Play-to-Earn
Gone in 31 seconds: Yield Guild Games’ IDO raises $12.5M from just 32 participants
The $12.6 million initial DEX offering of play-to-earn collective, Yield Guild Games, sold out in just 31 seconds to just 32 participants.
Yield Guild Games (YGG), a collective of play-to-earn gamers, completed its initial DEX offering via SushiSwap’s Miso platform in under a minute earlier today.
The offering saw YGG raise roughly $12.5 million on July 27, with the token sale distributing 25 million tokens or 2.5% of the project’s 1 billion token supply via a dutch auction. The YGG tokens were sold for roughly $0.50 each.
Disappointed investors criticized the sale after 32 wallets exhausted the allocation in 31 seconds, even though YGG’s Discord membership exceeds 47,000.
A single address appears to have been able to nab 4.5 million tokens or 18% of the coins available in the offering, although onlookers have speculated the purchaser was likely a pool.
32 participants / Biggest ape (looks like a pool) did 4.5milly pic.twitter.com/EpR69WXKTT
— Darren Lau (@Darrenlautf) July 27, 2021
YGG co-founder, Gabby Dizon told Cointelegraph the project has been in touch with some of the buyers, noting the purchasing addresses represented groups of long-term community members who had “[pooled] capital together for a large purchase.”
“So it's not just 32 whales that bought in, it was 32 wallets that represented different groups of long term believers of our vision.”
Dizon also noted the token is scheduled to begin trading on SushiSwap later today with plenty of liquidity, providing investors additional opportunities to access the YGG token.
In a blog post, Dizon thanked the project’s community for its support and participation, stating: “We are looking forward to kicking off our community airdrop where YGG tokens will be given to the most active and engaged members of our guild, especially those who have been with us from the beginning.”
Moving forward, Yield Guild Games will soon complete a community airdrop distributing tokens to its most active members. The project will also launch a community mining program soon.
YGG also intends to expand its sponsorship program, which facilitates the donation of Axie Infinity in-game currency Small Love Potion (SLP) to YGG players for breeding Axies — collectible fantasy creatures that inhabit the game.
Last month, YGG raised $4 million in a Series A funding round featuring participation from Mechanism Capital, ParaFi Capital, and lead investor Bitkraft Ventures.
Yield Guild Games Token Launch Crashed by 32 Whales
What is Causing Axie Infinity’s Boom in Popularity?
Yield Guild Games Raises $4 Million to Power Its Play-to-Earn Proposal
Yield Guild Games, an online gaming guild, has raised $4 million to power its play-to-earn proposal in a Series A funding round. The funding round was led by Bitkraft, a venture capital company specializing in e-sports investments. Other blockchain and crypto-related companies also participated. The company plans to include more gamers in its activities with […]Community members integrate play-to-earn features into Dark Forest game
Players can now earn xDAI by broadcasting planet locations in the space strategy game.
Players of the decentralized real-time strategy game, Dark Forest, have introduced new and innovative ways of earning cryptocurrency within the virtual ecosystem.
The play-to-earn plugin “Broadcast Market” was integrated into the game on May 31, according to a tweet by programmer Blaine Bublitz. The developer noted that Broadcast Market is the first plug-in featuring its own smart contract that directly communicates to Dark Forest.
This is the first plugin that has its own smart contract that talks directly to Dark Forest. It allows you to broadcast a planet to receive a reward or, if you are in need of extra broadcasts, you can post a bounty to the board!
— Blaine Bublitz (@BlaineBublitz) May 31, 2021
Bublitz added that he and collaborator Jacob Rosental, "Project Sophon," intend to develop additional plug-ins for the game in future, thanking Dark Forest for supporting their work.
Dark Forest praised the plug-in as showcasing the possibilities enabled by decentralization, emphasizing that players and not just Dark Forest’s official developers can expand the DApp’s gameplay and functionality:
“Thanks to interoperability, *new game features* in a decentralized game can be added by anyone, not just the original devs — this is literally not possible in traditional games.”
Dark Forest is a real-time strategy space-conquest game where players discover and capture planets in an infinite, procedurally-generated, cryptographic universe.
It has been built on Ethereum using zkSNARKs to provide zero-knowledge proofs. The cryptography secures the hashes that are created to represent planet locations in the smart contract.
Broadcast Market has been developed by Project Sophon allowing gamers to reveal the location of any planet in the Dark Forest universe once every 24 hours. Competitive players need more than a single planet broadcasted so users can now earn xDAI just by broadcasting a planet for another player, the website explained.
xDAI is a derivative of the MakerDAO stablecoin DAI hosted on an Ethereum layer-two sidechain of the same name offering high-speed and low-cost transactions. Project Sophon stated that they would take a 20% listing fee, paid by the creators of Broadcast Requests, for posting on the Broadcast Market.
The MMO, or massively multiplayer online game, was launched in August 2020, recently upgrading to version 0.6 on May 21.
Other blockchain gaming platforms encouraging play-to-earn mechanics include Axie Infinity — a play-to-earn virtual world populated by collectible fantasy creatures that are represented as nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
On May 3, Cointelegraph reported that the pseudonymous digital landowner and crypto whale, Flying Falcon, had sponsored 50 Axie Infinity players based in emerging economies.
Axie Infinity player buys two houses in the Philippines from in-game profits
An Axie Infinity player from the Philippines claims to have purchased two houses with profits earned through playing the crypto-powered play-to-earn game.
An Axie Infinity player from the Philippines bought two houses with his earnings from the popular crypto-powered play-to-earn game.
Earlier this month, 22-year-old John Aaron Ramos, who plays under the pseudonym “Magnus TV,” took to social media to announce that he had purchased two houses in the Philippines from profits earned playing Axie Infinity.
In the post, Ramos attributes the purchases to the surging price of Axie’s in-game token Smooth Love Potion (SLP), which rallied 940% from $0.035 on April 24 to more than $0.364 on May 2. SLP has since retraced 45% and last changed hands for roughly $0.20.
“I believed in AXIE’s ability to lift us up, I held an SLP, paid attention to the trend of AXIE Community and did some research [...] then I played with the price of SLP to have enough funds to buy two houses and one team.”
Players of Axie Infinity can earn SLP through the games’ PVP battle area, where players battle their Axies — Pokemon-inspired creatures that are bred in the game and represented as nonfungible tokens.
SLP currently ranks as the 428th-largest crypto asset by capitalization with $81 million, driving more than $45 million worth of trade in the past 24 hours.
In addition to SLP, Axie players also have opportunities to earn the game's governance token, AXS. The AXS token has also seen meteoric gains recently, gaining 5,114% from $0.14 to $7.30 in the six months since the token began trading.
Ramos participated in Yield Guild Games’ “Sponsor-A-Scholar” program, which encourages sponsors to donate SLP to Axie players based in countries where the set up-costs associated with playing Axie infinity may prove too prohibitive to many prospective users.
Axie Infinity reportedly became popular in the Philippines towards the end of 2020, as people sought alternative ways to make money after losing their jobs due to the pandemic.