TL;DR

• Follow the Hustle and the Nexus Twitter accounts for the latest news.

• Web3 gaming news: DraftKings kills NFTs, The Watch, Ring Games terminates Stella Fantasy, Gam3Girl Ventures, Edison Metaverse and Turf Gaming raise, The Banana Game, Mintify Raises, Onchain Heroes, and more.

• Macro news: strong Q2 US economy, Trump Bitcoin conference, The strategic Bitcoin reserve, Wall Street's worst trading day, and more.

🎮 Web3 Gaming and Tech

• DraftKings’ NFT Marketplace and Reignmakers has been discontinued, effective immediately

  • Because of a class action lawsuit, DK’s NFTs are now seen as securities and therefore were forced to drop the initiatives

  • Players will be offered a reimbursement for the cards they hold

• The Watch announced its official game release on the 28th of August

  • It’s a MOBA x RTS, which was co-developed by Ubisoft and has been in development for the past few years

• Ring Games, the studio behind Stella Fantasy announced they are shutting down the game

  • However, the studio remains and they are working on new projects that can use the SFTY token

• Gam3Girl Ventures is a new Web3 gaming incubation fund

  • The fund’s strengths lie in its network, ability to link the East and West, and expertise across Web2 and Web3

  • Since their inception, they have been investing in Metacene, Aria, Party Icons, Footballcraft, and many other teams

• Elixir announced a 100-supply sneaker collection in collaboration with Nike

  • The sneakers will come with an NFT chip inside and will have 5 different airdrops

• Edison Metaverse (EM) announced they raised $2.2M in an angel round

  • EM is working on the acceleration of the metaverse through massive multiplayer events

• Hamster Kombat has delayed its planned July token launch on TON

  • The team is still finalizing plans for the promised large-scale airdrop.

• Turf Gaming announced a strategic investment from DGB Ventures

  • Turf is building a permissionless esports engine, lowering the barriers to organizing esports events/tournaments

• The Otherside came with a game update, introducing a new shooter mode: Project Dragon

  • The trailer was largely underwhelming and led to most people clowning The Otherside for their lack of progress in the past years

• CARV joins the meta and released The Banana Game

  • The Banana Game is a clicker game that’s played on Telegram. It takes the idea of the viral “Banana” game that launched on Steam earlier this year

• Mintify, “The NFT Orderbook” announced they raised $3.4M in an additional round

• Hyper Play launched in-game quests

  • Players can now earn in-game currencies and items by completing tasks on their platform

• Cosmic Bomber is a new game coming out of an Animoca Brands-owned studio (nWay)

  • The Bomberman-like party game just released its open beta and the tournaments feature

• The Forgotten Runvierse launched its Closed Beta

  • Recently the game migrated to the Ronin Network

• Onchain Heroes is an idle RPG launching soon (on an announced L2)

  • What we can expect is something along the lines of a next-gen DFK

  • Most interestingly, angel investors such as Hunter, Beanie, Seedphrase, and Bharat, are involved

🕹️ Gaming Narrative Play

• Memes x Gaming: Liquidity flow continues to show how memes dominate mindshare in this market. As we all know gaming is another consumer-friendly narrative, as in its easy to understand the concept and application. However, the attention on gaming is far lower than memes in this bull market.

• So, where does the crossover of memes and games start? Which games are actively working on social engagement or meta loops incorporating memes to create virality? Something interesting to find out more about.

🚀 Nexus V1 Alpha Launch

Welcome to #39 of the Nexus Power Up Newsletter. This week we have a list of P2A campaigns for you (note: it’s still bare-bones). In the meantime, this is how you can get involved with Nexus:

• Get a Nexus Pass NFT now for exclusive and immediate lifetime access

When we launch publicly, you can:

• Subscribe for $9.99/month to unlock Standard Tier access

• Use the free version (limited in features) of the platform

Don't miss out—follow our journey on Hustle's Twitter, YouTube channels, and Nexus Twitter.

📈Macro Cryptocurrency News

• Economic activity in the U.S. was considerably stronger than expected during the second quarter, boosted by strong consumer and government spending. 

• The SEC intends to seek an amendment to its original complaint against crypto exchange Binance — potentially impacting the need for a court ruling on whether or not tokens such as Solana are securities. 

• Former President Trump gave the keynote address at the three-day Bitcoin 2024 Conference. Even before speaking, Trump was already the first-ever major U.S. party nominee to accept donations in bitcoin and other crypto assets.

  • Much to the delight of the crowd, he noted that if re-elected, he would immediately fire Gary Gensler and appoint a new SEC chairman.

• Other noteworthy news from the BTC Conference came in the way of U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis unveiling an innovative proposal to transform the United States' financial strategy.

  • Known as the "strategic Bitcoin reserve" bill, Lummis's plan recommends that the U.S. government acquire 5% of the global Bitcoin supply and hold it for at least twenty years.

• Last week saw Wall Street suffer its worst trading day in 19 months, as disappointing earnings from Tesla and Google dampened recent tech gains. The benchmark S&P 500 index dropped 2.3% as a sell-off triggered its biggest single-day fall since December 2022.

🌟Token Spotlight by Hustle

• Coin of the Week: $KASPA

• Market Cap: $4.5B

• What is Kaspa Currency? Kaspa is a completely open-source L1, without central governance (similar to Bitcoin). The token was “fair launched” in November 2021. Recently KASPA hit its ATH of $0.20 and rose above MATIC.

• Delve into Hustle's market wisdom with his “Daily Watchlist” and deep-dive analysis available on the TTOO Discord server and through his “In the Game" show. 

✍️ NFT of The Week

• Pick of the Week: GOAT Gaming - Genesis GOATs

• Why GOAT Gaming?

  • GOAT Gaming is the same team behind Mighty Action Heroes. They built a very successful mobile game called Butter Royale

  • GOAT is a full-stack gaming infrastructure platform leveraging AI, and it received a grant from the Singaporean government, to build out their AI software

    • The software allows other studios to spin up content for their games at a rapid pace, which decreases production costs

  • In total, Might Bear Games raised $13.3M

• Utility

  • There’s little info about the Genesis GOATs available. What we do know is that staking your GOAT grants you points, which represents a token allocation

• Catalysts

  • The NFTs launched only yesterday and are trading a little above their mint price (0.05). GOAT onboarding more games for their AI infra might lead to value accrual for the NFTs

Nexus Feature Tweets

See you next week!