Gambling Coins Are the Latest Meta. How Did We Get Here?

Hamster racing, snail racing, and now marble racing. It’s all occurring in Web3.

Hamsters.gg, a platform purporting to be the primary ever to livestream hamster races, has quickly gathered a devoted following of betters within the Web3 house desirous to amass fortunes by races. Hamsters are put into specifically designed racing lanes geared up with automated beginning gates. Previous to the start of every race, customers can place wagers on the racing hamster they favor.

The idea shortly turned standard, resulting in the creation of quite a few related platforms that includes completely different animals, corresponding to Snail Trail ($SLIME), Race (RABBIT), and Rat Roulette (RAT).

CoinGecko, a outstanding cryptocurrency analytics platform, has even taken the step to create a devoted class on its web site particularly for this area of interest. On the time of writing, the market cap for animal racing cash is $7.44 million.

Whereas stranger issues have caught the curiosity of the NFT house, the query stays: Why is there a rising fascination with these unconventional racing tokens?

How did we get right here?

It’s no secret that the crypto panorama is at the moment bearish, and NFT gross sales have been experiencing a downturn for some time now. Firstly of 2023, we skilled an optimistic second the place gross sales had been up 43 %. Nonetheless, this pattern wouldn’t proceed because the yr wore on. The ground costs of standard collections — corresponding to Azuki and Bored Ape Yacht Membership — noticed regular declines, and highly-anticipated drops resulted in letdowns.

When the efficiency of conventional investments is lackluster, some traders discover different methods, significantly people who might supply substantial returns, corresponding to coin presales, quick-flip NFT initiatives, and pump-and-dump schemes.

Consistent with this, the pursuit of extra profitable alternatives has performed a big position in fueling the elevated curiosity in playing tokens. Buyers are attracted to those high-risk, high-reward avenues as they search to maximise their income, even towards the backdrop of a broader market downturn.

The scenario isn’t fully unfamiliar. Not way back, we noticed an analogous pattern with the frenzy surrounding meme cash corresponding to $PEPE and $WOJAK.

Whereas this will likely current alternatives for some people to get wealthy shortly, it doesn’t assist with crypto’s already negative reputation related to scams, presumably hindering the trade’s potential to achieve broader acceptance.

Parallels to conventional markets

The joy surrounding the potential to capitalize on a lot of these fast-paced investments isn’t distinctive to Web3. It’s no completely different from people who proceed to spend on lottery tickets or on line casino video games in periods of financial downturn.

In reality, in response to a research from the National Library of Medicine, “members who skilled monetary issues as a result of financial disaster had been 52 % extra more likely to have purchased a lottery ticket through the recession interval in comparison with those that weren’t affected financially by the disaster.”

In essence, this underlines a basic similarity between conventional and digital economies. Whether or not or not this pattern will final, it reveals the age-old human inclination to hunt alternatives for speedy wealth creation, even amid financial downturns and towards appreciable odds. The mix of thrill, novelty, and potential for revenue is a compelling proposition that continues to attract an increasing number of individuals to those streams of revenue.