What's Driving Token Prices? November 29, 2023

TORN (-53%) - Tornado Cash, the decentralized mixing service, saw its token delisted from Binance on Monday, sending its price down -53%. The delisting is likely due to part of Binance’s promise to “right the ship” following last week’s settlement with the DOJ. Tornado Cash has long been a law enforcement target as criminals use the services to wash stolen coins to avoid tracking essentially. One way Tornado Cash can be used is laundering assets, but many others use the service for general privacy since user wallets can be tracked and tagged. Tornado Cash was the only privacy technology available on the market, and with the DOJ enforcement action, there is a dire need for new digital assets privacy services.
KNC (-5.9%) - Last week, DEX protocol, Kyber Network, suffered an exploit of over $50M across the Abritrum, Optimism, Ethereum, Polygon and Base networks. Details of the exploit are still unknown, but the Kyber team has already offered a 10% bounty to the hacker for returning funds.
TON (-0.4%) - Yesterday, gaming-focused venture capital firm, Animoca Brands, announced that it invested in the TON ecosystem, which will provide gaming apps, and will also become a validator on the network. The team behind the messaging app, Telegram, created Toncoin, previously known as The Open Network. Toncoin recently resurfaced with a renewed focus on gaming following its legal settlement over its 2018 ICO. The hope is that Telegram’s 800M+ users will bring a lot of eyeballs to Toncoin’s upcoming gaming apps.
ILV (+6.3%) - Web 3 gaming studio, Illuvium, launched its first game, Illuvium Arena, to the public yesterday. It is available on the Epic Games store, the second largest game distribution channel. Illuvium, co-founded by Kieran, Aaron and Grant Warwick (brothers of Kain Warwick, the founder of DeFi protocol, Synthetix), has been in production for over two years. The release of this game is a significant milestone for both the studio, and for Immutable-X, the gaming-focused layer-2 that the game is built on. Two additional games, Illuvium Overworld and Illuvium Beyond, are expected to launch in Q1 2024. Unlike Axie Infinity, which features a play-to-earn model, Illuvium’s ILV token can be staked by holders to earn more ILV from in-game revenue.

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