Back in the ICO boom days of Ethereum, much digital ink was spent on discussing fat-thin theory; that is would value accrue mainly to the native token of the underlying protocol or the tokens of the successful products built on top of the protocol?
Of course, this was occurring when the value of ETH was priced in the hundreds of dollars, while anyone with a white paper dreamed up on the back of a fag packet was coining it.
As much as I understood the argument, in that context sensible people were both annoyed and perplexed that ETH wasn’t worth more.
Fast-forward a few years and no-one talks about fat-thin theory much any more as the price velocity of most L1s has been much faster than the apps built on them, especially on Ethereum.
As an aside, I note it’s now worth around 50% of Bitcoin’s market cap, which we haven’t seen since early 2018.
Maybe the fabled flippening is inbound after all.
Immutable X vs Illuvium
But so much for the past.
My dim recollection of these discussions was triggered by breaking out the token data on game projects as part of some ongoing research, and the status of the Immutable X, which is an Ethereum L2 using ZK-rollups.
Although the IMX token has been live for less than a month, it’s already made it into the Coingecko top 100 (#99 today at least), with a market cap of $1.5 billion.
Of course, that’s still some way off from ostensible rivals such as Polygon (#18, mcap $13 billion) and Flow (#54, mcap $3.9 billion)
Even so, the fact that the most anticipated game that will be running on Immutable X - Illuvium - is priced at $1.2 billion — ILV is up 90% in the past 30 days — did give me some cause for thought and portfolio rebalancing.
Because whatever your take on fat-thin theory, that’s strikes me as a pretty wafer-thin thesis for the protocol layer.
Funding news:
Guild tech platform Blockchain Space has added to its recent $3.75 million round with a $2.4 million strategic funding round. Morningstar Ventures led the round with participation from Crypto.com, Alameda Research, Kingsway Capital, OKEx Ventures and the UniX Gaming guild.
Blockchain Space’s tech is currently used by +2,500 guilds for scholarship management, a number it hopes to expand 10-fold.
As previously discussed, this demonstrates the growing power of guilds to provide high levels of capital and labor to any play-to-earn game that can scale and maintain a stable game economy a la Axie Infinity.
Continuing the funding of funds news, well-known early stage game outfit Play Ventures has closed an over-subscribed $75 million round for its specific blockchain gaming fund, which is labelled Play Future Fund. It’s already invested in Community Gaming and GuildFi.
Backlash alert:
Someone bought a $650,000 NFT yacht for a game that hasn't been released