GC Alpha is a new newsletter format exploring P2A events, SocialFi, market narratives, and alpha more in-depth (GC on Monday | Newsletters on Wednesday).
Disclaimer: None of this information should be taken as financial advice. DYOR + I will hold some of the assets that are spoken of in this newsletter.
Soulbound is a decentralized social platform backed by Animoca Brands!
Share gameplay clips, feature your Twitch live streams, and complete in-game quests for rewards. Sign up here: https://soulbound.gg/invite/T4jvUstgOp
(P2A) EVENTS & SOCIALFI
SPELLBORNE
Spellborne is finally live, meaning everyone can access the game inside their browser (mobile and PC later this year).
Tip: you can join Discord and go to #ask-wiki, where a bot will answer all your questions regarding Spellborne or the P2A campaign. But here’s what you need to know:
You can complete three types of missions in the game: quests, task board missions, and daily missions. Besides this, you earn gameplay points for completing random tasks within the game
As you complete quests you collect various items, including Golden Nuggets and Shards:
Golden Nuggets can be collected by finding them in trash bins, completing events, and completing daily missions.
When you ask the bot the specific use of them isn’t stated, which makes me think they might be associated with an in-game token
Shards can be collected by completing various tasks within the game, and allow you to spin the wheel
Furthermore, there’s an airdrop score in the game, which can be increased by focusing on three main categories:
Gameplay points: earned by completing random tasks
Creator points: earned by creating content about Spellborne
Store points: earned by purchasing items in the in-game store
Other things to note: holding apartments can increase your score, each category has its own token allocation, items will be separate from your airdrop score
XOCIETY
Xociety is organizing a playtest on July 15th, Pop Extraction, the event will last 8 days
The event is accessible to anyone who pre-registers, however, players with an Extraction Crate receive exclusive perks: including a separate pool of tokens and unique skins
You can receive a code for an Extraction Crate through their Discord and collabs
The rewards are not limited to Xociety, as prizes from other games/ecosystems will be handed out (SUI, League of Kingdom, GDX, etc.)
Besides the playtest they are running a larger P2A campaign, which rewards you for completing social quests daily
APE ARCADE
The token launchpad Ape Terminal recently introduced its new gaming initiative Ape Arcade
At the moment Ape Arcade includes 3 types of browser games, that can also be played on Telegram (an idle clicker, match3/puzzle, and dungeon crawler)
Players compete to earn Ape/ATX Points, prizes, and tickets to (IDO) launches
Ape Terminal is one of the most popular launchpads without a live token, this campaign seems like a good opportunity to gain exposure to a future token launch
FLASH EVENTS
Serum City started S2 today, with a $100K (in APE) prize pool
Pre-register now for Supervillain Wanted for the scheduled launch on July 30
RavenQuest announced their P2A is coming with a 10M QUEST in prizes
Faraway will have a growing prize pool that starts with $100K
Space Nation started an (NFT-gated) playtest with a prize pool of 1M OIK
MARKET TALK
TWO GAMING MINTS + SENTIMENT
Last week we talked about The Beacon minting out, that same day Counter Fire minted out its 2168 supply (1500 mintable) Genesis Heroes Collection for 0.075 a piece.
Other than these two we had the CCP Premium Pass mint in late June, which did fairly well for a free mint, and the gaming-adjacent mint Bad Egg Co., sitting at over 3x from its 0.099 mint price
Overall, it’s telling that gaming NFT sentiment isn’t too bad, even though the market is in shambles right now, so let’s get to the two gaming mints for this week:
Lizard Labs (3333 supply, 2667 mintable, free, July 9th): the main selling point of the NFT is getting access to every deal on the Lizard Launchpad
With increasing number of launchpads being “launched” this year (XBORG, Elixir, GAM3S, etc.) I do find this selling point to lose its value
On the contrary, the ETH Lizards is quite an active community and an investment DAO. I wouldn’t be surprised if a chunk of their members scoops up a good amount of them (the effects are stackable 20x)
Additionally, they held a launchpad sale with Moonfrost, which seemed pretty exclusive, as I didn’t see it anywhere else in my network of access to token pre-sales. This might be telling of the quality of their connections
The current ETH Lizards Genesis Collection is at ~0.30 ETH floor price.
All-in-all I expect this mint to go somewhere in the 0.07 - 0.12 ETH range D1
Moku (8888 supply, 4200 mintable at 55 $RON/~$100, July 9th)
Firstly, the Moku raffle generated 4,675,200 RON (~$10.1M in RON on June 26) in financial interest. Pretty good for a project that doesn’t explicitly say they will launch a token
Ronin’s market activity surged in 2024, and multiple successful NFT collections were launched on the platform this year (Kaidro, Nyan, and Wild Forest)
The Ronin ecosystem gobbles up high-supply price collections
Lastly, I think, in the public eye, not many know that Moku has onboarded all of the current games that joined Ronin in the past months. Plus the NFT will have a (still unannounced) way to accrue value
Overall, I think we will see around a 2-3x here on D1
THE NEXT CATALYST
Sparkc often has great takes on the market, which makes good food for thought. Last week he posted this Tweet, voicing his take on the current gaming market
He addresses here that Web3 gaming needs another catalyst event to set off a gaming bull run, similar to Axie in 2021. So which game could that be?
My gut is saying it’s a studio from SEA/SA, mobile native, attached to a publisher ecosystem (e.g. Ronin and WEMIX), with a focus on guilds, so quite similar to Axie, but of higher quality and with stronger social loops/design
However, I am not overlooking non-SEA native mobile/browser games with potential that are getting closer to their (global) launch: Fableborne, King of Destiny, Jungle, CityVerse Tycoon, and Paradise Tycoon, to name a few (many of my bags to be transparent)
Outside of mobile, I am hearing Off the Grid comes closest to any Web2 experience people played so far, other than that there’s Wildcard, and MapleStory Universe of course
Lastly, it should be mentioned that gaming is a long-term play, games take years to develop as we all know. So, if we don’t see a breakout hit in Q3/Q4 ‘24, there will still be plenty of exciting launches in ‘25
ON THE RISE
Cambria’s Gold Rush Event looks promising + they raised $2.5M recently