👾 Out of the trenches

Should the CEO of a major crypto exchange openly promote or post about low-cap “creator coins”?

Three Coinbase execs, including Jesse Pollak and Brian Armstrong, are promoting a token named after their once-CTO Balaji Srinivasan.

What once might have felt like a dangerous move just a year or so ago is now, for some of crypto’s leaders, no longer a concern.

In response to a question about whether Armstrong has any ethical concerns about buying and posting about the token, he said: “No. I’m going to keep supporting creators on Base App. Probably every day as the app comes out of Beta.”

— Kate Irwin

By degens, for degens

Crypto gaming has seen plenty of multimillion-dollar raises, but in many cases, that funding and hype hasn’t amounted to much. It’s not a guarantee of future success, by any means. 

Funding in the crypto gaming sector is also down 93% year-over-year, meaning there isn’t as much of an appetite for funding large dev teams or splashy marketing budgets right now.

But builders are still finding ways to ship projects with lean teams, turning visions from the GameFi trenches into reality.

Jakpot Games, which is building out its Solana-based site with just three people in its core team, is one of those projects. Their arcade-like platform launched last week, letting players spend the platform’s JAKPOT token to try their hand at getting a high score in one of a few different browser-based games. 

Rex Runner and Speed Racer, which both involve speeding through pixelated environments, are the two titles currently on offer. 

Currently, each Jakpot tournament has a countdown — meaning players have anywhere from 12-24 hours to try to reach the top of a game’s leaderboard in order to win some tokens.

Users connect to the site via crypto wallet tool Privy, and buy the platform’s token using SOL.

85% of every pot is split among the top scorers. 10% goes to the team’s vault for marketing and development, and 5% rolls over into the next round’s pot, Jakpot cofounder Gannon Breslin, who previously authored The Drop, explained to me in an interview. 

Like many gaming upstarts, Jakpot has already had to fend off an onslaught of cheaters who sought to unfairly exploit the platform for financial gain.

“They cheated in ways we didn’t even imagine possible,” Breslin said, adding that continuously monitoring and expanding upon their existing anticheat is a top priority. 

Since its launch last week, Jakpot has seen 7,316 games played, 16.1 million game credits transferred, and 26.7 million JAKPOT paid out in total. 

As often happens with low-cap tokens, JAKPOT’s price has fallen significantly from its all-time high. 26.7 million JAKPOT was worth over $53,000 just a few days ago, but would now be worth about $15,000.

“We’re 10,000 times more focused on people playing the game than the market cap,” Breslin said of the token. 

The team is planning to add a “Degen” mode soon with higher token buy-ins per play to raise the stakes for those who want it.

They’re also building out custom game lobbies and are actively exploring which games they might add to their platform next (I suggested DOOM). 

As the Jakpot team continues to build, they’ll have to compete for Crypto Twitter’s attention with the likes of the latest trend-of-the-moment Football.Fun, plus the Abstract gaming ecosystem and existing gaming platforms like Remix.

It’s never easy in the trenches. 

Disclosure: Gannon Breslin is the prior owner and writer of The Drop newsletter, which was acquired by Blockworks.

It’s the summer of DATs and the party is going strong. 

But when October rolls around, everyone will be looking to DAS: London to hear from these meta-defining voices on where things stand and where they’re headed.

Get your ticket today with promo code: DROP100 for £100 off

📅 October 13-15 | London

Now trending: Soccer trading

Football.Fun, a browser-based fantasy soccer game on Base, saw a surge in activity over the weekend — and logged more volume traded than all Ethereum volume on OpenSea and Blur combined.

They’ve also been hit with bot swarms trying to abuse the platform’s referral system, according to a post from the team.

According to one Dune dashboard, Football.Fun saw $9.5 million in volume in the past 24 hours. By comparison, OpenSea saw $2.8 million in daily volume traded for Ethereum-based assets, and Blur saw just over $605,000.

Another reports a total volume traded of over $27.6 million across more than 11,000 wallets and garnering over $1.6 million in fees.

Worth remembering: pump.fun has continued to see far more volume than all of these platforms, however, with hundreds of millions to over a billion dollars in weekly volume.