Gaming activity is bubbling up on buzzy new Ethereum scaler Blast, and while one game has already fallen victim to an exploit on the nascent network, another is yielding rave reviews from players while driving Blast’s most-traded token.
Crypto Valleys is the game in question, and it initially appears to tread upon similar ground as Pixels, the popular farming game on competing scaler Ronin. But while Pixels is a relatively robust experience akin to traditional video games, Crypto Valleys—at least in its initial incarnation—is focused on keeping DeFi degens coming back to harvest more gains.
In the web-based game, you’ll buy NFT-based seeds with the game’s YIELD token and plant them, and then eventually harvest the produce… to earn even more YIELD. Rinse and repeat. Crypto Valleys has more ambitious aims ahead, as spelled out in the game’s documentation and in social media threads, but for now it looks pretty simple and streamlined.
The addition of “gacha” elements helps spice things up, coming in the form of NFT seed packs with randomized contents. Gacha games are akin to loot boxes in many popular games, which promise rewards that could range wildly from common to extravagant. You don’t know until you open them, however, which fuels the FOMO.
Want massive YIELD gains from your next crop? Well, those could be found in your next seed pack. Maybe. That kind of alluring possibility is ready-made to drive users to grab their Ethereum wallets, particularly when there’s a surging token driving it all.
Crypto Valleys’ YIELD is currently the most-traded token across all of Blast, per data from DexScreener, with about $13 million worth of trading volume over the past 24 hours.
The price pumped to about $17 on Thursday and then cooled off into Friday, but has been rising again Saturday to a current price of $13.60 as of this writing. That gives the token a $95 million market cap. The tokens were initially offered for sale in-game at a price of around $0.15 each—just last week.
Amid growing buzz around the game, Crypto Valleys gave out a free-to-mint collection of 1,500 character NFTs. The assets now start at about 0.4 ETH, or $1,350 as of this writing, on the secondary market and have yielded over $4 million worth of trading volume so far.
Crypto Valleys has drawn comparisons to earlier crypto game DeFi Kingdoms, which wrapped the mechanics of decentralized finance trading into a fantasy role-player.
But the gacha mechanics, paired with the potential yield opportunities around the booming Blast ecosystem, appear to have supercharged the serotonin hit that players are getting this time around. Players can also earn “Blast Gold,” or special points that go towards the upcoming Blast network token airdrop for users.
Over the last couple of days, the hype tweets around finding rare, valuable seeds and sharing farming strategies have been steadily circulating across Crypto Twitter. We’ll see whether degens stick around long enough to watch these digital crops—and the game around them—mature, or if they quickly move on to find the next juicy yield elsewhere.