Prominent crypto tokens tied to video games and gaming chains have skyrocketed in value this weekend, with some hitting new all-time high prices and others rising to their highest point in years—all while Bitcoin briefly returned to the $70,000 mark.
The Gala ecosystem’s GALA token is the biggest winner in this weekend's gaming and metaverse coin surge, with the price jumping 42% over the last 24 hours alone to nearly $0.08 at present, per data from CoinGecko. It nearly hit $0.085 earlier Sunday and is now up 77% on the week and 230% over the last month.
There’s no single, clear trigger to explain the sudden pump, though Gala has been busy lately and long-term holders have been awaiting a breakout. Gala recently launched its GalaSwap decentralized exchange (DEX) on its own layer-1 GalaChain network, and also is sponsoring a $1 million hackathon at this month’s Game Developers Conference.
The weekend surge has pushed GALA into the top 50 cryptocurrencies ranked by market cap, according to CoinGecko. However, the token still remains over 90% off its all-time high price of $0.82 from November 2021.
Crypto Gaming Firm Gala Launches GalaSwap Exchange With Token Rewards
Blockchain gaming and entertainment firm Gala (aka Gala Games) announced Tuesday that it has launched GalaSwap, a new decentralized exchange (DEX) built on the firm’s own proprietary network, GalaChain. Gala claims that the DEX can handle upwards of 2 million transactions per second due to the layer-1 chain’s horizontal scaling approach, with some 43,000 user-operated nodes currently supporting the network. The firm also claims lower fees than decentralized exchanges on general purpose chains li...
Elsewhere, surging crypto farming game Pixels and the network that runs it, Ethereum scaler Ronin, are both up big this weekend. The PIXEL token spiked to a new all-time high price above $0.94 overnight, just weeks after the token launched. It’s now sitting at $0.88, up 63% on the week.
PIXEL’s surge comes amid data that points to growing interest in the game, with a new peak of over 500,000 daily active users. And the Ronin network’s RON token hit $4.05 overnight, marking a more than two-year high price.
RON came close to beating its all-time high price of $4.29 from January 2022, but the price has since dipped to $3.70 at present. Even so, it’s up 24% over the past week. Another token rising in the Pixels orbit is Yield Guild Games’ YGG token, which is up 64% this week after being announced as the game’s guilds infrastructure partner.
How 'Pixels' Guilds Will Massively Change Crypto's Hottest Game
Pixels is undoubtedly the hottest game in crypto right now following last month’s token launch and airdrop, with the Ronin farming game pulling in hundreds of thousands of daily users. Given that success, why then is the gameplay “completely changing” in the coming months? It’s all to do with next week’s initial introduction of in-game guilds, a social finance (SocialFi) feature that takes cues from last year’s crop of buzzy protocols like Friend.tech and Stars Arena. Essentially, players will b...
Another notable gaming token that spiked to a new all-time high price overnight was PRIME, the token of NFT card battler Parallel. PRIME peaked at $19.78 early Sunday, and is up 132% over the past 30 days. The latest pop comes after Parallel opened up in beta to all players, and after major crypto exchange Coinbase announced a giveaway to lure in new users.
The BEAM token of the Beam gaming network also set an all-time high price of $0.044 early Sunday. And Immutable’s IMX—the biggest gaming token by market cap—spiked to a two-year high of $3.62 on Saturday.
Coinbase Is Giving Out Free Cards and Currency for Ethereum NFT Game 'Parallel'
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is offering up free in-game items and currency for Ethereum NFT card game Parallel, which launched to the public in open beta last week. The exchange will offer up $5 worth of in-game credits (Glints) and two free packs of non-NFT cards to new players who access the game either through Coinbase’s “explore” page for retail traders or through social media posts from Base—the Ethereum layer-2 scaling network incubated by Coinbase. Parallel mints some of its NFTs on...
Axie Infinity’s AXS governance token is up 75% over the past 30 days at a current price of $13, while Iluvium’s ILV token spiked to $155 overnight—the highest it’s been since June 2022. Up and down CoinGecko’s list of GameFi tokens, you’ll find sizable gains.
And in many cases, those gains are sharply higher than those of Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency by market cap. Bitcoin again rose above $70,000 on Sunday after breaching that price point for the first time ever on Friday. It's down just below $69,500 as of this writing, still putting the coin up 11% over the past week.
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The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
