Does the DOGE Rally Mean "Alt Szn?"

🌅 Welcome!

A metaverse school is coming to a Northeast Asian city and a pilot CDBC is coming to the world’s second most populous country. 

Today, we take a look into the recent DOGE rally and what it could mean for the rest of the market and our Research team provides insights on web3 gaming distribution.

This is the Delphi Daily. Let’s dive in.

🚨 In Case You Missed It

• The Japanese city of Toda initiates a metaverse schooling service where students can study in virtual classrooms.
• India’s central bank will introduce a pilot central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the form of digital rupee.
• The U.S. Department of Justice assigns a new team to investigate Tether as the case struggles to reach a conclusion.
• A judicial report reveals that crypto lender Hodlnaut lost nearly $190M in the UST collapse.
• Singapore‘s central bank reminds all crypto exchanges to comply with EU sanctions against Russia.

📊 Does the DOGE Rally Mean “Alt Szn?”

• After weeks of moving within a narrow range, crypto assets are showing signs of life. Over the past seven days, ETH is up 14% while DOGE is up 102%. Other meme tokens have also outperformed with ELON rallying 59% and FLOKI gaining 42%.
• Seemingly, the rationale behind this price action in meme tokens has been attributed to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. 
• Historically, a strong rally in DOGE has marked the beginning of an “alt szn” – a time period characterized by aggressive risk-taking behavior where capital flows to crypto assets other than BTC.
• Most recently, we’ve seen this scenario play out during the first half of 2021 when DOGE price increased by 172x while BTC dominance decreased by 42%. Previously, this has also occurred in May 2017 and January 2018. 
• Different sectors take turns rallying. Generally, a bull market starts with an increase in BTC price. This is typically followed by a rally in ETH, after which other altcoins begin to rally.
• Given that we’ve already seen price increases in ETH and DOGE, several market participants are also expecting a rally in other altcoins. It remains to be seen if this rally has any legs or if this is merely generating exit liquidity before we hit new lows.

⚡A Primer for Web3 Distribution

• In 2020, 91% of the $175B gaming industry revenues came from digital sales. Things are only expected to go up from here, with the market for digital games estimated to reach $560B by 2028.
• Digital distribution platforms play a pivotal role in this growth as they help onboard more developers and aid players in discovering the best content.
• From 2004 to today, multiple companies have adopted the digital distribution service model, including Steam, Good Old Games (GOG.com), EA’s Origin, and the Epic Games Store (EGS).
• Post-2010, the adoption of mobile gaming resulted in the meteoric rise of Apple’s App Store (for iOS devices) and Google’s Play Store (for Android devices). By 2020, 91% of the total $175B game industry revenue came from digital sales.

• When examining the Web3 landscape, it quickly becomes apparent that due to the nascent nature of the industry, things are not as clearly laid out as they are in the traditional digital distribution market.
• It is also important to preface this by outlining two key challenges preventing the widespread adoption of blockchain-based games; high barriers to entry and discoverability.
• The story starts with the battle of the blockchains, where the most prominent providers are fighting among one another to offer the most funding, the fastest and cheapest transactions, the highest level of support, and the best suite of SDKs/APIs to attract more game developers into Web3.
• The chart above illustrates the number of active wallets interacting with gaming protocols, which can be taken as rough insight (wallet interactions do not equate to active players) into the interest in gaming throughout each of the largest blockchains.
• Interactions on Hive and WAX are dominated by three games: Splinterlands, Alien Worlds, and Farmers World, which slightly skew the chart.
• However, it is encouraging to see the “underdog” Solana slowly catching up to the more established gaming chains, BNB and Polygon, both of which see many new games being deployed each month.
• For more on the Web3 distribution, Delphi members can read our Delphi Pro report here.

🐣 Notable Tweets

Vitalik on Crypto Regulation

Should I publicly blab my opinions about crypto regulation more? Feels unfair to let other people get attacked by CT but never actually poke my own head out.

– vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) Oct 30, 2022

Rugs on Uniswap

According to this research 97.7% of tokens launched on @Uniswap were rugs.

– drnick 🗳️² (@DrNickA) Oct 31, 2022