This year the crypto market is showing less momentum and perhaps even a certain saturation. A paradigm of this is Axie Infinity, the largest crypto-game, which went from being an economic livelihood for some to crumbling. There are other similar platforms such as Decentraland or The SandBox, all of them work with their own cryptocurrency, something that forces them to have a careful economic design that meets different characteristics.
What happens is that after the initial boom, the enthusiasm for Axie Infinity has been lost and this made the value of its cryptocurrency fall. The other two platforms, Decentraland and The SandBox, have met an identical fate.
The cryptocurrency market is not going through its best moment since Bitcoin reached a record high of US$65,000 and then plummeted and lost more than half of its value. The blow was even harder for cryptocurrencies of platforms such as Axie Infinity.
To top it off, Axie Infinity was a protagonist in the biggest theft so far in the crypto world. An attacker managed to access the system that validates transfers to steal around 173,600 ethers, which are worth close to 600 million dollars, and 25.5 million USDC.
Last Thursday, April 14, the FBI attributed the attack on the Ronin network of the Axie Infinity video game to a North Korean hacker group known as Lazarus Group. This organization has been responsible for some of the most renowned attacks in recent years.
Cryptogames have only been one part of this crypto asset slump. The other big leg has been NFTs, which were the big fever on the web for much of 2021.
In March, designer Beeple sold one of his digital works for US$69 million, something that sparked interest in the sector. Several deals followed, and dozens of stories of people becoming millionaires from NFTs were replicated.
But skeptics warned that behind the NFTs was a bubble and a high risk of scams. In the last month, the market capitalization of NFTs has fallen by about 80% and is now around 10 billion.This is in addition to the fact that, in January, the OpenSea marketplace -the largest NFT buying and selling website- acknowledged that 80% of the content they hosted was fake, plagiarized or directly related to some kind of scam.
