Year in, and year out, people continue to wonder how long the crypto hype is going to continue. The volatility of the market keeps leading some to believe that the digital currency’s time has ended. But without fail, it always pops back up again… why?
This month at The Fintech Times we will be looking at what makes digital currencies so popular. We will also uncover the emerging alternatives to cryptos and why the digital future looks so intriguing. Rounding out the month, our focus is going to be on quirky currencies, looking at the top-performing currencies of the year, as well as which are most sustainable.
In our final article for this month’s focus, we spoke to Jonathan Hobbs, Rachel Lin, Leo Goriev, Charlton Haupt, and Shinnosuke “Shin” Murata, about what they believed were the whackiest trends and cryptocurrencies we saw in the digital currencies market this past year.
Blockchain games have exploded onto the scene in recent times, becoming a big hit among players and investors alike. And Alien Worlds has more people playing it than any other project right now, with around 250,000 unique wallets interacting with it per day, according to DappRadar.
Alien Worlds is an intergalactic metaverse (or virtual world) with its own complex economy that runs on Trillium (TLM) tokens. TLM buys you the things you need to level up in the game, which come in the form of unique NFTs (non-fungible tokens): tools, land, minions, weapons, and so on.
The rarer and more useful the NFT item, the more valuable it is to the game player. That’s because those items can help you earn more TLM, making you a wealthier member of the Alien Worlds civilization. What’s more, you can use NFT tools to mine Trillium on NFT land. And if you own a plot rich with TLM deposits, you can let other players mine too – for 20 per cent of their token rewards.
The game operates on the Ethereum, Wax and Binance Smart Chain blockchains. And as for real-world crypto investors, TLM trades on regular crypto exchanges – meaning they can convert their virtual tokens into regular money, and vice versa. Like most digital assets, the token is no stranger to volatility: it jumped 6,000 per cent in value the day it listed on Binance in April of 2021. Today trades for just over two cents.
Still, it’s had a few monster rallies on the way down, and it is the currency of the world’s most popular blockchain game at this current point in time. So it could be one to keep an eye on for the next crypto bull run.
Crypto has grown from a niche internet currency into a globally adopted asset class with millions of people using it daily, not to mention widespread institutional adoption. But crypto is still a weird and wonderful world thanks to the importance of the concepts of ‘decentralisation’ and ‘permissionlessness.’
Essentially, the idea is to share control as widely as possible, removing middle men and unnecessary red tape, in order to foster vibrant innovation at an often breakneck pace.
These concepts of ‘decentralisation’ and ‘permissionlessness’ lead directly to the major outpouring of creativity we have seen, for example in the varying design and applications of NFTs, or the quirky currencies that attract fanatic communities, such as DogeCoin.
This distributed and decentralised creativity should be celebrated as a major strength of the crypto industry. It is a key factor supporting its continued resilience. Think of a many-headed hydra that keeps coming back, no matter the actions of its adversaries.
What will be vital for the sustainability of the crypto market going forward, is for key industry players to uphold and protect these concepts. And yes in turn the quirky curr
