Ethereum Gaming Tokens Battered as Bitcoin Price Sinks to $63,000

As Bitcoin goes, so too does most of the market—and video game-centric tokens tend to be particularly volatile, considering the nascent sector of the gaming industry that such projects are trying to establish.

Those factors are apparently playing into some deep dips for the top gaming-related crypto tokens early Thursday, with Bitcoin down 2% on the day to a current price of $63,600. BTC fell under the $63,000 mark earlier in the morning, and its 30-day losses now stand at 10%.

Some of the biggest gaming tokens—most of them minted on Ethereum—have seen their prices drop by 10% or more over the past 24 hours alone, including the biggest of them all: IMX, the token of the Ethereum gaming network Immutable. Down nearly 9% in the past day, IMX is down to $2.09, deepening recent losses with a 32% fall over the past 30 days, per CoinGecko.

Another big drop Thursday comes from PRIME, the token of buzzy Ethereum NFT card game Parallel, which has also been correcting over the past month after setting a new all-time high price of $28 in mid-March. Now at just under $17, the token has fallen by 13% over the past 24 hours and 24% in the last month.

Other notable gaming tokens with double-digit percentage drops over the past day include Yield Guild Games (YGG), down 8% to $0.92, and Portal (PORTAL), which shed 7% of its value to hit $0.94. And the GuildFi (GF) token is down 10% over the past day to $0.37, shedding most of the gains seen earlier this week amid a rebranding announcement.

While those tokens have seen especially rough dips in the past day, other gaming tokens in the top 100 coins by market cap haven’t been as battered as IMX. Gala Games (GALA), for example, is down 2% on the day, while Axie Infinity (AXS) has dipped by 6%, and The Sandbox (SAND) has fallen 4.4%.

Gaming tokens broadly had a charmed first quarter of the year, marking sizable gains as Bitcoin climbed to what was ultimately a new all-time high price in March ahead of the halving. At the same time, big new tokens like Pixels (PIXEL), Saga (SAGA), and Portal were airdropped to early supporters, each hitting a peak market cap above $500 million.

But amid a cooler market for the biggest crypto assets, long-running gaming tokens are shedding some of those gains—while the newer ones near all-time low prices.