Gaming Tokens Ride Bitcoin, Ethereum Boom to All-Time High Prices

Crypto tokens tied to prominent blockchain games—and the networks that support them—are broadly surging amid the Bitcoin and Ethereum boom, with a number of tokens launched within the last year rising to new all-time high prices over the past day.

The tokens tied to gaming networks Xai (XAI) and Beam (BEAM) are among those that reached new peak prices, according to data from CoinGecko, along with the tokens of crypto games Heroes of Mavia (MAVIA) and Parallel (PRIME).

XAI, the token from the Arbitrum-based layer-3 gaming network of the same name, spiked to a new peak price of $1.39 overnight before settling slightly to $1.30 as of this writing. At the current price, XAI has a market cap of $359 million, and the token has jumped into the top 200 cryptocurrencies by market cap. It’s up 13% over the past 24 hours and 19% on the week.

The token just launched in January as Xai rolled out a sizable airdrop to operators of Sentry Nodes, which support the network, as well as owners of certain NFTs tied to the gaming network. The total value of that 125 million XAI airdrop now sits above $162 million.

BEAM, the token of the Beam gaming network built on an Avalanche subnet, is up 10% today to a current price of just above $0.035. It’s down only slightly from an all-time high of nearly $0.036 on Monday morning.

Beam is operated by Merit Circle, a gaming DAO (decentralized autonomous organization), and has also integrated with Immutable zkEVM, an Ethereum scaling network for games. With a market cap of nearly $1.8 billion, BEAM is the 53rd largest cryptocurrency overall by market cap and the second-largest gaming-centric token behind Immutable (IMX).

PRIME, the token of crypto trading card game Parallel, also set an all-time high price of $14.84 late Sunday, though it has dipped nearly 7% since to a current price just above $13. Parallel, GG’s 2023 game of the year, recently launched a new season of in-game content and has been teasing an open beta launch in the near future. It’s currently in closed beta.

And MAVIA, the newly launched token of mobile strategy game Heroes of Mavia, pumped Sunday to a new all-time high price of $10.59. It has marked a sharper decline since surging to that peak, however, now down about 14% on the day to about $8.50 as of this writing.

MAVIA debuted less than three weeks ago and has spiked 370% since its initial launch. The Clash of Clans-style crypto game rolled out an extensive roadmap over the weekend, showing off plans for additional NFT staking rewards, an upcoming announcement of a layer-2 scaling network to power the game’s crypto elements, and other bonuses and features ahead.

Mavia’s February Community Update:

Tokenomics, Game Stats, Roadmap and more!https://t.co/6OipmDj4Ta

— Heroes of Mavia (@MaviaGame) February 17, 2024

Heroes of Mavia was released on iOS and Android in January and airdropped tokens to 100,000 players and NFT landholders. Developer Skrice Studios now says that it has logged over 2 million downloads for the game, with 278,000 daily active users.

All four of these tokens initially launched within the last year, including two of them so far in 2024. That’s an important detail as some of the other largest gaming-centric crypto tokens are longer-running coins that set much higher peaks during the bull market runs of 2021 and 2022.

For example, coins like IMX, The Sandbox (SAND), ApeCoin (APE), and Gala Games (GALA) remain well short of their all-time high prices—and all of those except Immutable are down more than 90% from such peaks. Immutable has risen 74% over the past 30 days, yet it is still down 65% from its all-time high price of $9.52 set in 2021.

The past day’s gaming token spikes came amid the launch of PIXEL, the long-awaited token of buzzy crypto farming game Pixels on the Ronin Network. PIXEL has pumped 24% since the Monday morning debut to a current price above $0.62, putting its market cap at $821 million.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.

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