Nowadays, it’s hardly surprising to see Play-to-Earn (P2E) mechanics in new projects entering the market. P2E originated within blockchain games and the crypto economy, becoming popular due to its ability to allow players to earn real money by playing video games. This approach opened new opportunities for millions of people worldwide, especially in developing countries where video games became a source of income. However, despite the initial hype, P2E encountered several challenges, including a decline in player interest.

Indeed, P2E primarily focuses on the user’s ability to earn money, often neglecting the important aspect of gameplay. As a result, the gameplay in P2E games, based on repetitive actions, turns into a routine and kills all the fun.

To regain users’ interest in blockchain games, the P2E concept needed a rethinking. Thus, the rising trend of Play-and-Earn (P&E) games was born. Unlike P2E, it focuses not only on earning but also on the quality of gameplay and player engagement. In this model, earning is more of a pleasant addition rather than the main goal of the game. Players are rewarded for performing various actions in the game, but the game mechanics and storyline remain the main focus. This approach helps retain users longer and creates a healthier gaming economy.

But how did this new genre come about?

The Play-and-Earn concept was first articulated by Bao Doan, CEO of Pixel Craft Studio and former developer at Sky Mavis, known primarily for the popular game Axie Infinity. At the recently held GM Vietnam 2024 conference, he stated that Play-and-Earn is “the next step in the evolution of the gaming economy and industry as a whole.”

Indeed, it seems that P&E offers a more sustainable and motivating model for players than its predecessor P2E.

“What’s the point of turning entertainment into job? When creating a game, it’s important to remember what exactly you are creating and why. And what your players will seek in it,” Bao Doan said.

As a key figure in creating the Play-and-Earn concept, Bao Doan emphasized the importance of balancing enjoyment with the opportunity to earn. Apparently, his experience at Sky Mavis, working on Axie Infinity, allowed him to see the weaknesses of projects focused solely on earning.

Axie Infinity became a symbol of the success of the Play-to-Earn model, but over time, the project faced difficulties. The game’s economy became subject to inflation, player interest declined, leading to a search for new paths in the industry’s development. It was on this wave that Bao Doan proposed the Play-and-Earn concept, which focuses on entertainment and player engagement.

So, what is the main advantage of the Play-and-Earn concept?

It seems to lie in a balanced approach to gameplay. Players primarily play for enjoyment, immersing themselves in captivating worlds and developing their characters. However, they can also receive rewards for their achievements, which becomes an additional motivation rather than the sole purpose.

This approach also creates a more sustainable gaming economy. Since earning is not the main motivator, in-game currency and assets become more stable, avoiding sharp fluctuations and inflation that undermine long-term interest in projects. Developers, in turn, can focus on creating quality content that attracts and retains players, rather than constantly searching for new monetization methods.

Play-and-Earn is already beginning to change the paradigm in the gaming industry. Companies previously focused solely on the Play-to-Earn model are starting to adapt their projects by adding elements aimed at improving user experience and engagement. This shift towards a more game-centric and sustainable approach opens new opportunities for developers and investors, attracting a wider audience.

Thus, Play-and-Earn can rightfully be considered the future of the gaming industry, combining the best features of traditional games and innovative blockchain technologies. The concept proposed by Bao Doan has already begun to change the approach to game creation and perception, emphasizing fun and engagement rather than earning money at all costs. This genre has every chance to become the foundation for new successful projects, capable of attracting millions of players and creating a sustainable gaming economy that benefits both users and developers.

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Hyperbolic’s blockchain-based cloud platform aims to make AI affordable to startups, researchers and builders squeezed by surging GPU prices.

Hyperbolic, one of the newer contenders in the race to apply blockchain tech to artificial intelligence, has raised $7 million in a seed funding round led by Polychain Capital and Lightspeed Faction.

The AI boom has strained the global supply chain for graphics processing units (GPUs) and other hardware used to train AI models. Surging hardware prices have squeezed all but the best-resourced AI outfits, making it difficult for startups and researchers to access AI alongside Big Tech companies like Microsoft, Google and Meta.

Hyperbolic’s blockchain-based cloud platform aims to make AI hardware affordable for a wider swath of builders.

“Currently, AI companies are reportedly spending over 80% of their capital on compute resources, without a cost-effective solution on the market, and causing an industry-wide bottleneck due to cost and distribution challenges,” Hyperbolic explained in a statement shared with CoinDesk. “Hyperbolic’s solution addresses this issue by creating a scalable system to aggregate global GPU compute and leveraging blockchain technology to ensure their network of nodes operates in a verifiable and secure manner.”

Hyperbolic’s first product will be an AI inference service that allows builders to use state-of-the-art AI models “at a fraction of the cost,” according to the company. (After an AI model is trained, it makes “inferences” based on user requests, such as when ChatGPT responds to user queries.)

In the long term, the firm plans to build a “GPU marketplace” that offers developers and researchers cheaper access to cloud computing hardware for training their own AI models.
The seed round included participation from Chapter One, LongHash, Bankless Ventures, Republic Digital, Nomad Capital, CoinSummer Labs and Third Earth Capital. It also included angel investors like Balaji Srinivasan, NEAR’s Illia Polosukhin and Polygon’s Sandeep Nailwal.

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The blockchain could see huge traction among retail audiences due to its proximity to the prominent Coinbase exchange, a sentiment that’s driving activity and growth of native Base tokens.

Crypto traders are seeking profit opportunities on the Base blockchain amid a meme coin-led frenzy for tokens issued on the network, several metrics show.

Base, built by crypto exchange Coinbase on OP Stack, went live for developers in August and initially saw muted growth. However, that has changed in the past few weeks, with funds locked on the network rising to nearly $1 billion on Tuesday from $450 million at the start of this month.

Blockchain scanners show that transactional activity is up threefold to over 1.5 million a day from an average of under 500,000 a day in the past few months. The number of unique addresses has doubled to 65,000 wallets.

Some market observers say direct access to Base from Coinbase’s exchange and wallet applications could make it the first network that retail users use, instead of the several other options – fueling a frenzy.

Prices of tokens such as cat-themed toshi (TOSHI), thank you base god (TYBG), normie (NORMIE) and brett (BRETT) have risen as much as 1,300% over the past week, data shows, crossing over $1 billion in cumulative trading volumes.

Tokens of technical projects such as decentralized exchange Aerodrome’s AERO and Seamless’ SEAM rose as much as 90% in the past week, CoinGecko data shows.

That has generated the network $1.8 million in fees over the past 24 hours. Social sentiment on X has bumped in tandem, with scores of traders calling for a rotation of capital to the relatively new network.

Meanwhile, the immense popularity of meme coins on Base has resulted in high gas fees, which exceeded the fees paid by users before the Dencun upgrade, Optimism developer Michael Silberling pointed out on X.

Most of the transactions came from meme coin trading and trading bots designed to buy tokens in the first few minutes after issuance, contributing to network congestion and stuck transactions last week.

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OkCoin CEO Hong Fang tweeted that customer deposits are safe and USD withdrawals are not affected.

OKCoin has temporarily lost the ability to allow customers to deposit USD because of Signature bank’s collapse, according to a tweet by its CEO.

“Our team are working very hard on alternative channels and solutions in real-time,” OKCoin CEO Hong Fang tweeted. “We’ve been through much worse times since our inception. If this weekend has told us anything, it’s the significance of the future that we are building.”

OKCoin is believed to be the first exchange to lose its ability – albeit temporarily – to process USD deposits because of the current banking crisis.

Across the industry, there have been growing concerns about the liquidity vacuum that the disappearance of the Silvergate Exchange Network (SEN) and Signature’s competitor, Signet, means for crypto-fiat liquidity.

OKCoin, available in the U.S., is the sister exchange to OKX, which is not available onshore.

OKX’s native token, OKB, appears to be unaffected by this news and is up 6.6% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.

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The consumer electronics company, which has served on The Hedera Governing Council since 2020, is bringing NFTs to television screens through a platform built on the Hedera network.

Another consumer electronics company is taking NFTs to TV screens.

Korea-based LG is releasing a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace called LG Art Lab that plugs into the Hedera Network, which LG supports. Television owners with sets updated to LG’s most recent software will be able to buy, sell and showcase their Hedera NFTs from their screens.

LG’s strides into the NFT space follow Samsung’s release of an NFT marketplace on three of its TVs, all supported by Nifty Gateway. LG Art Lab will only be on LG TVs. Incorporating LG’s mobile crypto wallet Wallypto, users can purchase assets by scanning a QR code to connect their wallets.

Chris Jo, Senior Vice President, Head of Platform Business at LG told CoinDesk in an email that the platform aims to make NFTs accessible for users looking to step into the space.

The choice of Hedera is not an obvious one for an NFT integration. According to data from the past 30 days, Hedera NFT marketplace Hash Axis’ $36,000 trading volume pales in comparison to Ethereum’s $330 million trading volume on OpenSea. But it makes more sense for LG: it’s been on Hedera’s Governing Council since 2020.

Shayne Higdon, CEO of the HBAR foundation, an organization supporting developers on the Hedera network, told CoinDesk that the Hedera’s energy efficient consensus mechanism makes it an ideal blockchain for cheap, low carbon footprint NFT transfers. Still, other networks are catching up; market leader Ethereum is moving to proof of stake this month.

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The crypto exchange said the “crypto winter” drove such a decision.

Crypto exchange Banxa (BNXA) has cut over 70 jobs in anticipation of a steep market downturn, Australian Financial Review reported Monday.

The move represents 30% of the Melbourne-based company’s workforce, AFR said. The company’s headcount peaked at more than 230 employees last year when the crypto market hit record highs.

“Banxa must take decisive actions to reduce costs now, or else our company won’t be able to succeed over the long run,” CEO Holger Arians said in a letter to employees, according to AFR. The decision was conveyed to staff last Wednesday, with Arians telling employees that the company grew too quickly and that extensive redundancy would occur as market conditions worsened.

Affected employees include European managing director Jan Lorenc.

The 2014-founded company has been publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange’s early-stage TSX Venture Exchange since January 2021. The shares have fallen some 74% in the past year amid a steep decline in crypto and equity markets. They closed Friday at C$1.04, giving the company a market value of about C$46.5 million ($36 million).

Banxa’s joins other crypto companies reducing headcount in an effort to save costs as bitcoin prices fall, causing a decline in customer sentiment and trading volumes. In the past month alone, Coinbase cut over a fifth of its workforce, while Crypto.com, Gemini and lending platform BlockFi also announcing layoffs.

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Frax is working on supporting Fantom projects interested in joining the yield pool, its founder confirmed.

The Curve-based yield farm 4pool is live on the Fantom network ahead of its eventual launch on Ethereum, data show.
4pool is composed of two decentralized stablecoins, UST and Frax’s FRAX, and two centralized stablecoins, USDC and USDT. It aims to increase the utility of Terra’s UST stablecoins through a partnership with Frax and Redacted Cartel, a tool for earning yields on locked tokens.

Curve data show the 4pool on Fantom has already locked up $31 million in value hours after launch, with over $2.4 million in traded volume. The pool is paying out daily yields of nearly 0.5%, the data show. The pool was created after a governance vote on Curve.

Data show the pool holds $9.7 million in FRAX, $8.4 million in USDC, $4.9 million in Terra’s UST stablecoin, and $7.9 million in Tether (USDT).

4pool will initially be tested on the Fantom and Arbitrum networks, and later on Ethereum, according to its developers, with its creators aiming to make it one of the most liquid trading pools on Curve. Curve remains the biggest decentralized finance platform on Ethereum with over $21 billion in value locked.

Pools currently deployed on Curve are backed by centralized or decentralized stablecoins, wrapped tokens – such as wrapped bitcoin – or a basket of various assets.

4pool, however, will bring together UST and FRAX, the two largest decentralized stablecoins with a cumulative backing of over $19.6 billion, and USDT and USDC, the two largest centralized stablecoins, with a cumulative backing of $133 billion. This would make it one of the most liquid decentralized pools within the crypto ecosystem.

Meanwhile, Frax Finance founder Sam Kazemian said in a message to CoinDesk that projects interested in the 4pool would receive operational support from the protocol.

“FRAX and Terra look forward to supporting all the projects that use 4Pool for their stablecoin yield & liquidity needs,” Kazemian said.

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TRON founder Justin Sun responded by tweeting he would offer $60 a share, compared with Musk’s $54.20.

Elon Musk, the CEO of electric-car maker Tesla (TSLA), offered to buy social media company Twitter (TWTR) for about $41.3 billion in cash.

The $54.20-a-share offer is a 38% premium over the day before Musk’s investment in the company was made public earlier this month, according to a filing with the SEC.

Musk plans to take the company private in order to “go through the changes that need to be made,” he wrote in a text to Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor replicated in the filing.

In late March, Musk criticized the social media platform for failing to adhere to principles of free speech, saying that it serves as “de facto public town square” and this failure therefore undermines democracy.

“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk stated.

Following Musk’s filing, Justin Sun, the founder of the TRON blockchain, tweeted a thread in which he said he would offer $60 a share for the company.

Twitter shares surged more than 12% in pre-market trading following the news. They were trading recently up about 6.4% to just under $49.

Musk took a 9.2% stake in Twitter for an estimated $2.89 billion earlier this month, quickly followed by an announcement that he would be joining the company’s board of directors. However, CEO Parag Agrawal said a few days later that a board position was no longer on the cards.

“My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” Musk said according to the filing.

Owing to the Tesla CEO’s well-known interest in cryptocurrency, his announcements often make ripples in the crypto world. Meme-based crypto dogecoin enjoyed an 11% spike following the news of Musk’s initial Twitter investment, and rose about 6% after Thursday’s news. They are currently up 5% over the last 24 hours.

Twitter has also established itself as a crypto-friendly platform over recent months, adding the ability to send tips in bitcoin last September with the facility extended to ether in February.

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The U.S. District Court for Northern California found the exchange’s arbitration agreement to be “unconscionable and… unenforceable.”

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN) has lost its bid to force arbitration in a lawsuit over the theft of a user’s crypto worth over $31,000.

Abraham Bielski was contacted by a scammer last year claiming to be a PayPal representative. Bielski gave the individual remote access to his Coinbase account from which assets worth $31,039 were transferred.

The plaintiff claimed that Coinbase’s customer service after the money was removed from his digital wallet was “meager and ineffective.”

Bielski sought to pursue the case as a class-action lawsuit, representing individuals who had experienced something similar with the crypto exchange.

Coinbase moved to compel arbitration based on its user agreement which states “any dispute arising out of or relating to this Agreement or the Coinbase Services…shall be resolved by binding arbitration.”

The U.S. District Court for Northern California has deemed that the user agreement “imposes a burdensome and unfair pre-arbitration dispute process on users and sends their complaints, but not Coinbase’s complaints, to binding arbitration.”

The “lack of mutuality” in the complaint process therefore “imposes and onerous, unfair burden” on the party bringing it, according to the court. Therefore, the court found the arbitration agreement “unconscionable and… unenforceable.”

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Advertising to retail investors will be disallowed, as Singapore limits crypto trading to professional investors.

Local industry associations gave businesses some clarity on Singapore’s rules on advertising crypto services at an in-person meeting yesterday, local newspaper The Straits Times reported.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) will disallow marketing and advertising of crypto services to retail consumers in the city-state, the Blockchain Association Singapore (BAS) told members, according to the report. Firms are allowed to advertise to accredited institutional investors if they can demonstrate they are only targeting these groups, BAS said.

Firms can sponsor events that are held outside Singapore but broadcasted there, and can hold in-person events, so long as they are do not include the retail public. B2B advertising, including press releases and announcements that don’t promote trading in crypot, is also allowed.

There are several outstanding issues, such as how businesses can make sure that their advertising doesn’t trivialise the risks of crypto trading, as MAS called for in January. The central bank has also raised the alarm over “training events” that are used to push and sell crypto services to retail customers, according to BAS.

BAS based its recommendations on a March 30 meeting with MAS, at which the Association of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Enterprises and Start-ups Singapore (Access) and , were also present, according to the report.

The MAS announced it would be limiting crypto advertising in Singapore back in January.

The associations did not provide comment by the time of publication.

Singapore was once seen as a top destination for crypto businesses to set up shop, due to favorable regulation. But it has been outshined by the United Arab Emirates in the last few months, the Financial Times reported, with Binance, FTX, Bybit and Crypto.com setting up shop in the Gulf state.

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