TL;DR

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

• Web3 gaming news: DUPER raises $5.5M, Pentagon announced they secured $6M, OKX Ventures and Aptos announced a $10M fund, Cartridge announced they raised $7.5M, The Ronin Bridge gets exploited, MATR1X's MAX token, and more news.

• Macro news: Japan's stock market, a crypto crash caused by Jump Trading, CFTC looking into Bitboy, Genesis Global emerged from bankruptcy, and Nexera got hacked for $1.8M.

🎮 Web3 Gaming and Tech

• DUPER an on-chain game that blends Poker and Catan just announced they raised another $5.5M, making their total funding $8.7M

  • It’s a social war game that includes wagering where players compete to take over territories

• Pentagon Games announced they secured $6M in a Seed Round

  • Animoca, Binance, Symbolic VC, and others were involved in the round

  • Pentagon is a game publisher and is building a new ZkEVM chain

• Cartridge announced they raised $7.5M in a Series A led by BITKRAFT

  • The company is building infrastructure for provable on chain games and autonomous worlds

• The Ronin Bridge gets exploited by white hats for a total of $12M

  • Luckily, the hackers had the right intentions and returned all the funds on the same day

  • Back in 2022, Ronin lost $615M in funds during another exploit

• Binance Labs announced the second batch of projects admitted to S7 of its Incubation Program

  • One of the incumbents includes Ton Ton Games, a publisher of Telegram games

• OKX Ventures and Aptos announced a new $10M fund and accelerator

  • The accelerator aims to improve the quality of projects and apps on the Aptos blockchain

  • In September they will announce its first cohort of 5 projects within DeFi, AI, RWA, gaming, and other industries

• Notcoin introduced a new game called Lost Dogs, a community-driven story game

  • The event will last 6 weeks and players will speculate on what the next story event will be

  • This is Notcoin’s attempt to pivot away from the unsustainable model of clicker games

• MATR1X launched its MAX token this week and reduced the supply by 20% on launch day

  • The token is now trading at a ~$42M market cap and ~$321M FDV

• XBORG announced that they’re launching the XBG token on the 19th of August

  • It’s trying to create a new meta by doing a on chain fair launch and with 100% community raise token unlocks, only on DEXes

• The makers of Crypto Unicorns, Laguna Games, announced they shut down Unicorn Party

• Wilder World launched its Alpha on Epic Games recently and released their airdrop campaign just yesterday

  • Players complete challenges and missions to earn Shards

• Wild Forest announced they closed a strategic round of $1.4M, led by L1D

🕹️ Gaming Narrative Play

• On-chain gaming: we’re seeing quite some capital being poured into fully on-chain gaming (FOCG) recently (e.g. DUPER, Cartridge, NPC Labs). Despite FOCGs not targeting mass markets, there seems to be potential to tap into this new Web3 player persona that is both a player and “entrepreneur”, and make games for them.

🚀 Nexus V1 Alpha Launch

Welcome to #40 of the Nexus Power Up Newsletter. The public launch date is now confirmed, and you will know soon enough when Phase 1 will go live. 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

• Japan's stock market was rattled this week when the Bank of Japan unexpectedly tightened monetary policy, sending the yen soaring.

  • This, combined with growing recession fears sparked by a weak U.S. jobs report and the unwinding of the yen carry trade, triggered a global market sell-off, with the Nikkei 225 and Topix suffering their worst losses since the 1987 crash.

• Singaporean trading firm QCP Group claims that aggressive selling by Jump Trading is the primary cause of the recent cryptocurrency market crash.

  • Jump Trading, a major market maker, is under investigation by the CFTC. The firm's president, Kanav Kariya, recently resigned from his position.

• The CFTC is looking into possibly fraudulent crypto activity carried out by individuals associated with Ben Armstrong’s former company. Armstrong, better known as “BitBoy”, had some legal issues dating back to 2023 and was removed by current CEO T.J. Shedd. 

• Crypto lender Genesis Global has successfully emerged from bankruptcy and begun distributing approximately $4 billion in cryptocurrency and cash to creditors.

  • Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana creditors will receive recovery rates of 51.28%, 65.87%, and 29.58%, respectively. 

• Nexera, a tokenization platform formerly known as AllianceBlock, has been hacked, losing $1.8 million. The company is working with law enforcement to investigate the incident.

🌟Token Spotlight by Hustle

• Coin of the Week: NEIRO (on ETH)

• Market Cap: ~$212M

• What is NEIRO? Neiro is a rescue dog that was recently adopted by Kabosumama. The dog that represented the original Dogecoin called Kabosu, passed away this year, a legacy that Neiro aims to continue.

• 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: The Origin Pass (by Dew)

• Why Dew?

  • Dew is “The #1 NFT aggregator and launchpad for Polygon and Immutable”

• Utility

  • The main utility for the Origin Pass is NFT and token airdrop from Dew Studio Projects

• Catalysts

  • Dew supports the Polygon ZkEVM, which is being adopted by Immutable, Ronin (coming), and X1 (the OKX chain)

  • The more projects to integrate with this tech stack, the more potential NFT launches from Dew Studio Projects, the more airdrops to holders

    • They have 10 incubated IMX projects coming up (apparently)

Nexus Tweets

See you next week!