Recently, Binance Smart Chain ushered in a scalability stress test. Browser data shows that on July 29, a total of more than 13 million transactions occurred on the Binance Smart Chain, more than 10 times that of the Ethereum network, setting a record high.
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CryptoBlades contributed more than 98% of the transaction volume, source: BscScan.com
The main reason why this game is so popular is that it inherits the characteristics of Play to Earn and integrates NFT, Staking mining and other playing methods. It can be said that it is Axie Infinity on the Binance Smart Chain.
A Filipino user named polvoron on Discord said that he earned 2 years of income in 2 weeks; a user named Josh Greiff on Twitter said that he earned an average of $77 a day by playing CryptoBlades. Similar to Axie Infinity, CryptoBlades is gaining support from users in Southeast Asia.
01. How to play CryptoBlades?
CryptoBlades is an RPG game (Role Play Game) on the Binance Smart Chain. The core gameplay of this game is role confrontation. Players need to configure characters (Character) and weapons (Weapon), and fight against enemies randomly generated by the system. The winner will receive token SKILL and experience rewards to gain benefits.
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CryptoBladesCharacter
The icons above the characters in the figure are the attributes of the characters. All characters are divided into four attributes, namely thunder, wood, water, and fire. Among them, thunder overcomes water, water overcomes fire, fire overcomes wood, and wood overcomes thunder. The mutual restraint of attributes can affect the result of the confrontation to a certain extent.
Players need to spend SKILL tokens to obtain characters. As of writing, it costs 0.4438 SKILL to recruit a character. When recruiting the first character, the player can get a one-star weapon for free. The rest of the weapons need krypton gold forging to obtain.
The setting of the weapon is mainly to add the power attribute to the character. The higher the power of the character, the higher the power range of the random enemies generated by the system. The higher the strength of the enemy defeated by the player, the more SKILL rewards the player gets.
When the official was writing the white paper, the reward formula was 0.111627 SKILL (subsidized gas fee) + 0.014651 SKILL/1000 power. Suppose the player defeats an enemy with a power value of 3000, then he can get 0.111627+0.014651*3=0.15558 SKILL, plus experience rewards.
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The output probability, attributes, and reforging effects of different star weapons
"Reforging" is the process of burning weapons with relatively low star ratings to increase the power value of weapons with higher star ratings. The reforging effects of different star weapons are as above.
In addition, the weapon itself also has one of the four attributes of thunder, wood, water, and fire, and the law of mutual restraint is the same as that of character attributes. In confrontation, if the player's characters and weapon attributes are consistent, then the winning rate can be increased by 7.5%. If the character and weapon attributes can restrain the enemy's attributes, then the winning rate can also be increased by 7.5%.
It can be seen that the result of the confrontation mainly depends on the comparison of the levels, experience, attributes, strength and other dimensions of the characters and the enemies. The greater the strength value a character obtains through weapons, the more likely he is to obtain more SKILL rewards after defeating the enemy.
CryptoBlades can be regarded as a "game mine" for mining SKILL. Out of the motivation of Play to Earn, players continue to play the game to improve the experience and level of characters, and players spend money to configure characters, configure weapons, and forge weapons. While playing the game to earn money, players are also glued to the game.
SKILL is a functional token in the entire CryptoBlades ecosystem. The entrance of Apeswap is configured on the CryptoBlades page. Through this DEX, players can exchange SKILL/BNB to realize the deposit and withdrawal of the game.
In the game, acquiring mining tools (characters and weapons) requires the consumption of SKILL, and rewards are issued in the form of SKILL, while those non-player participants can obtain SKILL rewards by staking SKILL or SKILL/BNB, realizing the closed-loop circulation of SKILL as a whole , can also ensure the balance of supply and demand.
In addition, CryptoBlades has also added NFT gameplay. There is an NFT marketplace built into CryptoBlades. The props in the game, whether they are characters or weapons, are all NFTs, which can be bought and sold through this market.
02, CryptoBlades player portrait
Play to Earn is the main motivation for players to participate in CryptoBlades, and the income mainly depends on the price of the token SKILL. Market data shows that since the game was launched in May, the price of SKILL has increased by more than 8 times, attracting many players to participate.
A blogger in Bilibili shared his experience of earning 125 times the income; a user in Discord said that he played the game for 2 weeks and earned 2 years of income. Many users in the telegram group said that they had more than 10 accounts and planned to resign to play games; this blockchain game, accompanied by huge risks, seems to have opened a channel for users to easily achieve high returns.
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Josh Greiff says he plays CryptoBlades for 30 minutes a day and earns $77
On the surface, it seems that it is easy to play and make money, but in fact, CryptoBlades contains greater risks. Although as of writing, CryptoBlades is still the DApp with the highest daily activity on Binance Smart Chain, but the price of its token SKILL has shrunk by more than 60% in the past 7 days. Fluctuations in token prices can easily affect a player's payback cycle. In addition, the frequent hacking incidents in the Binance Smart Chain are also a major hidden danger.
But it has to be denied that the popularity of CryptoBlades is comparable to that of Axie Infinity. Data from DappRadar shows that the number of daily active users of CryptoBlades is increasing day by day, and has now exceeded 330,000, 90,000 more than Axie Infinity’s daily active users, ranking first among all DApps. However, the daily trading volume of CryptoBlades is only 1/10 of that of Axie Infinity.
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CryptoBlades user distribution, source: alexa.com
The monthly salary of the Filipino people is about US$300, and according to information on social media, the number of players has grown to more than 200,000 in the first two months after the game was launched, and the per capita income is US$1,021, which is equivalent to several months’ wages of the Filipino people. . Although the price of SKILL has dropped, the player's daily income is maintained at about $8, which is still considerable.
It was previously reported that due to the pressure of unemployment and excessive inflation, a large number of people at the bottom of Southeast Asia are participating in income-based NFT games, which has become a way for them to increase income or re-employment. It is foreseeable that under the pressure of livelihood, any income-generating game in the currency circle may be captured by the people of Southeast Asia.
However, the funding threshold to participate in CryptoBlades has been raised. According to the experience summed up by the players, the more efficient way for novices to participate is to directly spend $180 to purchase an 11th-level character team of the same attribute and fight against three-star weapons. This amount of funds constitutes a big threshold for the people of Southeast Asia.
In this case, the player can obtain a net income of about US$0.42 for each battle won, about 28 battles per day, the 24-hour income is US$10, and the payback period of the player is about 18 days. However, as mentioned above, the payback cycle and income will be largely affected by the price of SKILL.
In addition, many players have already complained about the increase in gas fees. Although the gas fee on the Binance Smart Chain is much lower than other public chains, with the popularity of the game and the accumulation of revenue, the gas fee of a few cents can also have a greater impact on the revenue of users in Southeast Asia. It even became a watershed for their profit and loss. However, the number of players of the game is still growing at an average daily rate of 6-7%. After all, the game still brings positive income.
03. Epilogue
This is the status quo of CryptoBlades, and it is also a microcosm of the development of many Play to Earn games.
We see that Play to Earn, GameFi, NFT, and metaverse ecology on Ethereum are gradually being copied to high-performance Layer 1 or Layer 2 such as Binance Smart Chain, Huobi Eco-Chain, Solana, and Polygon, and repeat it on Ethereum development path.
Finding the next Axie Infinity game could represent an opportunity for players and investors alike. As for the public chain and Layer 2, the construction of popular ecosystems such as chain games and NFTs may require more customized strategies for differentiation.
