In today’s newsletter:
🔎How can crypto go mainstream?
📊On-chain alpha
😂Crypto meme of the week
🗞️The latest DeFi news
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🔎How can crypto go mainstream?
Well, it has finally happened.
A web3 game entered Twitch's top 3 most viewed games for the first time ever.
The game I’m talking about is Off The Grid - an Avalanche-based F2P Extraction Royale game that was launched just a few days ago.
For a short period of time, it even exceeded Fortnite in popularity on Epic Games, reaching millions of downloads in just a few days.
Off The Grid seems to be the first web3 game that has gone mainstream.
What led to its huge success?
As some of you know, web3 gaming isn’t a sector I often talk about. However, I believe that analyzing what makes Off The Grid so successful can be helpful in determining what could be the next dApp to take off.
I spent some time playing it this week.
Here are 3 things that I believe make it stand out:
The blockchain technology is completely abstracted away
Off The Grid is built on an Avalanche subnet.
But all the blockchain stuff is fully abstracted away. You don’t need to create a wallet first, get funds from CEXs for gas fees, or sign transactions to play it.
The game does all of this on behalf of the users in the backend. Playing it is like playing any other web2 game.
Smart strategic partnerships
Off The Grid team has partnered with some of the biggest streamers in the world including Ninja, Shroud, and Dr. Disrespect to promote the game.
You can imagine that this wasn’t cheap. But many crypto games have raised insane amounts of money from VCs.
Partnerships like this between web3 games and top streamers seem a great way to convince people to try these games.
Off The Grid is actually fun
95% of crypto projects don’t solve any real problem.
In the same way, most crypto games are not fun at all as they are focused more on the economic aspect rather than on the actual gameplay.
This is in my opinion a big mistake. If people are playing a game only in order to earn some tokens, that game is poised to fail.
In contrast, Off The Grid is very enjoyable and is similar to or even better than other modern AAA games in terms of graphics.
The game drops 150 players into a reality show-like experience, where they have to fight against each other to survive in large-scale online matches.
What can be learned from this?
Crypto still feels like the internet in the early days.
A small no. of projects found product-market fit (like Polymarket and Off The Grid did), while the others are still trying to figure out how to do it.
Yet I’m confident that in the next 12 months, we’ll see several other crypto projects going mainstream. (and start being used by ppl outside of our CT bubble)
But I can’t stress this enough:
If you're a web3 developer trying to onboard normies to your dApp, it's crucial to abstract away blockchain complexities as much as possible.
The bad UX is in my opinion one of the biggest issues that crypto faces right now.
Some UX projects I’m paying attention to
Fortunately, many projects are currently working on improving the on-chain user experience and building products that can compete with web2 apps.
A few of them are:
Rabby Wallet - DeBank’s user-friendly wallet developed for EVM chains
INFINIT - The first DeFi Abstraction Layer for simplifying development
Coinbase web app wallet - which enables going from no wallet to minting an NFT in less than a minute
Infinex - A crypto UX layer built by the Synthetix founder
Ctrl Wallet - A novel wallet that offers a unified multichain portfolio
Defi App - a decentralized SuperApp built to simplify on-chain interactions
Everclear - a project that aims to solve the liquidity fragmentation issue
And I’m sure there are many more.
Over the past few years, infrastructure protocols have been the ones that have gotten the most money from VCs and the most attention.
I think it’s time for projects that solve major UX problems to shine.
We already have many highly scalable blockchains, the gas fees are no longer high in most cases, and spinning up a new chain is now easier than ever before.
Now we need to build dApps that address real problems and bring a true web2-like user experience on-chain.
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On-chain Alpha🔎
Base became the largest Ethereum L2 by TVL
Base is the first L2 that managed to surpass Arbitrum in TVL in quite a long time.
In the past 30 days alone, its TVL increased by over 50%.
Over 50% of this liquidity comes from a single application, Aerodrome, the go-to native DEX for Base.
While Arbitrum still seems to be the L2 with the most interesting utility projects, Base has benefited a lot from the surge in the popularity of memecoins.
Crypto Meme😂
The latest developments in DeFi
SEC Commissioner admitted their approach to crypto has been a disaster
Hyperliquid introduced its token $HYPE
Hyperlane introduced Superlane - an interoperability layer that aims to connect Optimism Superchain L2s
Sonic (prev. Fantom) announced the upcoming deployment of Pendle on Sonic
Asymmetry Finance introduced its token $ASF and announced its sale date on Fjord Foundry for October 24. Asymmetry is a novel synthetic dollar protocol
Zero1 Labs launched a new $DEAI staking vault and teased a major partnership announcement for the next week
Aethir Cloud released a $100M ecosystem fund for AI and gaming
Mantle's Methamorphosis S1 Airdrop Campaign concluded and the MNT Buildathon was announced. 15% of the COOK token supply is allocated to the Methamorphosis S1 airdrop
INFINIT, a DeFi abstraction layer, released a Points Rewards System. You can earn INFINIT Stones by just using dApps like Pendle, Solv Protocol, and Ethena
Mode L2 introduced veMODE, a new vote escrow model for distributing ecosystem incentives
Pancakeswap introduced PancakeSwapX, a DEX aggregator that comes with MEV protection
Solv Protocol, a decentralized BTC reserve, raised $25M in total funding
Fuel Labs launched Fuel Ignition, a high-performance Ethereum L2. Fuel enables parallel execution to achieve higher scalability
Ethena’s proposal to onboard SOL as a USDe backing asset went live
That’s all for this week!
Until next time,
The DeFi Investor
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