Cryptocurrency prices, NFT collection values, and blockchain activity may be down across the board, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t interesting and positive data hiding amongst the chaos.
Any successful entrepreneur will tell you — and many do in their various books — that you learn more from mistakes than successes. Well, that could also be said of bear markets versus bull markets; in bull markets, it’s all too easy to succeed with speculation and the high resting heart rate of its occupants. In bear markets, however, you can get an indication of what has the legs to go the distance, and what cannot survive without the buzz of the bull.
The rise of blockchain gaming has been a swift ascent and it has proven integral to crypto in a number of ways. One of these ways is engagement, with gaming ecosystems often seeing the highest volume of transactions, NFT sales, and UAW (Unique Active Wallets). As a result — or perhaps its the cause rather than the effect — blockchain gaming has been a rapidly changing landscape. A recent ChainPlay survey shed some light on this which you can read about in the article, The Rise and Fall of GameFi: The Worst Word in Web3 Gaming.
Nevertheless, the analytics of crypto is looking a little red, no matter which filters you apply. That said, if everything is crashing, what is crashing the least or the slowest is a potentially relevant marker. Web3 gaming is arguably near the top of the resilient list and DappRadar’s August industry report highlights how clear its importance to crypto has become.
Yes, blockchain games as measured by UAW have fallen and DeFi has risen, but there are two crucial and connected pieces of information here. Firstly, gaming represents over half of UAW in crypto — which is fantastic. But the second piece of information that is informed by the first is far more noteworthy: it’s 51% when there are so few genuinely good blockchain games.
DeFi is far ahead of blockchain gaming in its journey to achieve its full potential, I suspect. That is, in the most basic terms, there is far better and more varied DeFi than there are blockchain games. Nevertheless, the limited selection of Web3 games still represents over half of UAW. What happens when there are mainstream games on-chain?
