1. Today’s newsletter is going to be short, cryptofam. After installing the game for the first time on Wednesday evening and playing about 50 duels, my MMR on Axie Infinity is a pretty mediocre 1170. I need to spend more time understanding the damage system and the metagame. Oftentimes, I lose and I’m not exactly sure why. I still call my beast “the yellow one” and my bird “the pink one,” so I also have a long way to go in terms of recognizing the various game elements. The only cards I know immediately are Eggbomb and Blackmail, the signature combo of this build. I haven’t been keeping track of my win-rate but I guess it’s probably around 45%, given that I’ve been dropping down the ranks. Hopefully I’ll have better news on Monday, after I’ve had a chance to actually focus on it without work distractions.

2. Here’s something that isn’t dropping like my MMR: the $YGG token from Filipino-led Yield Guild Games broke $3.50 for the first time yesterday. (It’s currently at $3.33 as I write this.) Its marketcap is now $300M, and its fully-diluted valuation is over $3.3B. YGG recently announced a sponsorship from popular exchange FTX, and I’ve heard that there’s an even bigger announcement coming from founders Gabby Dizon and Beryl Li next week.

   

3. The FTX token has also been doing well, nearly doubling its value in the last 30 days. Overall, the crypto market is looking healthy, with the total marketcap now hovering just below $2T. Every major coin saw double-digit gains over the last week, with $ADA, $XRP, $MATIC, and even $DOGE, all rising by 30%. It seems likely that Ethereum’s hard fork from last Friday triggered the rally, and as of this morning we’ve seen over 35,000 ETH permanently removed from the economy.

4. Last Wednesday, I wrote briefly about the Poly Network hack, which resulted in a loss of $600M. In one of the strangest reversals I’ve yet seen, the hacker has returned $342M of the stolen funds, with the remaining $267M sitting in an Ethereum address as of yesterday evening. When I checked again this morning, the PolyNetwork team had posted that all the remaining assets had been returned and they were now in the process of redistributing to affected users. So although this broke the record for the largest hack in crypto history, it may have also broken the record for fastest full recovery (of assets, at least, although I don’t think we can say the same for PolyNetwork’s reputation).

5. My first 36 hours with Axie Infinity resulted in 105 SLP earned, which is just a little under 1,000 pesos in today’s prices. I wasn’t optimizing my energy usage, and spent a lot of time dueling at zero energy because I was just squeezing it in whenever I had 15-30 minutes to spare. That said, 1,000 pesos is a nice pizza and pasta lunch for two here in La Union, something which I’m looking forward to spending my Axie earnings on later today.

See you all on Monday, cryptofam, and stay safe this weekend ❤