As some of my readers may have noticed I've been quite negative towards Gods Unchained lately. Even though I know many of the issues that made Genesis card trading impossible were to blame on ETH and its fees it seemed like the team has been lagging behind in evolving the game. There are still quite a lot of things to improve within the game, balancing being one of bigger issues right now, part of it most likely being due to the Genesis collection not being changed anymore meaning all core, season 1 and upcoming season 2 cards having to revolve around the stats of the genesis cards making it harder to balance. Hopefully they'll be able to iron out those changes, release season 2 for sale soon and possibly mobile and some marketing alongside it. For now let's take a look at some of the recent announcements such as the $gods token which I didn't take the time to write down in a post yet and the very recent $imx token announcement and its airdrop.
I'm not going to get into $gods too much as that's kind of old news by now, for those wanting to read it more in detail I'll leave you with this link. A tl;dr would be, they listened to the communities concerns and increased the community airdrop amount from 3% to 7% with some caveats such as half being locked up for 3 months. The way this is airdropped takes into account the amount of cards people own, both genesis and trial of the gods (season 1) and the snapshots already occurred on June 21st-23rd. Instead of just having 20m tokens as initially planned they increased that to 500m due to the unit bias psychology where people enjoy having/earning a handful of tokens than 0's followed by demicals. A big percentage of the tokens will be used in play to earn in the future, a small part of it will be publically sold to give the tokens a base price and at the same time people who may have missed the airdrop/buying cards from before a chance to get invested.
Let's get into the $IMX airdrop that was just announced.
For those of you who've bought genesis cards a long time ago, now's the time to link your ETH wallets to Immutable X, I've made a post when that first was announced and if you hadn't linked them before this $IMX airdrop was announced you may have missed on some airdrops as only 7918 users are going to receive 12.63 IMX each of the 100k IMX retrospective airdrop.
If you link your wallet to IMX now you'll still be able to participate in the Alpha Airdrop, but here you'll have to buy cards. 4x higher airdrop amount for this one but it'll be weighted in depending on what kind of cards you hold or buy and this snapshot will occur at a later date which they'll announce with a week's time in advance.
Every GU card you own on Immutable X when we take this final snapshot will earn you points (including those minted after this announcement)
The last part makes me think they may release season 2 packs before the snapshot occurs so they'll also be counted towards the alpha airdrop and here's how the point system will be distributed of holdings for the airdrop:
To be clear, the only way to earn these points right now is by buying GU cards on Immutable X and holding for the snapshot, while this might mean that after the snapshot a dump may occur it also means that right now this might be a pretty safe bet that cards you happened to buy before this announcement were bottomed out in price. Being able to both buy Genesis cards and TOTG will most likely mean a lot of volume coming up for these cards and we can already see this happening on some stats on tokentrove which is another 3rd party exchange that has implemented immutable x's zksnarks solution.
My prediction is that we'll be seeing a lot more volume happening in the next few days/weeks as more people are made aware they can participate in the IMX alpha airdrop of 400k tokens out of max 20M which will lead to higher base prices of most cards until the snapshot occurs. Hard to say what happens after that but if you've been looking at the markets lately and followed the success of Axie Infinity and its tokens $SLP and $AXS you may have noticed it's been paving the way for a pump not just in their own tokens but many other gaming tokens on the exchanges as well. Needless to say GU is nowhere near the activity and userbase that Axie has but at the same time it does have the potential as the game is free to play compared to Axie where you need to apply for scholarships and trust the owners will share the SLP rewards with you every 2 weeks. Compared to some of the other gaming coins that barely have a product yet and still have been going up in price I think $GODS and $IMX have a great chance of upside in the near future.
I'm not familiar with $AXS or what exactly it does, but $IMX is one of the first ones to use zksnarks and has already a very promising lineup of investors, partners and games that are going to be using it for cheap minting and close to 0 trading fees on Immutable X.
Needless to say I'm pretty excited about this over a very long waiting time of not being able to trade cards freely and the future of the game and the ecosystem around it being fairly uncertain. Airdrops are nice but I'm also considering participating in the public sales a little to add onto my holdings. IMX will also have ways to stake and serve as a governance token:
And it will offer you ways to earn IMX by being active on the exchange in the future after the airdrops are finished and staking, etc:
This last part is equally exciting for Gods Unchained holders. Many have been wondering what's going to happen with the usecases of cards, if they will be able to "stake" them meaning be able to lease them out or what's going to happen if a massive influx of new users appear but many of the Genesis cards are limited to 2-3k each in existence. With IMX and all functionalities that blockchain and smart contracts can offer the potential to do a lot more with these assets are now back on the table. Ideas such as staking cards allowing people who lease to generate temporary cards with the same effects they can play with while not re-minting more of the limited cards, a creation by demand system which will drive price depending on which cards are mostly used at the time and with close to 0 fees and the IMX token being used on the exchange it allowing for microtransactions such as daily leasing of cards that players may be interested in when they want to participate in tournaments or the popular weekend ranked events that occur in GU right now where packs can be won by the best performing players. The sky is the limit of what can be done with this technology and it feels nice to see GU and IMX finally open up that gate and be ready to tackle it.
What does this mean for Hive?
Well, seeing the popularity that Axie Buzz have been having with their community it gives me hope that I'll be able to give life back to the Gods Unchained community here on Hive (subscribe to not miss out when it gets restarted). Where we will be able to invite and offer players ways to earn crypto by posting and socializing around their favorite game instead of using the old centralized hubs such as Reddit, Facebook, etc. We had something going on in the beginning when the GU hype was still there but hopefully things are turning around now and we can pick up where we left off and OCD & HiveGC can act like a guild for popular blockchain games and make use of our account credit tickets for onboarding and put our voting power to use for retention and growth of these communities with people already familiar with blockchain tech but now knowing what they're missing out on cause they're not aware of Hive.
