Starknet Foundation forms Gaming Committee with $125M budget

The Starknet Foundation, which backs the Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Starknet, has formed a committee to push gaming on the network and set aside $125.5 million worth of tokens to bankroll the group.

The Gaming Committee will “analyze, strategize, and recommend programs to expand Starknet’s gaming ecosystem,” with 50 million Starknet (STRK) tokens put aside to fund its proposals, Starknet said in a March 11 blog post.

“The Committee is tasked with designing and recommending programs to incentivize developers to build games on Starknet and to incentivize players to use them,” Starknet added. “Its success will be measured by usage metrics like daily active users, retention rates, and revenue.”

The committee has six members, including Starknet’s developer relations head Henri Lieutaud, Unstoppable Games founder Chris Lexmond and Gabin Marignier, co-founder of Web3-based productivity app Focus Tree.

Other members are Starknet ecosystem developer Oli Feuler from Starknet development firm StarkWare, Starknet-based “gaming console” Cartridge co-founder Tarrence van As, and the pseudonymous creator of Starknet-based game Realms World known as “LordOfAFew” or “LOAF.”

It comes as Starknet’s network activity continues to drop, even after StarkWare changed a STRK token unlock schedule over concerns the original plan allowed early investors to dump on retail users.

NFT prices fall even as ETH price rises

The prices of top nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have seen their prices fall on the day, even as Ether (ETH) notched a 24-hour price hike putting it at a more than two-year high.

The ETH-denominated floor prices — the lowest possible price — for seven out of the 10 top traded collections on NFT marketplace Blur are down in the last 24 hours, even as ETH’s price over that same time is up around 5% and above $4,000 for the first time since late 2021.

Yuga Labs’ flagship Bored and Mutant Ape Yacht Club collections are respectively down 13% and 14% on the day, while Azuki and DeGods are closing on being 9% and 10% down, respectively.

The stats worsen when looking at the collection’s seven-day change, with DeGods seeing an over 40% decline on the week and the Mutant Ape Yacht Club down over 30%.

CryptoSlam! sales volume data shows a nearly 22% drop on the week, with the number of NFT buyers and sellers also each falling around 75%.

“Crypto will outperform NFTs,” Kevin Rose says after $1.3M NFT sales

The co-creator of the now-Yuga Labs-owned Moonbirds NFT collection, Kevin Rose, said his reason for dumping over $1.3 million worth of NFTs was because “crypto will outperform” them.

NFTScan data shows that over the past nearly three weeks to March 10, one of Rose’s wallets sold around 330 ETH worth of NFTs, including two sales over 140 ETH. Rose also transferred a high-price CryptoPunk NFT to another wallet.

In a now-deleted March 10 X post, Rose said he’s “been pruning [his] NFT collection” as he believes “mass adoption is still further out, and classic cryptocurrency will outperform.”

“The rumors of me ‘selling everything’ are not true,” Rose wrote in the deleted post. “I’m, as always, diversifying versus praying a single collection or bag works out.”

Related: Is GameFi subject to the same market forces as the traditional game industry?

In a separate X post, Rose said he often sells so he can “tax loss harvest,” adding he’d “much rather put this ETH to work staked and in Bitcoin” and claimed he still held “over 100 NFTs.”

It comes after Yuga acquired Rose’s firm PROOF and, with it, the PROOF-owned NFT collections, including Moonbirds, Oddities and Grails.

PROOF’s staff were folded into Yuga and Rose joined the firm as an adviser.

Other news

Automaker Nissan has digitized some of its old cars into a metaverse to educate on traffic safety, with minigames on a driver’s field-of-view and steering wheel spin.

The Bitcoin halving — when mining rewards are halved — could spark an NFT price surge as interest in Bitcoin (BTC) may spill over to the NFT world.

Magazine: NFT Collector, DCinvestor: Is this the best NFT collection in the world?