Many believe that Web3 gaming is crypto’s next major boom and there is now more evidence for that: in January 2023, despite an across-the-board rise in the market, metaverse and gaming tokens outperformed the godfather of the space, Bitcoin.
2022 was arguably the toughest year in crypto’s history, seeing us enter a long winter we haven’t really begun to recover from yet. Nevertheless — and contrary to many predictions — the start of 2023 has been kinder to crypto in the first month of the year. While many of the top 100 coins saw a sizeable price increase, Bitcoin was lagging behind metaverse and gaming tokens.
Crypto is a difficult sector to keep up with and that is true even if you narrow your focus to “just” metaverses and Web3 games. Nevertheless, the interest in this area is certainly increasing. Many predicted that blockchain gaming will be the next significant trend in the space, as we have seen with ICOs which started around 2017, and then NFTs in 2020. It’s difficult to make predictions in crypto, but it doesn’t seem unlikely given the mass adoption we have watched by major gaming organizations and developers.
What I certainly wouldn’t have predicted, however, is gaming and metaverse token performances in January, but a CoinDesk report shows exactly that. The two metaverse tokens I track are $SAND (of The Sandbox) and $MANA (of Decentraland) as they have established themselves as frontrunners. The Sandbox has been a force to be reckoned with in Web3, particularly with regard to onboarding. In fact, from both a metaverse and a purely gaming perspective, The Sandbox has been important. So, it was pleasing to see such a spike
On the gaming side in January, $GALA, Gala Games’ token, saw a gargantuan spike of over 200%, Alien Worlds’ $TLM increased by 75%, $AXS for Axie Infinity mirrored that increase of 75%, and Yield Guild Games’ $YGG managed 92%.
There is still a long way to go before the industry recovers enough to pick up any momentum, at least price-wise, but the performances of gaming and metaverse tokens could be indicative of things to come, on a much larger scale.
