Author: Stella L (stella@footprint.network)

Data Source: Footprint Analytics Games Research Page

In August, the cryptocurrency market faced severe challenges, with significant declines in the values of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin fell by 9.3%, while Ethereum's decline was even more severe, reaching 21.4%, reflecting market volatility triggered by global economic factors. Despite the decline in token market value, the Web3 gaming sector continued to show resilience. Daily active users (DAUs) increased by 6.88%, and transaction volume increased by 8.94%, mainly driven by platforms such as Ronin and opBNB. However, the blockchain gaming industry did not completely escape the overall market downturn, as the market value of gaming tokens decreased by 13.2%.

Despite the turbulent market environment, the continued development of Web3 innovation remains a focus of industry attention, especially with industry giants like Sony making progress in the blockchain field.

Macro Market Review

In August, both Bitcoin and Ethereum experienced significant declines. The price of Bitcoin at the beginning of the month was $65,290, and by the end of the month, it had fallen to $59,246, a decrease of 9.3%. The downward trend for Ethereum was more pronounced, dropping from $3,220 to $2,531, a decrease of 21.4%.

Data Source: Bitcoin and Ethereum Price Trends

The unexpected announcement of a rate hike by the Bank of Japan at the end of July triggered a chain reaction across various markets. Strategies such as short-term volatility and forex arbitrage trading saw a significant decline in returns, leading to a sharp drop in cryptocurrency values in the first week of August. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum reached their lowest points of the month on August 7.

Sustained selling pressure persisted throughout the month, with factors such as government actions and legacy issues from Mt. Gox exacerbating this trend, although the impact of these factors gradually diminished.

Meanwhile, Ethereum was undergoing a significant transformation, causing uncertainty among some investors. The blockchain planned to achieve scalability by moving more transactions to the Layer 2 network. This year, activity on the Ethereum Layer 2 network has increased significantly, with giants like Sony launching projects such as Soneium within this ecosystem. However, the shift of activity to Layer 2 has led to a decrease in Ethereum transaction fee revenue, which may affect the value of Ether.

At the end of the month, after the arrest of Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, in France, the market's focus increasingly turned to the relationship between blockchain technology and digital privacy. Although Federal Reserve Chairman Powell "hinted" at the possibility of a rate cut later in the month, overall market sentiment remained predominantly negative throughout the month.

Overview of the Blockchain Gaming Market

In August, the market value of blockchain gaming tokens decreased from $1.82 billion to $1.53 billion, a decrease of 13.2%. In comparison, the market value of Bitcoin decreased by 8.6%. Like other parts of the cryptocurrency market, the blockchain gaming industry experienced a challenging month.

Data Source: Market Value of Blockchain Gaming Tokens and Bitcoin

Despite the market downturn, the daily active users (DAUs) of Web3 games in August reached 4.15 million, an increase of 6.88% compared to July. This growth was mainly driven by activity on Ronin and opBNB.

Data Source: Daily Active Users of Blockchain Games

The average daily transaction volume of blockchain games reached 8.86 million transactions, a slight decrease of 0.46% from July. A notable trend is the surge in on-chain transactions, mainly driven by Telegram games such as Tapos on the Aptos network. Due to the game mechanics, each click generates a transaction, leading to a peak daily transaction volume of over 50 million transactions on Aptos. Currently, we have not included this data in the statistics, as we intend to observe this trend over a longer time span.

Data Source: Daily Transaction Volume of Blockchain Games

The daily transaction volume of blockchain games reached 17.04 million, an increase of 8.94% from July. This data has excluded some abnormal data points from the previous month.

Data Source: Daily Transaction Amount of Blockchain Games

Overall, despite the month-over-month growth in daily active users, transaction volume, and transaction amount in August, the decline in the market value of blockchain gaming tokens still highlights the challenges faced by the overall cryptocurrency market, with token prices and market value showing a downward trend.

In the context of market volatility, Soneium has become a hot topic. On August 23, Sony Blockchain Solutions Labs, a joint initiative by Sony Group and Startale Labs, announced the launch of a new Layer 2 network called Soneium, based on Ethereum. The network will utilize Optimism's OP Stack technology to integrate Web3 innovation with consumer applications across gaming, entertainment, and finance.

In the week following the announcement, Soneium made rapid progress, including the launch of the "Minato" testnet, the initiation of the "Soneium Spark" program for developers, and a partnership with Transak to provide global fiat on-ramp services. With industry giants like Sony continuing to enter the blockchain space, there is growing optimism about bringing more users into the Web3 ecosystem.

Public Blockchains for Blockchain Games

In August, a total of 1,492 games were active on various blockchain networks, a decrease of 5.45% from July. BNB Chain, Polygon, and Ethereum led the market with market shares of 20.2%, 17.4%, and 17.0% respectively.

Data Source: Percentage of Active Game Projects on Various Public Chains

Ronin, opBNB, Nebula (SKALE Subnet), and NEAR showed outstanding performance in terms of DAUs, averaging 1.34 million, 691,000, 349,000, and 321,000 respectively in the month. By the end of August, these chains held 28.0%, 23.8%, 8.8%, and 6.6% of the DAU market share, respectively.

Data Source: Daily Active Users of Games on Various Public Chains

Ronin's DAU market share continued to decline in August, dropping from 38.1% on August 1 to 28.0% on August 31. Despite this, Ronin's average DAU in August was still nearly twice that of opBNB. This downward trend was mainly caused by the performance of the game Lumiterra, with its DAUs dropping from 600,000 at the beginning of the month to 150,000 by the end.

Additionally, on August 6, the Ronin cross-chain bridge was temporarily suspended due to a white-hat hacker attack, which exposed a critical misconfiguration in the cross-chain bridge upgrade proposal. Approximately $12 million worth of cryptocurrency was transferred. Although the issue was quickly resolved, and all funds were recovered, this event had a certain impact on the activity in the Ronin ecosystem.

In contrast, opBNB's DAU share increased from 17.5% in August to 23.8%. By August 31, its market share had almost doubled from 13.1% on July 1. The game SERAPH: In The Darkness, which was launched on opBNB in mid-July, garnered significant attention, with its DAUs increasing from 187,000 on August 1 to 515,000 by the end of the month.

Nebula also saw an increase in market share, rising from 7.6% to 8.8%. As a SKALE subnet adopting a "Zero Gas Fee" model, Nebula's growth was driven by games such as Yomi Block Puzzle, moteDEX, and Haven’s Compass.

Overview of Blockchain Games

In August, the blockchain gaming ecosystem comprised a total of 3,401 games, with 1,254 games in active status. Among these active games, 290 attracted over 1,000 monthly active on-chain users (MAUs), accounting for 8.5% of the total number of games and 23.1% of the active games.

Data Source: Number of Monthly Active Blockchain Games

As mentioned earlier, the launch of Telegram game Tapos on Aptos in August marked a significant development. This strategy indicates that, in addition to the TON network, more and more blockchain platforms are actively seeking to attract traffic and users through Telegram games.

In addition, one of the most popular games on Telegram, "Hamster Kombat," announced plans to launch its HMSTR token on TON on September 26 and conduct an airdrop for players. Despite claiming to have attracted 300 million players, it seems that only the token will be integrated onto the chain. The core mechanics of the game and user activity are expected to remain off-chain, so the direct impact on blockchain metrics is expected to be limited.

Investment Situation in Blockchain Gaming

In August, the blockchain gaming sector received a total of $61.5 million in investments, involving 17 funding rounds, a 61% increase compared to June. Four funding activities did not disclose specific funding amounts.

Blockchain gaming investment events in August 2024 (Source: crypto-fundraising.info)

It is worth noting that GAMEE appears twice in the above funding chart, which is not a statistical error. As the mobile gaming platform behind WatBird and a subsidiary of Animoca Brands, GAMEE successfully completed two rounds of funding in August. On August 16, GAMEE announced investment from TON Ventures, followed by an investment from Pantera Capital on August 21. With over 4 million users connecting their TON wallets to WatBird, GAMEE is focused on attracting more gaming and Web3 communities, GameFi investors, and Telegram users through community-driven activities on its Telegram Mini App.

Animoca Brands led or participated in 6 of the 17 funding events in August, indicating their unwavering commitment to driving the development of the Web3 gaming industry despite macroeconomic fluctuations.

Interest from industry giants in the Web3 gaming sector continues to grow. For example, double jump.tokyo announced raising over $10 million in its Series D funding round, led by SBI Investment with participation from Sony Group. This funding will be used to accelerate the development of blockchain games and infrastructure, including the blockchain platform Oasys developed by double jump.tokyo.

Additionally, the projects SatsRush and UniWorlds completed funding rounds aimed at building games based on the Bitcoin ecosystem.

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