Portal Airdrop Begins, Ethereum Card Battler ‘Parallel’ Opens Up

Luckily, Decrypt’s GG is all over it. And if you need a quick way to get caught up on the latest moves around crypto video games, we’re debuting This Week in Crypto Games.

Our weekend roundup serves up the biggest news from the past week, along with a few other tidbits you might have missed. We also showcase a few of our original stories from the week.

Biggest news

Portal token launches: You’ve probably heard about this one if you follow the crypto gaming world at all. The long-awaited PORTAL token launched Thursday following a huge airdrop farming campaign across Twitter, and it popped above a $500 million market cap before cooling off. Portal is a cross-chain gaming platform designed to bridge the gap between games and networks, and there’s still a ton of hype around it.

Parallel open beta: NFT card game Parallel, which we picked as our 2023 game of the year, is now available for anyone to hop in and play following Thursday’s launch of the open beta. Think Hearthstone but with added complexity, an appealing space opera vibe, and collectible NFT cards. Now one of crypto’s brightest games is available for anyone to check out.

Dookey Dash cash: We already knew that Yuga Labs plans to bring back last year’s viral crypto gaming sensation Dookey Dash, albeit without NFT gating. And now we know that the free-to-play version—Dookey Dash: Unclogged—will still offer serious prizes, with a prize pool of more than $1 million set to be offered up when the game launches this month.

Speaking of Dookey Dash: Unclogged—Rug Radio creator Gabriele “Orangie” Leyva went hands-on with an early version provided by Yuga Labs and shared the following preview with Decrypt‘s GG:

Ex-PlayStation boss joins READYgg: This news flew under the radar a bit, but former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden was announced last week as an advisor for READYgg, a crypto gaming infrastructure startup. He’s apparently keen on NFT tech being used for user-generated games, for example, and will use his connections and influence to help more game developers embrace the space.

ICYMI

• The original Stormtrooper design from “Star Wars: A New Hope” will be featured in Solana gaming platform MixMob, but there’s an interesting backstory to the deal.
• Arbitrum layer-3 gaming network Xai launched staking rewards last week, which will roll out in phases. Here’s what you need to know.
• Crypto gaming startup Gala launched its GalaSwap decentralized exchange (DEX) last week on its new layer-1 network—and there are trading rewards.
• Telegram game Notcoin will start to purge mined coins from inactive game accounts ahead of the upcoming token drop on The Open Network (TON).

• Long-running Ethereum NFT card game Gods Unchained has finally gone mobile with last week’s launch of iOS and Android versions.
• The Arbitrum Arcade promotion will showcase games building on the Ethereum scaler and offer up $200K worth of grants to content creators.
• Immutable said last week that it has now onboarded 200,000 users to Immutable Passport, a streamlined wallet designed for non-crypto natives.
• Not crypto, but AI—Google’s DeepMind team revealed a demo for an AI tool that can generate video games on the fly based on a user prompt. Wild.

GG spotlight

Here are a few of our original stories from this past week that we think are well worth a weekend read: