Disclaimer: None of this information should be taken as financial advice. DYOR + I will hold some of the assets mentioned in this newsletter.
MARKET TALK
ASTRA NOVA’S ALLEGEDLY RUGS EVERYONE
On October 18th, Astra Nova (AN) launched its RVV token across a multitude of CEXs, including Binance Alpha and Futures. Shortly after the Binance Alpha listing, “18 wallets abnormally dumped ~890M $RVV for ~$10.66M” (8.6% of the supply), which then deposited 8.4M USDT into Gate and KuCoin. A market maker hack?
The remaining $2.04M+ of the “stolen” funds stay in the perpetrator’s wallet
But EmberCN brings up a good point: “Which hacker would convert stolen assets into USDT and hold onto them?” (as it can be frozen)
It also shared that it raised $41.6M on the day of the TGE in a round led by Outlier Ventures (but I have yet to find a good source). In GC News 132, we talked about AN as well when they raised $4.7M
AN called the incident a problem with its market maker getting hacked, but CT seemed sceptical…
An “onchain investigator” called Specter dove into the onchain data. According to his sleuth, wallets associated with the team minted 10B $RVV a few days before TGE, which were distributed to 13 addresses, and sold across different exchanges on the day of the launch
Additionally, presale participants weren’t able to claim their tokens at TGE as well. It seems the team decreased the unlock on TGE, added a cliff, and prolonged vesting
To add, players have been complaining about being pushed back 1000s of positions down the leaderboard, making them ineligible for any airdrop. And allegedly, the team replaced these spots with their own wallets
As part of its “recovery plan,” the AN team just bought back 200M of $RVV tokens, now holding onto ~$73K of tokens. But the buyback of tokens made a minimal difference, as the token is already down 63% since its TGE
Overall, the story is extremely fishy, and do note that all these accusations are alleged. Yet, it serves as a soft reminder that you shouldn’t trust business model flip-floppers that have little to show for
PIXEL DUNGEONS INTRODUCES SOCIAL DUNGEONS
A new and interesting experiment that caught my eye recently is Pixel Dungeon’s (PD) social dungeons, a new feature that creates in-game hooks for the audience that’s watching on Twitter
How it works:
The PD account or a creator livestreams on Twitter
Through interacting (like, repost, etc.) with a livestream, players can claim a free ticket to enter a dungeon (after they connect their Twitter to PD)
The more engagement from the audience, the more $PIXEL rewards are added to the prize pool, and the longer the event goes on
It also creates a deeper layer of engagement from a streamer<>player perspective
The first creator they partnered up with was Cagy, who managed to generate almost 30K views on his Twitter stream, which is very impressive
From here, the PD team is looking to expand through more collaborations with creators, and eventually introduce a % rake from the dungeon
PD essentially created a strong mechanism to convert an audience from the TL to the game through a free entrance ticket, which allows these users to compete for $PIXEL rewards. Making Twitter (potentially) a viable platform for UA
In terms of the numbers, during its first stream, they gave away ~$7K in rewards, and during its second stream, ~$6,500. With Cagy’s stream, they reach the highest player concurrency to date (unfortunately, no exact number)
Note: The rewards are likely coming from the $PIXELS game-staking system
The question becomes what % of these players is incentivized enough to continue to play and spend after using their free ticket, to recoup the “UA costs” (LTV > CAC or achieving a positive RORS)
Furthermore, there are a lot of different and interesting angles from a co-marketing perspective, through brands, other tokens, streamer parties, etc.
It also seems Twitter is finally becoming more pro-links? This could be bullish for cutting out an extra step to play the game. Now, they still point you to the profile page, where the link is located
