Introduction
With the approval of bitcoin spot ETF, the crypto market is recovering from the deep bear and gaining more interest from new capital and players. Since the start of the new year, bitcoin has surged from $42,000 to $60,000 in just two months and the overall crypto market cap has returned to $2 trillion.
Gamefi projects also benefit from the overwhelming market liquidity and emerge like mushrooms after rain recently. Some newly launched gamefi projects like Bigtime, Gashero, and Pixel have onboarded many players and achieved great success.
Source:https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gamefi-uniting-gaming-finance-revolutionary-blockchain-experience
The prosperity of GameFi projects raises new requirements for the blockchains on which they are built. However, most “traditional” blockchains (like Ethereum) have limited performance, thus restricting the adoption of the web3 games.
Thankfully, with the maturity of app chain toolkits and infrastructures, gamefi teams can now build their app chains specifically for games. These gaming app chains empower web3 games with a lot of unprecedented benefits, such as high throughput, zero-gas transactions, fast finality, and low latency, making interacting with web3 games as smooth as the web2 ones.
To date, gaming chains have become one of the emerging segmentations in the crypto market. The most notable gaming chains include Ronin, Xai, Immutable, Beam Skale, etc. So, what on earth are these gaming chains? How are they adopted, and most importantly, what games can we play on them?
Let's take a deep dive 👇
Ronin
Due to the very successful launch of Pixels, Ronin is the most mentioned gaming chain these days. Developed by the Sky Mavis team, Ronin is an EVM-compatible blockchain crafted for developers to build games with player-owned economies.
Ronin is designed to be a gaming-centric blockchain, equipped with a bunch of user-friendly infrastructures, such as DEX (Katana), native wallet (Ronin wallet), domain system (RNS), and NFT marketplace (Mavis Market). Ronin users can also execute transactions with ultra-low gas and super-fast finality, so interacting with games on Ronin can be seamless and frictionless.
Despite a bridge exploit in 2022, Ronin gradually grows a unique gaming ecosystem and makes its comeback in 2024. The figures below illustrate the springtime at Ronin.
Since Nov 2023, Ronin has captured $217M as total TVL and attracted tens of millions of trading volume
Source: https://defillama.com/chain/Ronin
Ronin's daily active users have witnessed a powerful surge, soaring from 100k to 700k, making an impressive 700% growth in the last few months
Source: https://www.footprint.network/research/gamefi/game-overview/single-chain
Apart from the outstanding figures, Ronin has a booming game ecosystem, with both the community and games keeping expanding. Ronin's plans for collaboration and expansion within the ecosystem are unfolding after the success of Pixels and Playwildforest. It's worth noting that several games have announced that they are migrating to the Ronin chain, including Kaidrochronicle, CyberKongz PlayFightLeague, etc.
In a nutshell, Ronin is demonstrating impressive growth based on a loyal community and well-executed building teams. It is reasonable to expect more native/migrated games to pop up in the coming months.
Xai
Xai is the world’s first Layer 3 solution for AAA gaming. Powered by Offchain Labs’ Arbitrum Orbit Technology with games from Ex Populus and other game developers, Xai is set to transform the gaming industry.
With the help of Arbitrum's magical tech, Xai serves as a stable, secure, and efficient gaming chain for both crypto and traditional gamers, enabling them to own and trade valuable in-game items in their favorite games, without the need for complicated crypto knowledge.
As a newly launched gaming chain, Xai is still in its early days. But the community has shown their passion for it.
In the Xai’s sentry node auction, there are 6,361 node key holders with 34,833 node keys minted
Source: https://dune.com/sohwak/xai-node-key-purchases
Xai has raised 12,700 ETH ($38M) from its sentry node sale and the $XAI token even surged 300% in two months
Source: https://www.bitrue.com/trade/xai_usdt
According to the official website, there are five upcoming games on Xai, with Final Form, a trading card, and a rogue-like game, launching first. In the meantime, Xai collaborates with big gaming brands, such as Ex Populus, Tencent, and Animoca Brands, to expand its influence on the larger gaming ecosystem. Notably, a well-known Polygon game, Crypto Unicorn, has just announced to migration to the Xai chain for a more seamless player experience.
Source: https://xai.games/
Xai might be a young competitor among the gaming chains, but it showcases its superior tech and an overwhelming community. Backed by the Offchain Labs team and Arbitrum ecosystem, it's promising for Xai to grow as one of the top-tier gaming chains.
Immutable
Immutable is one of the leading platforms for building web3 games in the Ethereum ecosystem. Immutable is created to enable developers to launch games faster without compromising on either security or the gaming experience. With years of building, Immutable has the most mature infrastructures and ecosystem. Currently, there are passports, NFT minting platforms, and marketplaces available for developers and game players.
Significantly, Immutable has also been exploring zero-knowledge (ZK) scaling solutions for a long time and it offers Immutable X, a rollup based on StarkWare technology, and Immutable zkEVM, powered by Polygon. Developers can utilize the magical zk technology to scale their games while protecting users’ privacy and asset security.
To date, Immutable is the leading gaming chain in terms of fully diluted valuation (FDV) and game ecosystem.
There are a cumulative 1915514 unique NFT owners in the Immutable ecosystem, with daily active users surging to over 2.2M in the last few months.
Source: https://immutascan.io/?chartTab=TradeVolume
Source: https://www.footprint.network/research/gamefi/game-overview/single-chain
Immutable has captured $51.41m TVL so far and close to $1M daily NFT trading volume on its platform.
Source: https://defillama.com/protocol/immutablex?staking=false
An incredible $1.2b worth of assets is sitting in the Immutable treasury.
Source: https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/immutablex
In addition to these impressive numbers, Immutable is powering a variety of web3 games, especially the 3As, including Illuvium, Guild Of Guardians Metalcore, etc. Immutable is also looking for collaboration with non-gaming projects to extend its influence outside of the gaming field. For example, Immutable has recently partnered with Cool Cats to encourage cat NFT holders to join the gaming party.
Source: https://www.immutable.com/
Immutable has been the gaming chain giant for years. As many 3A games in its ecosystem release their alpha/beta, we can expect that it will attract more attention in the foreseeable future.
Other gaming chains
Several gaming chains are emerging as the game market heats up. Aside from the ones we mention above, there are:
- Beam chain, developed by Merit Circle guild based on AVAX subnet
- Skale chain, providing highly functional hubs for games
- Gala chain, a comprehensive platform for games, music and films
- Oasys chain, the blockchain optimized for gamers, with instant transaction speed and zero gas fee
Source: https://dappradar.com/rankings/chains
Moreover, new chains, such as the Magic chain by TreasureDAO, are on their way to disrupt the current gaming market. The gaming market will soon be a garden with all the flowers blooming together.
Source: https://www.footprint.network/research/gamefi/game-overview/chain-stats
Conclusion
In retrospect, Axie Infinity alone was evaluated with an astonishing market cap of 10B in 2021, exceeding the total market cap of all the above gaming chains. We are confident to believe that the gaming chain is one of the major narratives in the coming bull cycle and also the silver bullet for mass adoption of web3 games. Right now, the question is: are you ready for the gaming chain season?