From ETH ETFs to Gala's snafu
Weekly roundup
On the macro scale, the big news this week was the SEC’s surprising approval for (non-staking) ETH ETFs, something which only the most optimistic had predicted so early in the year.
One result was 21% jump in the ETH price but neither the news or the price velocity has as yet kickstarted a wider change in sentiment, certainly in gaming with Immutable’s IMX and Gala’s GALA tokens both down on the week.
In the case of GALA perhaps this wasn’t a surprise given the unauthorized minting of 5 billion tokens and a $22 million sell-off in ETH. We’re no clearer knowing who the culprit was but they appear to have cooperated with Gala, sending back the ETH, with the remainder of the 5 billion tokens locked and burned.
I took the opportunity to recap Gala’s increasingly troubled history, also taking some time to discuss why the GALA token remains the #2 gaming crypto despite all these cock-ups.
As for Immutable, it’s now in an interesting position as games start to go live on its new Immutable zkEVM blockchain.
I covered the launch of mobile RPG Guild of Guardians extensively last week, but while we have seen an acceleration of activity on the Immutable zkEVM blockchain, some data research showed that it’s coming from Boomland’s Hunters On-Chain, which is gearing up to migrate from Polygon and will launch a 250 million BOOM token play-to-airdrop campaign in June.
But as well as looking forward, I also started the week with a lookback to the glory days of 2021 and early 2022, reminiscing about all the VC money that entered the sector and posing the question, how well was it spent?
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Weekly News Roundup
Nyan Heroes’ NYAN token goes live; up 14% on pre-sale price.
Aurory launches Citrine update for Seekers of Tokane.
FSL announces new socially-focused Stepn Go mobile game.
Immutable partners with Wombat and AtomicHub.
Neon Machine launches third Shrapnel playtest including NFT skin fragments and crafting.
Distro platform Elixir acquires RoboKiden: PC shooter launching on Avalanche.
How Helika is moving beyond web3 analytics [YT]
What’s Jon Been Playing This Week?
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