Gaming tokens across the Solana crypto ecosystem are proving to be yet another casualty in the fallout from FTX.com’s collapse, with some dropping even further than the blockchain’s main coin after the network lost its biggest supporter.
(Bloomberg) — Gaming tokens across the Solana crypto ecosystem are proving to be yet another casualty in the fallout from FTX.com’s collapse, with some dropping even further than the blockchain’s main coin after the network lost its biggest supporter.
Among the top games for the nascent ecosystem is Aurory, a turn-based role-playing game which saw the price of its in-game token slump more than 70% in the last seven days, according to data from CoinGecko. Comparatively, Solana’s SOL token has lost 56%.
FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was a major backer of Solana, and had pledged to invest $100 million in gaming projects on its blockchain as part of a consortium of venture capital firms a year ago. His crypto empire began to implode on Nov. 6 as the value of FTX’s own token declined, and it emerged later that FTX had been nursing about $9 billion in liabilities with only $900 million in liquid assets to cover them.
Solana’s gaming space remains incredibly small compared to others in blockchain gaming. Data collated by analytics firm DappRadar showed the blockchain’s top game TapFantasy had just 3,500 unique active wallet addresses interacting with it in the last 24 hours, compared to crypto’s largest game Alien Worlds, which had 501,000.
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Star Atlas, a space-themed strategy game on Solana, saw its coin fall more than 36% in the last seven days. Others that were thought to be some of the ecosystem’s most popular platforms, such as Panzerdogs and Faraway Studios’ Mini Royale: Nations, have yet to launch their own tokens. FTX previously led a $21 million funding round for Faraway.
Both Aurory and Star Atlas sought to ease players’ concerns around whether they might be impacted by FTX’s failure in recent days. In statements shared on Twitter, Aurory said its exposure to FTX was “minimal”, while Michael Wagner, the CEO of Star Atlas’s lead developer ATMTA Inc., said a portion of its “liquid cash assets” had been affected.
Trading volumes across crypto games are also largely down in the last seven days, including falls of between 16.4% and 36.3% across major games DeFi Kingdoms, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity.
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