Week ends with Sorare gambling charges
UK hearing on 4th October
It’s been a bitty week in terms of blockchain gaming news, with two of my paid stories this week involving lateral investigations.
The first was looking at E-Pal’s claimed $30 million funding round as the gaming sidekick platform looks to pivot to similar blockchain-based platform Balance. Expect more coverage as Balance goes into marketing mode as it launches not only its tokens and NFTs but also nodes.
The other was a look into a feud in the close-knit autonomous worlds niche of the fully onchain gaming community, which saw one CEO calling another high profile company “grant-dependent boys” who had carried out “the most utterly impotent attempt to launch a blockchain I've ever seen”. Ouch!
Yesterday, however, I went for some good old fashioned dataviz to inform my thoughts around the question of when/if the RON token which underpins the Ronin blockchain will flip the marketcap of the AXS token used by the Axie Infinity games.
As the graph shows, convergence is happening — as logic suggests it should — but even ChatGPT-4o wasn’t sure exactly wen?
Sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing 📈 in the future 🔮 of gaming 🎮
Weekly News Roundup
Tamagotchi-style Axie Pals announced, with AI features to come.
Ragnarok: Monster World prepares for global launch on 1st October.
Line Next bringing web3 mini-games to Line’s 2 billion chat users.
YGG partners with Parallel TCG for a $100,000 esports tournament.
TreasureDAO ditches Arbitrum to build on ZKsync.
But Oasys now supports L2s built on Arbitrum Orbit.
Elixir prepping for RoboKiden token IDO on 30th September.
The Sandbox opens Alpha #4 pre-registrations.
Weta and Neo Tokyo partner with Readyverse’s Open battle royale.
Avalanche announces $40 million Retro9000 grant program.
As discussed below, including an enormous The Sandbox rant!
Sorare Vs UK Gambling Commission news
Breaking news for a Friday afternoon but after what has been described as a three year investigation, the UK Gambling Commission has charged Sorare with providing unlicensed gambling facilities.
“Sorare is charged with providing facilities for gambling without holding an operating licence contrary to section 33(1), (4), and section 36(3), (3A) of the Gambling Act 2005,” it states on its website.
The hearing will take place at 10am on Thursday 4th October at Birmingham Magistrates’ Court.
"We firmly deny any claims that Sorare is a gambling product under U.K. laws," a Sorare spokesperson was reported as stating.
"The Commission has misunderstood our business and wrongly determined that gambling laws apply to Sorare."
The case will be significant in that fact that Sorare users buy soccer player NFTs and then put together teams whose performance is based on those players’ real-world performance. Users can then win rewards such as NFTs, ETH, kits and match tickets based on their team’s performance
In that sense, I guess Sorare’s lawyers will argue it’s a skill-based game — not a game of chance — in which a range of rewards are provided over a period of time — not immediately.
Hilariously, the Guardian points out; “since the Gambling Commission was established in 2005, it is thought to have used its prosecutorial powers only once, in a case of cheating involving a man who had drugged dogs to fix greyhound races”.
What’s Jon Been Playing This Week?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to GamesTX to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.