Deciphering the Metaverse: Virtual Land Models

One of the core themes throughout this series has been the meteoric rise of blockchain-based gaming. While its development meandered unobtrusively through the crypto landscape in 2020, it finally took off at the beginning of this year. With the advent of this summer’s NFT mania, blockchain-based gaming also skyrocketed to unprecedented highs. Since reaching its second-highest peak at $219M four weeks ago, the weekly trading volume for gaming NFTs consistently shrunk on a weekly basis down to $129M.

But contrary to the overall impression, weekly trading volume has been on a consistent upswing since the middle of June if we exclude the incumbent, Axie Infinity. Fueled by the liquidity injection of launching its native DEX, Katana, Axie’s weekly trading volume spiked significantly in the week leading up to and the week after the launch, hitting $184M (+64.3% WoW) and $214M (+16.3% WoW), respectively. Despite attracting a lot of trading volume, the project was not able to keep up these levels and since then plummeted to $121M, thereby setting the agenda for the entire gaming market.