Scam fear puts gamers off crypto gaming

CryptocurrencyMediaTech

New research has found that worries over scams are a big barrier to crypto gaming.

Coda Labs, a developer of mobile Web3 games, surveyed 7,000 respondents from the UK, US, Brazil, Japan and South Africa in partnership with the Blockchain Game Alliance, DappRadar and Laguna Games for the study.

It found that 41% of gamers were concerned with scams, while 41% were unsure as to how Web3 gaming would work. The financial costs of getting involved was a barrier to a third of respondents.

Investment in web3 gaming is expected to reach around $10 billion by the end of 2022 despite the ongoing crypto winter and an often highly critical response to Web3 from gamers and game developers. 

“Unsurprisingly, [the study] did find that many gamers don’t perceive any benefits to Web3 gaming, and even those with Web3 knowledge are wary of financial costs and scams,” said Şekip Can Gökalp, CEO of Coda Labs.

“Barriers to web3 going mainstream are plenty, although gamers’ concerns about its environmental impact are less pronounced than is often stated.

“When regular gamers do give Web3 games a go, they tend to feel more positively, and this survey reveals that those regular gamers and heavy crypto users aren’t as far apart as we might have thought. 

“They often overlap in their behaviours, motivations, and concerns; ‘Crypto Gamers’, as we have called them, are effectively hardcore gamers who are also early tech adopters. 

“We hope the collective games industry can use these crucial insights to experiment with ways of making gaming more fun and accessible for all types of gamer.”

Improbable targets profitability & $100m funding

Music NFT platform Stems launches

An NFT music platform has launched after raising $4 million.

Stems is a decentralised social hub for music makers and listeners to collaborate and connect with emerging and major artists around the globe.

Artists can release music stems or components that make up a track such as drums, bass and guitar to the community, who can use them to create remixes and create music NFTs. 

The original artists of the stems will receive royalties from sales of the remixes featuring their stems.

Hosted on the Polygon blockchain, users must purchase and deposit MATIC tokens into their crypto wallet then connect it to the platform. 

Ideo CoLab Ventures led the funding round. It also featured Collab+Currency, Village Global, Polygon Studios, Merit Circle, Yield Guild Games, FireEyes, NoiseDAO, Jump, GSR and Akatsuki.

Cryptocurrency shorts

Global banking system SWIFT says it moved central bank digital currencies and tokenised assets on existing financial infrastructure in two successful trials. It adds: “CBDCs can be rapidly deployed at scale to facilitate trade and investment between more than 200 countries and territories around the world.”

Horizon Blockchain Games, the developer behind NFT turn-based card game Skyweaver, has raised $40m in Series A funding led by Brevan Howard Digital and Morgan Creek Digital, with participation from Polygon, Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft, Xsolla, The Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget, Sky Mavis and Axie Infinity co-founder Aleks Larsen. It plans to grow its smart wallet Sequence, expand the content and reach of Skyweaver and introduce a semi-fungible token (SFT) marketplace called Niftyswap.

Yuga Labs has revealed a Bored Ape Yacht Club community council to help the project “grow and thrive”. The members include, @beijingdou, @SeraStargirl, @TheMiamiApe, @OxEthanDG, @OxWave, @negithenagi and @peterjfang.

The Middle East and North Africa are the world’s fastest-growing cryptocurrency markets, according to research from Chainalysis. The volume of crypto received in the region leapt 48% to $566 billion in the 12 months to June.

Taiwan-based Asus, the world’s fifth-largest computing company, has launched a Web3 unit to oversee its NFT marketplace and metaverse projects. Select artists will be invited to list their NFTs on ‘Art Black Hole’.

Asset management giant GoldenTree has invested $5.2m in the SushiSwap governance token, created as a copy of Uniswap with added liquidity mining and governance features.

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Crypto prices

The overall market cap of the more than 21,200 coins is at $971 billion at the time of writing (7am UK), a 0.5% increase in the last 24 hours.

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For valuations of the top 100 coins by market cap in US dollars, plus 24-hour price change, see below.