🪩 This Past Month in Web3 Gaming

Welcome to another edition of Delphi’s monthly Gaming Roundup! Despite the broader crypto market performing quite well in April, with ETH making a run past $2,000, the Web3 gaming sector continued to follow a downward trend. This report will add color to the current market conditions to inform readers on what to expect in the coming months. Some of the standout highlights of the month include:

Ronin staking rewards go live and cause the token to pump
Gaming wallets fall to levels last seen in 2021
A terrible month for game funding, but not bad enough to deter Razer & Bitkraft
A billion-dollar Chinese game developer prepares to enter the market
New partnerships, updates, and releases from some of the biggest Web3 gaming companies

📈 State of the Market

The total market cap for all gaming-related tokens in April was $11.1B. This represents a 6% fall from last month, but we are still up compared to the end of 2022. Notable token unlocks included APE (1.56% of total supply – worth ~$66M), AXS (1.45% – $32M), IMX (0.6% – $18.8M), and RON (4.15% – $39.5M).

As illustrated in the table above, after a relatively strong first quarter, most of the top 10 gaming tokens by market cap are beginning to trend downward. This may be a price correction following ETH’s breakout back in January, but we will have to wait another couple of months before confirming. That being said, Ronin Network has continued to outperform other gaming tokens since last month. This is in large part thanks to the release of RON staking rewards.

On April 12th, Ronin officially announced that staking rewards are live. This news came shortly after the introduction of RON staking, which resulted in the token price increasing by >300% from December and volume spiking >1,270% over a 30-day period. Staking rewards may not have had an equally significant impact, but it was enough to pump the price and volume by 30% and 264%, respectively, w