⛏️ Phone farming

Hey frens! Welcome to The Drop. 

Blockworks Research lead Ryan Connor has shared his take on consumer crypto, including Pump.fun, Believe.app, and Time.fun — and I think it’s worth a read. 

Today we’ve got news about a crypto game studio that’s got fresh funding (rare these days), plus news about a new decentralized exchange that’s targeting mainstream game studios and more.

— Kate Irwin

Voya Games raises $5M for mobile sim Craft World

Crypto gaming studio Voya Games has raised $5 million in funding in a round led by 1kx and Makers Fund, with RockawayX also investing.

Angel investors Jeff Zirlin, who cofounded Sky Mavis, and Sebastien Borget, cofounder and COO of The SandBox, also participated in the round (Zirlin is also a partner at 1kx). 

“Our goal is to build a token ecosystem where games are connected through a shared player economy and culture,” said Voya Games CEO and founder Oliver Loffler. 

The studio plans to use the funding to release its upcoming game, Craft World, and set up the company for its long-term goals.

Craft World is billed as a “casual resource management game” with NFT items, where humans live with dinosaurs after a meteor hit Earth. Players must farm for resources to build structures. The game is currently in its testnet phase, powered by an unspecified blockchain stack, and has seen over 100,000 downloads on Android already. Voya says more than 240,000 players have registered so far, and it has seen over 1.1 million testnet trades between players. 

“They’re building a Web3 gaming ecosystem that prioritizes openness and ownership, treating the game world more like a public good than a closed economy,” said the pseudonymous 1kx partner known as Peter Pan.

The game uses Dyno Coin, a utility token players use to buy NFT items and craft. The team says it’s not intended to be a speculative token, and it currently does not appear on crypto exchanges.

Craft World is expected to fully launch by the end of this year and will release for iOS, Android, and on the web as a browser game. 

Voya Games was founded in 2023 and is tied to Angry Dynomites Lab, which released two pixelated dinosaur NFT collections on Ethereum back in 2022. Loffler previously cofounded Kolibri Games, a mobile gaming studio with games like Idle Miner Tycoon: Gold & Cash, which has over 100 million downloads on Android alone. Kolibri was acquired by Ubisoft in 2020.

Mobile games have continued to make up a significant portion of the crypto gaming market. Game7 research found that mobile games made up 29% of game launches last year, with an additional 20% being Telegram games (which are also primarily mobile games). 

That means about half of crypto games have a mobile-first focus, and that doesn’t include the over 26% of crypto games that are launching in a browser, which can also be mobile-first titles.

Mobile games can be cheaper and easier to build than ambitious PC titles while having more opportunities for monetization via quick in-app purchases. They also generate more revenue than PC titles overall and have more players. Plus, mobile games have the additional advantage that their audiences are more used to monetization strategies like microtransactions and paid tiers of access. 

“Development costs for resource management games are comparatively low. This allows us to release updates quickly and frequently, enabling us to identify and address issues early based on player feedback,” the Voya Games team wrote in its litepaper.

Real Users. Real Products. Onchain.

Permissionless IV is for the teams building crypto that doesn’t feel like crypto.

Wallets that don’t suck. Loyalty programs that break out of Web2. NFTs with context. Consumer apps that actually ship.

It’s not about what the tech can do — it’s about what people are already using it for. Crypto meets culture, UX, and utility in Brooklyn this June.
 
📅June 24–26 | Brooklyn

YouTubers launch DEX, anticipating ‘AAA’ studios will join crypto

YouTuber, trader and crypto startup founder Elliot Wainman, known online as ElioTrades, is starting a decentralized exchange alongside YouTuber and trader Alex Becker called Blackhole.

Blackhole is a DEX built on Avalanche, with support from the Avalanche Foundation, Wainman said. One of his goals with the DEX is to make liquidity more accessible, and it is based on his belief that more mainstream gaming giants will launch crypto games in the future. 

“I believe that when these big AAA studios come to launch their games, they’ll probably follow a similar path to Sony, probably building out their own internal, white-labeled marketplaces and even their own explorers, definitely their own frontends,” Wainman predicted in a video. “The thing that I don’t think they’re gonna want to build is their own liquidity pools to trade their assets. I believe that the big AAA studios will come in, and they will be very happy to plug in to existing DEXs.” 

The platform also promises “Genesis pools,” a launchpad for tokens that offers liquidity before the token supply is generated.

But are any other large “AAA” game studios flocking to crypto — who haven’t already tried their hand at it?

While Sony’s blockchain arm is running its own chain, Soneium, it has yet to announce any crypto game titles of its own. 

Back in 2021, EA’s CEO said that blockchain and crypto were the “future of our industry,” but EA hasn’t announced a crypto game in the years since. It’s also unclear whether the CEO really meant anything concrete by that statement. Back in 2023, EA Sports said it was working with Nike to put NFTs in its sports games, but Nike has since left the crypto game entirely, so this didn’t exactly manifest.

So far, we haven’t seen a major US “Web2” studio announce a crypto game besides Zynga (It had Sugartown, but Sugartown has since spun out and is no longer a part of Zynga).

The major gaming studios that have actually announced or launched crypto games are Ubisoft (based in France), Square Enix (based in Japan), Nexon (started in South Korea), Bandai Namco (Japan), WeMade (South Korea), Krafton (South Korea), and Com2uS (South Korea). 

Others, like SEGA (based in Japan), haven’t directly launched crypto games of their own, but instead have licensed some of their old IP to others for those third parties to use. 

Crypto gaming’s stronger prevalence among Asia-based game studios — and not the US — may be in part because Asia is more open to crypto gaming than the US (and despite South Korea’s rules against crypto games). There is a strong anti-NFT sentiment among many US gamers, and that sentiment has repeatedly manifested as social media and mainstream gaming media backlash since 2021.

So while game studios already using crypto may want to use Blackhole, it’s still very much TBD on whether any US gaming giants will ever join this cohort.

• Crypto-optional shooter Off The Grid is coming to Steam next month (as a crypto-free version).

• NerdWallet’s X account was breached to promote a token this week. 

  • A rep for the personal finance portal confirmed to me they didn’t launch a token or memecoin, and that the now-deleted post about a supposed NERD token had been made while the account was compromised.

  • Key context: Trusted X accounts are often “hacked,” after which the attacker often posts a link to a fake token, phishing site or wallet drainer promising a reward to victims.