Weekly Overview: What Happened in GameFi, NFTs, and Metaverse This Week? [November 18–25]
We collect this week’s highlights on NFTs, play-to-earn, and metaverse which are the main topics we hear more and more details about every day.
For those who do not want to miss the most influential news about the industry among dozens of news, we have compiled the top five of the week for you.
“Metaverse Supporter” Bob Iger Returns to CEO at Disney
Bob Iger, known for his support of the metaverse and the crypto world, announced that Disney’s current CEO, Bob Chapek, has taken over and is making a surprise return.
Iger was CEO at Disney from 2005 to 2020, during which time the company bought Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm and launched the digital streaming service Disney+. This time, he will return for 2 years and the former CEO is thought to have been brought back not to stabilize the ship, but to completely change course.
Disney is currently heading towards its worst annual loss since the 1970s. The sharp decline in its shares peaked at $203.02 in March 2021, and was 91.80 on November 18, down 41 percent year on year. After the announcement of Bob Iger on November 20, it saw $ 104 at the opening on Monday, November 21. Thus, it recorded its most substantial value since the beginning of November.
The announcement of Iger as CEO is significant for Web3 and the crypto market because he had been a director, advisor, and investor in Genies, a digital avatar platform running on Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain. Iger is known for his support for Web3 and the crypto world. In addition, while Iger was the CEO of Disney, he licensed a “virtual-world simulator in a real-world venue” patent related to the metaverse in December last year.
Disney continued to work on metaverse, NFTs and blockchain technologies in Iger’s absence. They began hiring a lead consultant last September to work on NFTs, the metaverse, blockchain and decentralized finance (DeFi).
Recently, it was reported that the company is looking for someone to provide legal advice and support specifically for global NFT products and work to ensure compliance with all applicable laws and regulations in the US and internationally.
Proof of Reserve Tracking Services Expands
Crypto price monitoring sites CoinMarketCap (CMC) and CoinGecko have introduced a feature where the reserves of centralized crypto exchanges can be tracked to increase transparency for crypto investors.
After FTX’s liquidity crisis in the past few weeks, crypto exchanges began to share evidence of reserves to reassure their investors. Underlying this is the fact that stock markets think that there is a need for transparency after the crisis in the market. This new feature is currently available for seven centralized crypto exchanges, including Binance, KuCoin, and Bitfinex.
CoinMarketCap announced the new feature with its announcement on Twitter on November 22. Binance CEO and co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao shared this on his personal Twitter account, who was already one of the people who took the initiative to share evidence of reserve after the FTX crisis. CMC gets the data from Nansen, DefiLlama, and the exchanges’ own websites. It also aims to update information every five minutes.
According to CoinMarketCap’s tweet thread, Proof of Reserves includes:
🔹The Total Asset
🔹Public Wallet Address Ownership
🔹Balance, Price & Value of Public Wallets
🔹Updated Every 5 Minutes
Cryptocurrency investment product servicer Grayscale is currently keeping a distance from the proof of reserve system. The company said it will not implement this feature for now due to security concerns.
LandVault Brings Metaverse Ad Integration
Metaverse ad platform LandVault has partnered with Decentral Games to bring integrated advertising to the industry. Ads will be broadcast in the game “ICE Poker” in Decentraland, which has 7–8 thousand daily active users.
In the bear season, where the downtrend in the industry continues, new investment and income opportunities are being searched for the metaverse. Companies entering the Metaverse sector are experiencing financial difficulties in terms of generating revenue, investment, and development costs. Meta’s trouble with this issue was the subject of the news:
In this respect, the integration of advertising into the metaverse is important in terms of the economic problems faced by the industry. Although it is not enough to end the recession, it can give the sector a breath of fresh air. LandVault has established 100 million square feet of metaverse real estate, which it has built in Sandbox and Decentraland, to increase its integration with Web3 brands. Company; in addition to Heineken, Mastercard also collaborates with brands such as Mutant Ape Yacht Club and World of Women.
Blockchain Game Company Fenix Games Receives $150 Million Investment
Fenix Games, which aims to become a Web3 and blockchain game publisher, announced that it has received a $150 million investment in an investment round involving Phoenix Group and Cypher Capital.
The startup describes its way as Next Generation Publishing. The company sees itself as a new and inevitable trend of blockchain games and thinks that it will attract more attention from investor companies in the coming years. The purpose of the company is to support the industry, invest in existing games and blockchain games in the coming period, buy them and publish their games.
Chris Ko, CEO and co-founder of Fenix Games, said “You can think of us as like a VC fund,”. “The market is similar to earlier [mobile gaming at the rise of free-to-play games] but it hasn’t found its Clash of Clans for blockchain games yet. We’re using the VC arm to fund the next generation of games. We’re actually going to start off with a huge base of capital to invest in those studios. We’re also looking to use our balance sheet to acquire a bunch of existing games in the Web2 space to build a portfolio. And that will be the right base for our portfolio.”
WEMIX to be Excluded from Five Exchanges in South Korea
The Digital Asset Exchange Alliance (DAXA), known as South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, announced that they will remove WEMIX, the blockchain platform of gaming company Wemade, from their lists.
As of November 24, Bithumb, Upbeat, Coinone, Korbit and Gopax, known as the Digital Asset Exchange Alliance (DAXA), announced that the WEMIX token will be delisted. It also announced that it would remove its trading operations, on December 8.
The reason for the problem is that DAXA, in an investment alert they published on October 27, claims that there are more than the WEMIX circulations announced by WEMIX.
Wemade is best known for its hit series The Legend of Mir franchise, which features one of the world’s most popular blockchain games, Mir 4, which had over 200 million records. In addition, the company announced on November 2 that it had raised $46 million in investments from Microsoft and asset management companies Kiwoom Securities and Shinhan Asset Management.
Upon DAXA’s delist decision, WEMIX made the following statement:
“The WEMIX team does not acknowledge or agree with the unreasonable decision made by the Digital Asset Exchange Alliance (DAXA)… It is crucial to note that the Foundation has not circulated a single WEMIX more than what we have officially disclosed thus far” by saying they will continue actively invest to build the global digital economy platform.
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