This Week on Crypto Twitter: Steam Bans NFTs, Axie Upsets Fans, Tungsten Cubes Go Viral

By Tim Hakki

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

Twitter is a free space to vent frustrations, and this week the folks on Crypto Twitter had plenty of frustrations to air. Here’s our review of the rants on CT that blew up this week. 

Yesterday, online gaming store Steam launched new rules and guidelines to ban games built with blockchain technology. 

In a section titled “what you shouldn’t publish on Steam,” the team included a new rule expressly forbidding “applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs”.

Crypto developer SpacePirate Games team tweeted its dismay after Steam kicked its hotly anticipated sci-fi shooter, Age of Rust, off the platform following the new rule change. The developer clarified: “While I respect their choice, I fundamentally believe that NFTs and blockchain games are the future.”

Sky Mavis, the developer and publisher of Axie Infinity—the number one NFT game by sales volume according to CryptoSlam!—quickly responded with a tweet saying that its game launcher “represents a different path—a future where gamers have property rights and economic freedom.” Sky Mavis defiantly added: “We will win. The future of gaming is [at] stake.”

It was an easy win for Sky Mavis. But earlier that day, the Vietnamese development studio had polarized fans with its latest update to Axie Infinity.

Playable Axie NFTs now reset to level one after changing owners, and lower-level players can no longer raise “Smooth Love Potion” (SLP) tokens through adventure, arena, or daily questing. SLP tokens are ERC-20 tokens that are earned through playing Axie, and also trade on crypto exchanges. 

The new rules limit the amount of Axies that gamers can breed in the early game and prevent players from selling high-level characters for more money. Some fans argue that restricting the supply in the early game creates a pay-to-win economy. 

After the update, the prices of AXS and SLP sank by 7%, but a few fans support Axie Infinity co-founder Jiho Zirlin’s assessment that the update will be “very healthy long-term for the community and economy.”

On Thursday night, Coin Metrics co-founder Nic Carter tweeted a screengrab of an Amazon page selling 4-inch cubes of tungsten. 

Carter unwittingly set Crypto Twitter ablaze with memes and witty remarks as many, including Bloomberg host Joe Weisenthal and CoinShares CSO Meltem Demirors, joked about tungsten cubes overshadowing NFTs to become the next hot collectible. 

It took just short of ten hours for the remaining three tungsten cubes to sell out from supplier Midwest Tungsten Service Store. But if you missed the boat this time, theres already demand for tokenized re-sales.

On Wednesday, crypto Twitter lobbed fraud allegations at a new NFT project called MekaVerse. MekaVerse had one of the most successful NFT launches ever, selling more than $60 million worth of tokens in 24 hours alone. 

Customers who purchased MekaVerse on OpenSea during the minting process on October 7 were expecting one of 8,888 randomly generated profile pictures to come their way during the image reveal several days later. 

However, some, including Twitter user MOLOTOV, allege that privileged users, like Wyb0—one of the Mekaverse developers from Minded Studio, had access to the metadata. That meant the developers could buy the rarest NFTs for the going price of 7.1 ETH before the reveal—though since then, the floor price of the NFTs has declined to 2.25 ETH.

Last, Ryan Selkis, the founder of crypto metrics company Messari, poked fun at longtime crypto bear and JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon. Dimon told attendees at the annual meeting for the Institute of International Finance this week that he “personally think[s] Bitcoin is worthless”. 

Selkis compiled Dimon’s quotes over the years and juxtaposed them with a graph showing Bitcoin’s upward price performance over the same period. 

Fraud allegations, complaints, memes and pillorying…just another week on Crypto Twitter.

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