This week in Crypto: Metaverse, GameFi and breaking crypto news.
Where do you invest in the Metaverse? and GameFi leaders prepared to explode.
While crypto markets move up and down, there’s blockchain companies in the trenches building the future of the internet, Web3, where allegedly we will all spend our time in the future, in the metaverse.
The metaverse is a whole nother’ world, with thousands of opportunities for growth at every level because we are still so very very early. Adoption wise, Dubai is already hosting over 1,000 metaverse companies in its country and the Dubai Crown Prince’s strategy to inject over $1 Billion into the industry and create 40,000 jobs.
So what companies shine brightest in this ever expanding metaverse?
I am determined to find out.
In this episode I explore into Metaverse’s that not everyone already knows about, GameFi that focuses on the gamer's experience, and how each of these three projects utilizes NFT’s play a crucial role in tokenizing and bringing financial capability to every aspect of the metaverse and gaming.
Firstly, let’s talk about the Ceek metaverse. Unlike decentraland, not everyone has heard of Ceek yet. But they will, trust me. Ceek has been around since 2017 and positioned themselves very strongly, with huge interest (and backing) from Facebook and Microsoft early on in their growth, major companies are finding digital land and a presence in the heart of the Ceek’s metaverse.
Ceek has already partnered with artists like Lady Gaga, Bon Jovi, Ziggy Marley, and more, who have already thrown concerts inside of Ceek with ten’s of thousands of virtual fans watching.
To learn more I speak with Mary Spio, CEO & CTO of Ceek, on the layout of the Ceek Metaverse, and we also discuss the ongoing land sale on Ceek, with the phase 1 available of 10,000 first-come-first-serve NFT based land plots in the busy area of the Ceek metaverse available.
Secondly, I dive into GameFi and the future of other openworld metaverse games. Infinity Skies is an openworld metaverse game where players outright own castles in the sky and manage their fortresses and their royal families in a modern Sim’s-like style game. It looks like a good gaming experience (regardless of blockchain) and brings hope for a game as addicting as the Sims, played by many millions of children and young adults.
The game demo is already live and playable, which is becoming a necessity for platforms integrating a native token and token economy inside of a GameFi game.
The NFT land sale for Infinity Skies land plots just started and the preferred locations land is being auctioned off. As well, their ISKY token is already trading on cryptocurrency exchanges.
Lastly, we speak with Sam Kim, from Metalcore. They’ve created an NFT-based, open world, mechanized combat game. The gameplay looks seriously intense and graphics much better than most blockchain based games. They just released their Infrantry mech NFT’s and unlike other projects, did a free mint to give them away to the community and get players their Hero’s to play when the game launches. They are easily available on OpenSea for those who missed the free mint.
Sam and I discuss the NFT Minting of the MetalCore Infantry NFT's, the gameplay and combat of the action game, the release of the private alpha part of the game for NFT holders, and more on the benefits of integrating blockchain and NFT technology.
Some of these blockchain games could be the next Call of Duty or Sims house party, bringing millions of new players into the blockchain space and continuing to revolutionizing gaming and blockchain into one new industry called GameFi.
Other news in Crypto:
Curve.Finance has been hacked with $530,000+ drained out of their smart contracts.
Hodlnaut, a crypto yield platform offering up to 7.25% APY, has halted withdrawals due to "market conditions". Customer funds are lost or in limbo.
HotBit exchange has paused withdrawals as the executives behind it were subpoenaed.
BlackRock CEO sells another 8% of his holdings, the most he has sold since right before the COVID crash of March 2020.
Elon Musk sold a total of $6.9 billion Tesla $TSLA shares over the past week.
***USA blacklists and sanctions Ethereum mixing tool Tornado Cash, often used to obfuscate funds after protocol hacks.
Coinbase blacklists every USDC address associated with Tornado Cash, including $80M+ in funds associated with Gitcoin. Traders are starting to send dusted amounts of blacklisted USDC coins to popular known wallets of famous people, bitcoin proponents and others to involve them in the fiasco.
Coinbase adds NEAR to its roadmap of listed assets.
Coca-Cola launches an NFT project on the Polygon blockchain.
Pinata, an NFT Media company, raised $18 million in a Series A funding round co-led by GreylockVC and PanteraCapital
The news of CEO’s selling large amount of stock, and the sanctions towards Tornado Cash which are trickling into regulation for USDC, stablecoins in general, and sanctioning software from US users, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cryptocurrency markets react negatively towards the news. On the other hand, traders say the macro market seems strong because inflation came in under the prediction (8.5% instead of 8.9% [still horrible]). Bitcoin has been trending upwards slowly in a bear flag like formation since the last major dip in mid-June, but I have a feeling will break one way or the other soon as we are nearing the end of the flag.
That’s all for this edition!
Ashton Addison
-CEO, Crypto Coin Show