A video game tied to cryptocurrency pays good money to those who are patient enough to spend many hours on it. But, how reliable is this alternate source of income?
By Caracas Chronicles – Daniela D’Santiago
Sep 1, 2021
This story starts with me joining a Telegram group with about fifteen hundred people online. Once I finish reading the fixed comments – where they usually post instructions and rules of conduct for the community – I realize the traffic has gone up by at least two hundred people in the last five minutes. The chat moves at a blinding speed, with several bots quickly answering the users’ questions. These questions tend to be recurring throughout the chat: “How do I add funds to my wallet?” “Where do I swap tokens?” “What time does the next update begin?” asked in English, Tagalog, Portuguese, and Spanish.
This group hosts the community of players of a Vietnamese game featuring virtual dragons that must be sent to fight non-stop, a simple and repetitive task. In an era where we can already experience augmented reality, the game has an archaic aesthetic, it doesn’t even have 3D graphics.
So, what’s all the fuss about?
It’s simple: each time you click and send your little dragon off to fight for about one minute you earn money. Well, you really get a fraction of the game’s native token, and if you accumulate enough of them, you can swap them for cryptocurrency. This game is built on the same cryptographic network that holds the alternate cryptocoin or altcoin, Ethereum, so each time someone plays, they are mining resources from there. Each dragon is, in turn, an NFT (Non-Fungible Token) created over that same technology. They are unique, unrepeatable, and they are also worth money.
In these Telegram and Discord groups, you’ll often see people freaking out when there’s an airdrop event, where a limited amount of crypto coins or tokens are distributed to the community for free.
The group moderators ask everyone to calm down and they let them know that it’s about to go down. They say that those who enter in the next five minutes will get a free NFT so they can start playing. The countdown feels like New Year’s Eve. When the clock hits the exact time (11:00 p.m.), I press F5 to reload the home page and I get an error screen. There were so many people trying to go in at the same time that the server crashed. The platform wasn’t able to take the avalanche of users coming from five different countries.
Let’s move on. I jump from Telegram to Discord – the base platform for gamer communities—and I go around the channels dedicated to NFT games updates, developing projects, some servers of the self-appointed crypto gaming gurus, ardent Twitch streamers, and meticulous YouTube content creators on crypto. I always see the Venezuelan flag among all the emojis and emoticons in the comment section.
The Venezuelan tribe inside these groups, forums, and chat rooms is quite large, and it competes directly with the Philippine, Vietnamese, and Argentine communities; countries that have adopted blockchain technology as a way to fight inflation, bad salaries, and bad economic policies.
It would seem like NFT based games are the next big thing creating FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) in the crypto world.
However, I think there’s something bigger going on beneath the surface.
The Perfect Storm
I should make one thing clear to start with, cryptocurrency culture and NFTs are very complex and, while I’m no analyst or specialist in the subject, I think that – in order to assess a technology’s impact on a community – we have to observe the use it’s given through time.
When this NFT boom took off at the beginning of the year, the first thing we saw in the news was eccentric American influencers making million-dollar purchases of avatars, cards, and digital images that, just like traditional collectibles, were more or less valuable depending on how rare they were, their supply, and creator. This NFT consumption established something that may be seen as new status symbols on the internet – let’s remember that we were all locked up in our homes because of the pandemic – and some outlets compared having the Bored Ape Yacht Club avatar to boasting a sports car or buying designer shoes.
So, at the other end of the same table, play2earn games came up, built on the main blockchain networks, and – with their turn of the century aesthetic and repetitive dynamics – promised their players a small piece of that world that Elon Musk and other prophets of the future talked so much about. The idea was simple: you make an initial investment buying a few game NFTs – meaning characters, cards, figures and then, by playing a few hours every day, you can pick up tokens which, just like video arcade games, you can exchange for crypto coins.
For most fans, this didn’t seem very attractive at first, but soon we understood that users of these games were elsewhere, mostly in developing countries, and weren’t afraid of spending many hours “farming,” playing, and competing for fractions of Ethereum, Matic, or Wax. Venezuela, undoubtedly, leads the top-ranking spots.
Farming culture in video games has been a way to get by on a daily basis for thousands of young people in the country.
We can’t fool ourselves, farming is a slow and tedious job consisting of extracting resources to then sell to other players who want to move forward faster. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. In games like Runescape, really important events have taken place, where thousands of Venezuelan farmers banded together to conquer the virtual world.
Another important factor is that cryptocurrency has slowly found its way into the decimated Venezuelan economy. In spite of the low trust generated by the government’s crazy idea of creating a centralized digital currency like the petrogoing as far as forcing people to use it citizens have gotten used to talking about wallets, bitcoins, satoshis, faucets, and exchanges, the same way they talk about Zelle or BofA on the streets to pay for goods or services, or even to receive remittances and protect their savings. The FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) surrounding cryptos in other places, because of their volatility, is dispelled when you live in a country with such hyperinflation that, at this point, doesn’t even raise eyebrows anymore.
According to a report by Chainanalysis, in 2020, Venezuela was already in third place in terms of adopting cryptocurrency, only behind Russia and Ukraine, and fighting for the fourth spot with the USA. If we think about it, we might be facing a new economic dynamic, in which organized communities of local gamers enter to compete in masses in a market they’re already familiar with.
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Read More: Caracas Chronicles – Play2Earn games spark NFT fever in Venezuela
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