This article was first published on daily blockchain gaming Substack GamesTX.
Let’s look at the best performing blockchain game tokens of 2023. In some ways, this is a less vexed question than the most popular games as the raw data concerning the change in price of a token from 1st January 2023 compared to 1st January 2024 is not a point that is open to discussion. Please note, this analysis was undertaken prior to the recent crypto token volatility.
To that end, as the table below shows, the best performing tokens are not ones most people – even those in the sector – have heard of. This tends to be the case as tokens that can generate hundreds or more than a thousand percent returns are often small caps with low liquidity.
This isn’t to say that some of the top performers aren’t solid projects, however.
- CROWN is the token from horse racing breeding and gambling game Photo Finish Line from established developer Third Time Games.
- WRLD was the original token from Minecraft-inspired NFT Worlds, which is now rebranded as Hytopia, with WRLD reissued as TOPIA.
- Similarly, BIGTIME is the token from MMORPG Big Time, which has been a well-followed blockchain game for a couple of years.
Notably all CROWN, BIGTIME and TOPIA were launched (or relaunched) as new tokens during 2023, allowing them to take advantage of growing market sentiment.
In terms of larger market caps, the best performing blockchain game token currently listed in the top 200 of all cryptocurrencies was Wemade’s WEMIX governance token, which rode continued interest from the APAC region in 2023, rising an impressive 651%.
Looking more specifically at these 14 top tokens (as below), only one – APE – lost value in 2023, with the average performance being +223%.
In comparison, across the total dataset of 192 gaming tokens tracked, the average performance was +93%, with 55% seeing a rise and 45% a decline in price during 2023.
However, while the majority of these top projects saw a rise in token prices, some performed much better than others.
Immutable’s IMX ended the year up 455%, making it the top gaming token in terms of market cap, overtaking The Sandbox’s SAND and Axie Infinity’s AXS in the process. Both of these experienced fairly insipid growth in crypto terms of <50%.
In contrast to AXS, however, Sky Mavis’ RON, which is the native token for the Ronin blockchain that Axie Infinity and other games run on, was up a very strong 561%. No doubt this narrative cannibalized interest in AXS.
The other token worth discussing is Merit Circle’s MC token, which is now in the process of being migrated to the BEAM token at a ratio of 1 MC to 1,000 BEAM.
Significantly – as is the case with IMX, RON and WEMIX – BEAM is a gaming infrastructure token; Beam being Merit Circle’s Avalanche-based gaming L2 blockchain. New blockchain infrastructure was a big trend in 2023, thanks to the rise of Arbitrum, Optimism, Base etc, and this was a key reason behind the performance of these four gaming tokens.
Finally, let’s take the opportunity to mention the potential performance of the most successful tokens. Whatever you may think of crypto from a political, technical or moral point of view, you shouldn’t dismiss the returns, which – as listed below – measure the performance from the first time anyone could have bought a token on the open market.
- ETH up 77,496%
- AXS up 6,386%
- MANA up 5,273%
- GALA up 3,074%
Of course, it’s also important to note the converse that the other 99% of tracked tokens have not generated such returns.
Comments are closed.