What's Driving Token Prices? October 11, 2023

PRIME (-19%) - Parallel, a blockchain-based trading card game, announced yesterday that it listed on Steam, currently the most popular video game distribution platform. The Parallel game will be launching in open beta soon but it is unknown if the full web3 functionality of the game will be available through Steam since traditional gaming platforms typically have limited features such as NFT functionality.
MATIC (-9.6%) - Layer-2 scaling solution, Polygon, announced last week that it launched the initial contracts for its token migration on testnet. Over the summer, Polygon released a roadmap for Polygon 2.0 which included a redo and rebrand of MATIC. Polygon recently passed governance proposals to upgrade the MATIC token to the POL token, institute the use POL as staking/gas token on the network, and chose to adopt Ethereum’s EIP-1559 burn mechanism that burns a portion of gas fees spent. Finally, Circle announced yesterday that native USDC would be available on Polygon’s PoS network.
JOE (-9.2%) - Avalanche-based decentralized exchange, Trader Joe, was named in a lawsuit last week by grocery store chain Trader Joe’s. The grocery store accuses the DEX of trademark infringement and profiting off the Trader Joe’s brand by using the same name and branding colors (red) in their marketing. Trader Joe’s also claims they sent multiple cease-and-desist letters to the DEX but received no response. The lawsuit requests that the Trader Joe DEX ceases using their name and hands over any and all websites associated with Trader Joe’s.
AVAX (-6.8%) - Last week, Layer-1 blockchain, Avalanche, was the talk of the town with its upcoming launch of their friend.tech copycat, Stars Arena, which promised to improve the user experience on friend.tech. Avalanche, which saw a decline in user activity since the end of the bull market 18 months ago, rose 13% on the promise of a new killer app. However on Friday, Stars Arena suffered an exploit that drained the project of all $3M of its TVL. The hacker last night sent a message onchain offering to return the money (with the assumption that a portion of this will be granted to the hacker as a bounty). Friday’s incident follows another hack on Thursday, in which a hacker stole $2000 of AVAX tokens from the platform. The project is currently closed down until a full security audit can be completed and AVAX has suffered in the absence of a token for Stars Arena, down -6.8%

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