San Francisco-based game developer Zynga, best known for the FarmVille and CSR Racing series, has announced plans to release its first blockchain and NFT-based games this year. The billion-dollar game studio first made waves in the crypto world last year after appointing 30-year gaming industry veteran Matt Wolf as Vice President of Blockchain Gaming to lead the company’s charge into the burgeoning industry. Zynga has also announced plans to increase the current blockchain gaming team from 15 employees to anywhere up to 100 by the end of this year. The company may also soon fall under the umbrella of video-game …

Olympic Games Jam: Beijing 2022 is the Winter Olympic's official play-to-earn multiplayer mobile game, created in collaboration between Animoca Brands-owned nWayPlay game studio and the International Olympics Committee. The app is currently only available on the Google Play store for Android phones, with no official release date for iOS devices yet. In the Olympian spirit, Cointelegraph played the newly launched game and reviewed the experience. Olympic Games Jam: Beijing 2022 Unveiled! Learn more about the new Play-To-Earn game here: https://t.co/q7dRTFCkmk #NFT #WinterOlympics pic.twitter.com/93rUDpmMj4 — Olympics Games Jam (@OlympicGamesJam) February 3, 2022 The game flow aims to mimic the real-life olympics: …

The stock price of popular video game store chain GameStop (GME) surged roughly 13% in one day amid rumors circulating online regarding a partnership with Microsoft to work on NFT gaming. At the time of writing, GME sits at $115.60 as of market close on Feb. 8 and has also held around that level in after-hours trading according to data from TradingView. GME started February at around the $100 region and has been pumping this month on the back of GameStop’s partnership with NFT focused Layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution Immutable X to develop its upcoming NFT marketplace. As part of …

The price of the Axie Infinity (AXS) token has surged by nearly 40% in three days. AXS rallied to over $65, its best level in more than two weeks, as Axie Infinity revealed a revamped reward structure for its player-vs-player (PVP) competition round. In detail, the play-to-earn startup expanded its number of leaderboard slots to 300,000 and boosted the amount of AXS rewards to 117,676 from the earlier 3,000 for the next season. "This will supercharge the competitive Axie scene and create more demand for quality Axie teams in the ecosystem," Axie Infinity explained, adding that their move would create …

Today's Nifty News rounds up NFT projects centered around the Winter Olympics, which began Friday in Beijing, China. The following are initiatives taken by the International Olympic Committee, or IOC, The British Olympic Association, and an independent artist leading up the 2022 games. IOC celebrates Olympic history Since June 2021, the IOC has collaborated with nWayPlay, an NFT marketplace and blockchain game studio that is a subsidiary of Animoca Brands, to launch the Olympic Heritage Collection of Olympic NFT Pins. Essentially digital versions of the physical collectible and tradeable Olympic pins, these NFTs celebrate the past Olympic Games by depicting …

A survey of 1,000 United States consumers around growing interest in the metaverse has revealed some interesting results. In a survey commissioned by nonfungible token and metaverse infrastructure provider Advokate Group, 87% of respondents preferred a decentralized metaverse on a blockchain over some of the mega projects planned by tech giants. This became more evident when 77% of the respondents shared concerns over Facebook’s entry into the metaverse, especially since it owns users' metaverse data. Facebook’s tainted past with mismanagement of private user data has already dismantled its early plans of launching a stablecoin called Diem. The stablecoin project faced …

Nonfungible tokens (NFT) continue to be one of the hottest sectors of the cryptocurrency market in 2022 despite the overall multi-month weakness seen in Bitcoin (BTC) and other large-cap crypto assets. One project that has benefited from the persistent bullishness in the NFT space is ImmutableX (IMX), a layer-two scaling solution for NFTs on the Ethereum network designed to offer near-instant transactions and zero gas fees for minting and trading Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that after hitting a low of $1.99 on Jan. 24, the price of IMX gained 116% to hit a daily high of …

The Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival has partnered with FTX US to launch a series of NFT collectibles that includes tokenized lifetime access passes to its annual music festivals. The iconic music festival is held over two consecutive three-day weekends every April in California, and is being headlined by Harry Styles, Billy Eilish and Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) in 2022. The partnership was announced on Feb. 2 and it will see the duo launch a Solana-based Coachella marketplace and NFTs that offer real world and virtual benefits. Coachella FTX One of a kind NFTs for …

The first computer games were developed in the late 20th century with the sole purpose of entertaining their audience. One of the first goals was to distract players from their routine work and provide them access to a fantasy world. Very soon, games began to compete for users' time against traditional forms of entertainment, such as movies, circuses, theater performances, zoos, etc. Planet Earth entered the new millennium with a population of over 6 billion people, and the forecast is that this number will reach 8 billion as early as 2023. If we assume that computer games will cease to …

Blockchain-based play-to-earn (P2E) gaming had a breakout year in 2021, and as the cryptocurrency ecosystem evolves in 2022, the P2E gaming sector and those that invest in it will need to consider what the next steps are. During bull markets, vaporware, speculation and euphoria can lead to unrealistic valuations and expectations, and this appears to also have impacted the P2E sector. Now that the hype is “over,” investors and developers will need to identify new value propositions that catalyze growth and steady investment into the blockchain gaming sector. Here’s a closer look at some of the trends that could emerge …

After the popularity of DeFi, came the rise of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and to the surprise of many, NFTs took the spotlight and remain front and center with the highest volume in sales, occuring at the start of January 2022. While 2021 became the year of NFTs, GameFi applications did surpass DeFi in terms of user popularity. According to data from DappRadar, Bloomberg gathered: “Nearly 50% of active cryptocurrency wallets connected to decentralized applications in November were for playing games. The percentage of wallets linked to decentralized finance, or DeFi, dapps fell to 45% during the same period, after months …

Cat themed play-to-earn (P2E) NFT game Nyan Heroes is aiming to save 1 billion cats from euthanization in animal shelters across the U.S. Nyan Heroes is an upcoming NFT battle royal shooter style game built on the Solana blockchain that will enable players to compete with each other using NFTs depicting animated cats that are used to pilot mech-robot NFTs in the game. The U.S. based project has been in development since October and the game is set for release in Q4 2022. Its first NFT drop is currently available for hodling and trading on marketplaces such as Fractal. According …