Airdrop Hype Spurs 20% Spike in Crypto Game Players in February

The average number of daily active wallets being connected by players to blockchain games jumped 20% month-over-month in February, DappRadar and the Blockchain Game Alliance announced Thursday in their monthly industry report.

The ongoing buzz around play-to-airdrop campaigns—which incentivize people to play games by dangling potential token incentives in front of them—is credited for at least some of the monthly rise. Climbing prices for crypto gaming tokens also played a role as the average number of daily wallets interacting with crypto games hit 1.9 million in February.

“The play-to-airdrop trend is still pushing more people towards blockchain gaming,” the report reads. “It’s not just this trend that’s boosting the market; gaming tokens are also doing well as Bitcoin reached new highs.”

Pixels, a popular social farming game on Ethereum scaling network Ronin, is one of the most prominent examples of the play-to-airdrop trend. Its PIXEL token dropped in February following the second such campaign, and yielded over $1 billion in trading volume in less than a day. The token set a new all-time high price last weekend amid growing player tallies.

The Saga blockchain also held a broad play-to-airdrop campaign across numerous games in recent months, while games like Nifty Island and Apeiron are currently holding their own respective promotional pushes. Another game, Nyan Heroes, is set to launch in early access later this month with play-to-airdrop missions.

Ethereum scaling network Polygon was the biggest beneficiary of February’s surge in active gaming users, DappRadar reports, pulling in an average of 408,000 daily wallets—a 117% jump over January’s figures. The report chalks up much of this demand to a test period for the shooter game Matr1x Fire, which pulled in more than a million registered players.

Another Ethereum scaler, SKALE, was next up with 284,000 daily active wallets thanks to games like racer MotoDex, 5tars, and StrayShot. BNB Chain (256,000 wallets), Ronin (239,000 wallets), and Near (157,000 wallets) filled out the rest of the top five.

In terms of individual games, the multi-chain game MotoDex led the charge with a whopping 6.9 million unique monthly active wallets connected over the course of February, with fitness game Sweat Economy next up with 3.75 million wallets, billiards game Trickshot Blitz third with 1.03 million wallets, and gaming platform PlayEmber up behind with 918,000 monthly wallets.

Bitcoin climbed in value over the course of February before hitting a new all-time high price above $69,000 last week. It has since popped even higher, climbing above $73,700 early Thursday. Prominent gaming tokens like Immutable (IMX), Ronin (RON), PIXEL, Gala Games (GALA), and Parallel (PRIME) have also seen skyrocketing gains of late.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.