a resource management and land-building game where certain earned assets will be interoperable with the core ILV game.
- Guild of Guardians, a play-and-earn multiplayer fantasy action RPG where players build their team of Guardians, is well anticipated by over 150,000 pre-registered players. Developed by Stepico and published by Immutable, Guild of Guardians will initially be available on iOS and Android in 2022. Check out their pre-alpha footage here.
- By the first half of 2022, Guild of Guardians aims to ship its pre-alpha demo (no blockchain, limited content, time-limited). Guild of Guardians aims to have a playable alpha on testnet by the 2nd half of 2022 with limited gameplay.
OpenSea planned upgrade stalls as phishing attack targets NFT migration
- Major nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea has reportedly fallen victim to an ongoing phishing attack within hours after announcing a week-long planned upgrade to delist inactive NFTs on the platform.
- Just yesterday, OpenSea announced a smart contract upgrade, which requires users to migrate their listed NFTs from Ethereum (ETH) blockchain to a new smart contract. As a direct result of the upgrade, users that don’t migrate over from Ethereum risk losing their old, inactive listings — which currently require no gas fees for migration.
- Further investigations revealed that attackers used phishing emails to steal the NFTs before they get migrated over OpenSea’s new smart contract. Once a user authorizes the NFT migration from the fraudulent email, the attackers gain access to the NFTs.
Harmony launches Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT Passport
- On Friday, blockchain platform Harmony — whose mainnet runs on the Ethereum network, claiming to have two-second transaction finality and fees 1,000 times lower than Ethereum — announced the launch of its Bored Ape Yacht Club Passport. The Passport enables users to import proof of their apes into DeFi Kingdoms, a play-to-earn game built on the Harmony blockchain with over 120,000 monthly active users. During its initial stages, Ape holders will be able to validate and display their assets in the game across multiple blockchains when they connect their MetaMask wallet to DeFi Kingdoms.
Terra injects 450M UST into Anchor reserve days before protocol depletion
- In a tweet published early Friday, Do Kwon, founder of Terraform Labs, the entity developing the Terra Luna (LUNA) and Terra USD (UST) stablecoin ecosystem, announced the injection of 450 million UST ($450 million) into the Anchor protocol’s reserves. The proposal passed a vote by the Luna Foundation Guard on Feb.10. Anchor serves as the flagship savings protocol of the Terra ecosystem, offering users up to 20% interest per annum on their UST deposits, paid for by borrowers.
- The protocol’s reserves had recently dwindled to as low as $6.56 million as there wasn’t enough borrowing demand to keep up with an influx of lenders. When such an imbalance occurs, the protocol must tap into its reserves in order to pay lenders the promised yield. From the beginning of December to late January, Anchor’s reserve funds fell by about $35 million.
U.S. inflation breaks 40-year record: Can Bitcoin serve as a hedge asset?
- On Feb. 9, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the Consumer Price Index, a key measure capturing the change in how much Americans pay for goods and services, has increased by 7.5% compared to the same time last year, marking the greatest year-on-year rise since 1982.
- With every year that Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency sector become more mainstream, the frequency of comparisons with gold in terms of reserve-asset potential multiplies. Many observers suggest that Bitcoin could even be more attractive than the precious metal in this regard. In November 2021, the preeminent cryptocurrency was up by 133% year-on-year against gold’s mere 4%.
- In theory, Bitcoin should make for a good inflation hedge because there’s a limited supply of tokens that can be mined. That creates a form of scarcity, which could help it hold its value over time compared to fiat currencies,” as Katie Brockman, analyst at investment advising firm The Motley Fool, explained to Cointelegraph. However, Bitcoin can only be a store of value if a significant number of people find it valuable.
XRP ‘mega whales’ scoop up over $700M in second-biggest accumulation spree in history
- Ripple (XRP) addresses that hold at least 10 million native units have returned to accumulating more in the past three months, a similar scenario that preceded a big rally for the XRP/USD and XRP/BTC pairs in late 2020.
- A 76% spike in XRP “mega whale” addresses since December 2021 has been noted by analytics firm Santiment showing that they added a total of 897 million tokens, worth over $712 million as of Feb. 18, to their reserves.
- The platform further highlighted that the XRP accumulation witnessed in the last three months was the second-largest in the coin’s existence. The first massive accumulation took place in November–December 2020 that saw whales depositing a total of 1.29 billion XRP to their addresses.
