Decentraland, Axie Infinity, Gala Games, and The Sandbox were once the most prominent and fastest-growing gaming players in the blockchain industry. They are all pioneers that had millions of users and multi-billion dollar valuations.
Play-to-earn growth has stalled
After peaking in 2021, the four platform users have waned while their tokens plunged and have never recovered. Decentraland’s MANA price peaked at $5.9 and now trades at just $0.33, while its market cap has crashed to $647 million from a peak of $9.1 billion.
Similarly, The Sandbox price peaked at $7.5 and has now tumbled to $0.33, giving it a market cap of over $760 million. It had a market cap of more than $7 billion as demand for blockchain gaming and the metaverse jumped.
Axie Infinity followed a similar path. The AXS token surged to over $157 in 2021 and has now crashed to $6, and its market cap stands at just $876 million.
Gala Games, a platform hosting numerous top-quality games, has also dropped sharply and lost its market share.
On-chain data shows that most platforms see little user interaction daily. Data by DappRadar shows that Decentraland had 857 Unique Active Wallet (UAW) interactions in the past 30 days.
Additionally, The Sandbox has become a near-empty metaverse, with just 2.3k UAW in the past 30 days. The number of transactions in the network rose slightly to 3.8k.
Axie Infinity is doing much better. In that period, it had over 232k users and over 2.4 million transactions.
Tap-to-earn tokens are on the rise.
Meanwhile, tap-to-earn gaming platforms are doing much better. Notcoin (NOT), which recently launched its airdrop, currently has a market cap of over $1.8 billion.
Because of their size, Other Telegram tap-to-earn platforms like Hamster Kombat, TapSwap, and Dotcoin will likely have a bigger market cap than Notcoin. Hamster Kombat has over 150 million users, while TapSwap has over 55 million users. Dotcoin, a relatively new platform, has grown to more than 15 million users.
Therefore, the most significant risk for these tap-to-earn platforms is that they will most likely experience strong growth and fade away shortly afterward. This happens when their tokens crash, as we saw with the former hot platforms like Decentraland and Gala.
When their tokens were at their peak, users could generate sensible returns. Today, with their tokens going for cents, making more money has become almost impossible, which explains why their growth has stopped.
The same could happen to Notcoin, TapSwap, and Hamster Kombat. Indeed, recent data shows that Notcoin’s user growth is not happening at a fast pace after launching its airdrop.
