After nine droopy weeks, Bitcoin has finally broken its red-candle losing streak, as the entire crypto market gets some pressure-releasing relief.

Meanwhile, two of the biggest gaming projects in the space – Illuvium and Gala – have exciting news, a shopping mall giant in Dubai is integrating crypto payments, and the state of New York is doing its level best to kill crypto mining.

Let’s take a quick look at some news, then, before jumping into the latest price action…

 

Crypto news: Illuvium land, Gala’s GRIT, New York mining roadblock

• Illuvium (ILV), an Aussie-founded, open-world, monster-battling, land-building, beast of a blockchain game completely sold out its 20,000 plots of digital land in its three-day sale.

Sold via a Dutch Auction and utilising Immutable X’s gas-optimised minting solution, the event generated US$72m in sales – not too shabby for what most investors and traders consider to be a bear market.

The sale has been lauded as a major success by the team, and the blockchain gaming community at large. And that can be put down to the smooth user experience and total avoidance of the “gas wars” (FOMO-induced purchasing-fee hikes) commonly associated with popular NFT minting events.

“Nearly all Ethereum NFT sales result in wasteful bids that reward miners and cost the buyer,” said Illuvium co-founder Kieran Warwick, who managed to pick up a couple of megacities (2×2 or 3×3 plots) in the sale. “Gas wars really should now be a thing of the past,” he added. 

 

• In other big gaming news today, one of the crypto space’s biggest GameFi protocols – Gala Games (GALA) has announced that its upcoming GRIT title, a Wild West-themed “battle royale” game, will be the first Web3 game on the Epic Games Store.

And that’s huge news for a couple of reasons… A) Epic Games, as you might well know, is the developer/publisher of smash hit Fortnite. And B), this is a further massive breach into the mainstream for NFT gaming.

One of the Epic Games Store’s main rivals, Steam, has made it clear it wants nothing to do with blockchain games, but Epic is clearly taking the opposite path.

GRIT will be a free-to-play, online multiplayer game for Windows PC players, featuring numerous user-owned NFT assets for utilisation in game and tradable for real-world value.

• In a potential blow for US Bitcoin (BTC) mining operations, on Friday a bill to ban PoW mining was approved by the New York State Senate on the grounds of electricity-based environmental concerns – as reported by Cointelegraph.

It could still be vetoed by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, but regardless of the legislative result, it’s been met with strong vocal opposition within the crypto community, as you’d expect.

For instance, Washington-based lawyer and head of policy at Blockchain Association Jake Chervinsky, said that the move will not “reduce carbon emissions” at all, arguing that it will only push miners elsewhere in the US.

• Back to more positive news… Dubai’s retail giant Majid Al Futtaim has confirmed it is partnering with Binance to accept crypto payments at 29 shopping malls and 13 hotels across the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The two firms will also be collaborating on various crypto and blockchain projects.

Last week, Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao tweeted the following:

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at roughly US$1.34 trillion, up about 4.4% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

After closing the week near US$30k, and then bouncing up to the mid $31K zone today, Bitcoin (BTC) has at last broken its most consistent weekly downtrend in its history.

And that was nine weeks of slow bleeding, bringing the OG crypto asset’s price down about US$16,500 – with inflation-related fun and a Terra Luna-induced black swan event in between.

Right then, are we in the clear for a bit? Something about counting chickens and hatching, according to some chart watchers… such as Roman Trading, who’s giving us the old “can’t trust a pump on low volume” angle…

Fellow analyst Rekt Capital also seems to be suggesting here that we may not be done yet with the dumping. The RSI (relative strength index momentum indicator) is apparently used to perhaps a fraction more downside during lingering bear markets…

But, just for good measure, something at least a bit more short-term bullish here from Dutch trader Michëal van de Poppe…

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$10.8 billion to about US$513 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time.

DAILY PUMPERS

• Helium (HNT), (mc: US$1.1 billion) +14%

• eCash (XEC), (market cap: US$1 billion) +9%

• Theta Network (THETA), (mc: US$1.3 billion) 9%

• NEO (NEO), (mc: US$888 million) 9%

• Loopring (LRC), (mc: US$695 million) 8%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS 

• Elrond (EGLD), (mc: US$1.56 billion) -9%

• Waves (WAVES), (mc: US$826 million) -3%

• Terra Luna Classic (LUNC), (market cap: US$837 million) -2%

• Bitcoin Cash (BCH), (market cap: US$3.5 billion) -2%

• Stellar (XLM), (market cap: US$3.6 million) -1.5%

 

Around the blocks

 

 

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