💪 4.5 million blobs

Hey frens, TGIF. Welcome back to The Drop!

I’m back from San Francisco — and GDC was so fun.

The Avalanche gaming side event and the Sui Gaming Summit were my favorite events, but I also loved the karaoke night co-hosted by Parallel. Didn’t realize Parallel Founder Kohji Nagata was such a good singer! 

Gaming tokens are largely up in the past week. Toncoin and Parallel’s Echelon Prime token each up over 20%, while PENGU and AVAX are down slightly. RON is down about 9%, taking more losses than the rest of the major gaming tokens out there.

Let’s take a look at what’s going on right now in the apps space — more below.

— Kate Irwin

P.S. Let me know how you’re liking The Drop! Send me an email at [email protected].

👀 Watching the Walrus

Walrus is an upcoming decentralized storage platform from Sui developer Mysten Labs that will offer programmable file storage for the gaming-focused L1 Sui, as well as devs on Solana, Ethereum, or other chains that also want to use it. 

Walrus is designed for large binary files or “blobs.” Right now, there’s 833.33 TB in total storage available, with about 78,890 GB currently being used across more than 4.5 million blobs, according to Walruscan. 

That means Walrus could store videos, images, PDFs, or other files, as well as apps. Walrus uses Sui smart contracts to make those blobs programmable.

Flatlander is one of the early projects using Walrus. Flatlander is an imaginary world concept with NFTs. Their site is being hosted on Sui, and all site resources are being loaded from Walrus. 

The Walrus mainnet will launch next week on March 27. The team has also released their tokenomics for the WAL token. 

The upcoming data storage chain uses delegated proof of stake and consists of storage nodes that will have to compete with each other to offer competitive pricing for file storage.

Walrus has just raised $140 million in funding from a round led by Standard Crypto. 

Could Walrus be good for blockchain gaming or art? I think so. 

One of the primary appeals of crypto is that it’s supposed to be decentralized. That’s a term that gets thrown around a lot, but it’s supposed to mean that the underlying infrastructure that supports a token’s existence — including the chain itself — is owned and operated by many different people around the world. Therefore, a decentralized chain is difficult to censor by shutting it down if there are enough participants owning a small share of the nodes. 

As we know, NFTs themselves aren’t technically the art you see but the underlying tokens and data tied to them. The visual data of an NFT is metadata that can be changed by the creator. 

That metadata can be stored on centralized platforms like AWS — or IPFS, a decentralized solution. More options isn’t a bad thing, though we don’t know yet ultimately how decentralized Walrus will become.

“Today the majority of decentralized apps rely on traditional web hosting to serve their front ends and client side code, which offers poor integrity and availability. Decentralized stores may be used to serve web and dApps content directly while ensuring its integrity and availability,” the Walrus whitepaper reads. 

“There’s absolutely a world where games on Sui use Walrus for a wide variety of possibilities,” Mysten Labs Head of Communications Lexi Wangler told me.

TBD on whether it’ll make sense to store an entire game’s assets onchain. We’ve already seen a few games that are almost 100% onchain, like Pirate Nation, but it would be cool if a more graphically complex game could run more game components onchain, too. 

Staking ETH on Abstract

Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Abstract is adding Ethereum staking on Abstract via Dinero and Layer Zero tech. That essentially means you don’t have to move your ETH off the chain to stake it if you don’t want to, because it will be staked as AbsETH.

At launch, the feature might not be as easy-to-use as the rest of Abstract’s newbie-friendly ecosystem, but Totten tells me the goal is to make the feature native eventually.

Abstract Head of Marketing Phin Totten confirmed the news. Abstract Chain currently has about $14.3 million in total value locked (TVL) at time of writing. 

• Solana memecoin platform Pump.fun has unveiled PumpSwap, its native decentralized exchange.

• Crypto AI firm Wayfinder will airdrop some of its upcoming PROMPT tokens to “emerging yappers” on Kaito. You’ll need to have over 100 yaps to qualify. 

• Immutable has signed 10 games to its platform in less than three weeks, according to Immutable co-founder Robbie Ferguson.

Met one of the Pixelmon devs this week and was blessed with a Kevin pin. This actually gives me nostalgia. 

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