Top 300 Blockchain Games Index: ⬆️1% today, ⬇️36% YTD
Ronin Games Index: ⬇️10% today, ⬇️49% YTD
AI Gaming Agents: ⬇️10% today, ⬇️35% YTD
Ex-Guilds Index: ⬆️1% today, ⬇️46% YTD
Transactional Games Index: 0% today, ⬇️38% YTD
I had hoped to cover the launch of the Forkast prediction market on Ronin in yesterday’s email. However, “traffic was much higher than anticipated”, causing “serious overload” so in the end I had to bail.
But things appear to be working much better today. Let’s dig in.
Forkast is the second project from US outfit Community Gaming, which originally launched — and still operates — its esports platform. This allows users to set up tournaments for both web2 and web3 games, boasting features such as automatic USDC payouts.
And in a similar vein, Forkast sensibly uses USDC as its main cryptocurrency, albeit one which you have to convert into platform credits at a 1-to-1 ratio in order to buy predictions.
I’d guess this is a legal safety measure. Withdrawals are also gated, with users having to complete three defined actions and have connected their X account to convert their credits back out to USDC.
As for the prediction market’s structure, it uses the sort of buy-and-sell markets seen in Kalshi, rather than the simple % odds markets of Polymarket and Manifold.
This means that for each question — such as “Will the market cap of RON be higher than that of AXS at the end of June?” — you can buy and sell any probability for Yes, as well as buying and selling any probability for “No”.
Whether a buy or sell order is filled depends on whether another user wants to take the other side of your prediction.
Obviously, things get more complex for more complex questions such as “Who is going to win the Champions League?” which features multiple teams, each of which have their own four-way web of buy/sell, yes/no probabilities.
However, the advantage of this approach is that users aren’t limited to the current market percent as with Polymarket, but can set up their own buy and sell options at different percentages, much like either trading Bitcoin at the market rate or setting up your own limits buys/sells.
In this way, such markets drive better market insight because users are incentivized to trade on exact probabilities rather than broad yes/no answers.
So far, so good, so why does Forkast have its own token?
Alongside its launch, the CGX token also went live on Ronin. As well as Forkast, it has utility in the esports platform, but in terms of Forkast, it rewards users for their activity and can also be staked to gain random loot boxes, which drop credits, more CGX and other game related assets.
Over time, holding it will also enable users to create their own questions, share platform revenues and gain governance features in terms of influencing the future roadmap, as well as being required to access subscription rewards as Community Gaming builds out its own ID and reputation system.
Of course, even if this stuff works, it’s months away and in the meantime, “everything’s a memecoin”.
For such reasons, CGX is currently down 75% but I expect I’ll end up buying a chunk as I want to set my own questions.
And on that note, I’m also happy to report I currently rank #3 in terms of weekly profit — 20% — and #5 in terms of volume — $54. But as I say, early days!
If you feel the urge to join me, feel free to use my referral.
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Calendar
Ronin’s incentivized NFT trading program ends — 10th March
Immutable’s big hope RavenQuest goes live — 14th March
Sui Gaming Summit at GDC 2025 — 18th March
Saga’s GDC event — 19th March
Yuga Labs’ Otherside metaverse launches — June TBC
Gabe Leydon Advice news
Meaningless Stats news
I have skin in the game so it was interesting to read that the Inevitable Games Fund has released some data on its performance. It was set up in March 2024 by Immutable and Polygon, together with Australian VC King River, to invest in web3 games and infrastructure.
Originally, it announced it was taking over existing investments including Pixelmon, MetalCore, Guild of Guardians and My Pet Hooligan from its initial backers but hasn’t announced any additional deals that I’ve seen beyond obscure Blade of God X dev Void Labs.
Nevertheless, it now reveals it’s invested into 16 web3 game companies, an undisclosed number of which have launched tokens. For the record, Pixelmon, MetalCore, Guild of Guardians and My Pet Hooligan have all launched tokens, being down 94%, 97%, 99% and 88% from their all-time-highs respectively.
Nevertheless, the fund’s return-on-investment on its tokens has resulted in a reported multiple on invested capital KPI of 2.8.
Of course, this number is both impressive and meaningless, the latter given that we don’t know how much has been invested or whether these are realized or unrealized gains i.e. has the fund sold its tokens and returned the profits to its LPs — good — or are these just paper returns — less good?
It’s also unclear how big the fund is. It launched with the hope it would get to $100 million. Initial LPs included Merit Circle, the family offices of Steve Kokinos (Sonic Boom Ventures) and Mike Arrington (Arrington Capital) as well as Immutable co-founders Robbie and James Ferguson, and Polygon’s Sandeep Nailwal.
However, the anchor investor is Alpha Wave Ventures, which is described as being funded by Alpha Wave Global and the Abu Dhabi Royal Group's Chimera Capital so $100 million is certainly possible.
More generally — to me — the timing of the press release appears to be more focused on addressing the weakness of web3 gaming sentiment — and by association the IMX token price, which remains the #1 gaming token by marketcap.
Nevertheless, King River’s co-founder Zeb Rice remains very positive, commenting, “The outstanding performance of IGF in such a short timeframe is a testament to the momentum and resilience of the web3 gaming landscape”.
Additional Links
Australian project Illuvium continues to downsize, bringing its monthly burn rate “closer to $500,000” and leaving it with 24 months of runway.
The new “1 million TPS” Somnia blockchain from Improbable and Msquared is claiming it has $270 million in capital — cash not tokens — to fuel its ecosystem. Its testnet is going live in the coming weeks. For those interested, my podcast next week will cover this in more depth.
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