Off the Grid FTW

Sponsor: Mantle — Mass adoption of decentralized & token-governed technologies.

A crypto game that tons of mainstream normies will play and love? It's possible, as Off the Grid, a new free-to-play "extraction" battle royale, is demonstrating.

The game partnered with some of the most popular streamers in the world this week, like Ninja and TimTheTatman, and the play sessions earned rave reviews across the board.

Indeed, the title is now the most popular F2P game on the Epic Games Store, and for a time it was even getting more stream views than Fortnite!

So how's this possible for a crypto game, which mainstream gamers have traditionally been skeptical toward?

First and foremost, it's fun, and as a battle royale it's like a cross between Call of Duty, Apex Legends, Fortnite, etc. In other words, it's hit this genre hard and is offering players the classic, thrilling experiences they expect from these PVP showdowns.

Additionally, the economy of Off the Grid is built atop its own custom Avalanche network, but the blockchain and crypto elements are essentially all abstracted away for players. It's not in your face every step of the way, so to speak.

So what we have here is an actually fun game that uses onchain aspects to power new possibilities in a way that's streamlined and beneficial for the player base. It's harder than it sounds to pull off, but this is the recipe for success in crypto gaming.

Will some of the initial hype die down eventually? Sure, it happens to every game. But with a legitimately fun foundation, Off the Grid has a serious chance to make more advances an inroads from that sound base. It's a blueprint I hope we see a lot more of going forward!

📰 General news

• Coinbase integrated Taproot addresses
• Fileverse added mobile support for Ddocs
• Kiwi News unveiled the Into the Nouniverse writing contest
• Magic Eden integrated Solana Blinks
• Phantom added support for Base assets
• Surreal opened collecting on its web platform
  

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• ArtRun, a new platform on Zora and Base for trading artcoins, launched
• XCOPY released COPE SALADA on Highlight and Shape and saw Chatbot and Chill? resell for 800 ETH

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Chimpers released The Dojo Legends collection on Base
• Possible acquired 10KTF from Yuga Labs

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• B3 kicked off Season 1 of BP rewards
• Cartridge announced Beast Slayers, a Telegram game on Starknet
• Duper introduced Season 2: Sparks Rush
• Fren Pet launched free-to-play onboarding
• Mavis Market added support for buying NFTs with any Ronin token
• Nouns Esports announced the details of its upcoming Smash Bros tournament, The Nounsvitational
• Oh Baby Kart is now free to download

📱 Onchain social

• Interface introduced a new copytrading primitive
• Layer3 partnered with Zora to showcase the Zora mobile app

🪙 NFTfi 

• GONDI unveiled a series of new product updates
• Uniswap announced its upcoming Unichain L2
• Yearn introduced yFu, a mintable comic detailing its history

🌐 Virtual Worlds

• Nifty Island unveiled Magic Eden collab quests, a Bloom Gacha machine, and its new dev roadmap
• Openvoxels published its September 2024 update
• Substrata debuted its new graphics system with a Cryptovoxels snapshot
• The Otherside is hosting an in-world ApeFest event on Oct. 19th

Mantle kickstarts Season 1 of Methamorphosis. Building on the success of their Liquid Staking Token, mETH, Mantle LSP announces plans for a new Liquid Restaking Token, cmETH, along with a governance token, COOK. With Methamorphosis, participants can now farm Powder for future COOK tokens and position themselves early for upcoming cmETH release.

• ✨ Hypersculptures - Neokry
• 🎴 Conduit Case Study: Zora Network - Henry Updegrave
• 📸 Snap and Mint: Web3 Social with Moshicam - Benoit.Tokyo
• 🎨 Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Onchain Art - Takens Theorem
• ⚔️ The Midpoint Between Robinhood and Runescape - Joshua Litchman