Market Analysis

The world of decentralized gaming has seen significant growth in 2021 as the rise of play-to-earn (P2E) gaming merged with NFTs to open the first pathway to the Metaverse.

Aavegotchi is currently making inroads in the blockchain-based gaming sector with a somewhat novel approach that incorporates features from P2E gaming, NFTs and decentralized finance (DeFi).

Data from TradingView shows that since hitting a low of $1.56 on Oct. 1, the price of GHST, Aavegotchi’s native token, has rallied 53% to a daily high at $2.40 on Oct. 29 as its 24-hour trading volume spiked 45% to $135.8 million.

Three reasons for the building momentum in the price of GHST are the ongoing Gotchiverse land auctions that require GHST to bid, several high-profile partnerships with gaming guilds and hedge funds and the overall strength of the blockchain-based gaming sector.

Gotchiverse land auctions

The biggest development helping to boost the price of GHST is the ongoing ‘Gotchiverse’ land auctions being held by the protocol. GHST and Gotchi holders are actively bidding to purchase a “realm” in the newly released digital world designed for the project’s collectible NFTs.

As seen in the tweet above, there have already been more than 80,000 unique bids made by 2,100 participants, resulting in a combined value of over 28 million GHST ($60 million).

Bids for land can only be made using GHST, which has put buy pressure on the token price and is likely the reason behind the large spike in volume and price seen on Oct. 18.

The Gotchiverse land auction is set to run through Oct. 31 and includes a total of 16,000 realms. 

Gaming guilds invest in Aavegotchi

This week two major gaming guilds announced partnerships that aim to expand the Aavegotchi platform.

The new partnerships include a collaboration with Blackpool, a quantitative hedge fund for NFTs, as well as a collaboration with Yield Guild Games (YGG) which invested $800,000 into Aavegotchi.

Related: Axie Infinity, Decentraland and ‘metaverse’ cryptos rally after Facebook rebrands to Meta

The Metaverse calls 

The concept of the Metaverse has also been a frequent topic of discussion throughout the current bull market and many analysts believe that play-to-earn and blockchain-based gaming will be the top performers in 2022. 

As seen in the chart above, tokens in the gaming sector have seen significant price appreciation in 2021 led by Axie Infinity (AXS) which has gained more than 25,000%.

Aavegotchi is actually following a similar path laid out by AXS, which started by releasing its NFT characters and then slowly built out its gameplay over time. The project eventually conducted virtual land sales and today Axies and land plots within the game sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This approach has worked well for Axie Infinity and if all goes well, Aavegotchi might follow the same path to mass adoption.

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