The NFT market, once booming in 2021, has seen a dramatic 93% drop in trading volume by early 2025. Despite this downturn, Rarible co-founder Alexander Salnikov believes the sector is not collapsing but evolving. He argues that NFTs are transitioning from speculative hype to real-world utility — powering memberships, loyalty programs, and digital identities. While celebrity-driven projects have largely lost value, Salnikov stresses that long-term success lies in meaningful community engagement and usability. Though major platforms like Bybit and Kraken have shut down NFT services, Rarible remains focused on building tailored, blockchain-based marketplaces with real user value. 

Well well well… look who finally showed up to the Web3 party with an actual franchise. After two years of mysterious partnership handshakes and PR speak, Immutable and Ubisoft have revealed Might & Magic Fates—a free-to-play strategy TCG built on the Immutable blockchain. You know, because "true ownership" and "earning cards" is the new meta (again). It’s inspired by the Might & Magic universe, dropping on mobile in winter 2025, with PC maybe getting some love later if things go well (read: if mobile whales show up). Here’s what they’re offering: 🧙‍♂️ Deck-building with creatures, spells, artifacts, buildings, and heroes🎯 Fast-paced PvP matches that totally aren’t pay-to-win📦 Booster packs with card rarities (because gambling mechanics in Web3 are basically a feature)💰 Full ownership of your cards—tradeable on Immutable’s marketplace, of course Ubisoft isn’t new to the blockchain scene anymore—they’ve already got Champions Tactics and Captain Laserhawk: The G.A.M.E. in the mix. This just might be their first shot at going semi-mainstream with Web3. So what do we think, frens? Are we finally getting a legit, non-janky Web3 game with real IP behind it? Or is this just another NFT-powered cash grab hiding behind nostalgic card art and lootboxes? DYOR, but hey, at least it’s not another pixel-art auto-battler from "three dudes in a DAO.

Well well well, it finally happened. Yolo.ex has left early access and officially launched on the Epic Games Store. So if you ever wanted to live out your dreams of being a DeFi degen in 3D, congratulations—your moment has arrived. Set in the year 2056 (aka after the next 3 crypto cycles), Yolo.ex is a sci-fi, story-driven, Unreal Engine-powered game where you play… wait for it… a recruit at a futuristic trading firm. Basically EVE Online meets FTX but without the Bahamas mansion (yet). 🚀 7 story-driven episodes incoming📉 Live trading, powered by Hyperliquid, Jupiter, and other DeFi protocols🌐 Runs on Solana (because of course it does)🎮 Free-to-play, no NFTs required to get wrecked Their pitch? “Markets 3.0.” Which sounds suspiciously like “Markets 2.0, but with slightly better lighting and more lore.” According to the CEO, the dev team includes both game devs and high-frequency traders—aka a mix of people who nerf boss fights and people who nuke liquidity pools. Honestly, I respect it. Instead of pretending crypto is something it’s not, they’re just leaning into it: high-speed trades, volatility, and the existential dread of watching your portfolio evaporate—now with cutscenes. Is it gonna onboard the next billion users? Probably not. But will it entertain a few thousand traders who can’t decide between trading and gaming at 3am? Absolutely. Anyone tried it yet? Or are we all just waiting for the inevitable rekt leaderboard to drop?

NFT platform Metaplex, built on Solana, is under legal scrutiny after announcing plans to transfer around 54,000 unclaimed SOL (worth over $6.5 million) from a resizing optimization process to its DAO Treasury. Burwick Law, a crypto-specialized firm, issued an open letter on April 22 demanding the reversal of the move by April 25, calling it legally risky and possibly a case of "unjust enrichment." The firm criticized the lack of user notification and proposed an alternative plan to refund 90% of the SOL to NFT holders and allocate 10% for DAO operations. The situation has sparked broader concerns about decentralization and user rights in Web3 governance. 

So here's a sentence I never thought I’d type: Yoki Origins, originally launched by Astar Foundation, just got rebranded as Yoki Legacy and relit on Sony's blockchain project—Soneium—via Sony Block Solutions Labs. Yes, Sony. As in “PlayStation but make it corporate Web3.” What’s changed? Well, quite a bit:🐾 From 48 Yokis to 24 – Half the monsters, double the Web3 efficiency.🔁 You can now fuse 3 basic Yokis into an evolved one – Pokémon fusion meets gas fees (but no gas fees… for now).💰 The token’s been rebranded from Omamori (OMA) to the sleeker, brand-synergized OMASTR (because it’s tied deeper to Astar and probably looks cooler on a chart).🎰 Capsule machines – Yes, literal gacha mechanics. Three machines, four capsule types. RNG gods, bless us.🧠 Notebook system – Complete your Pokédex–I mean, Yoki Notebook–by June 1st and earn an OG Badge. And it’s not just fluff stats either: 📈 59,000 player wallets created 🧱 2.5M Yoki NFTs minted (most likely 98% are chilling in someone’s dusty Phantom wallet) They’re also rolling out ACS Points, Astar’s new reward system with a 100 million ASTR pool. At launch, 2 million ACS points are up for grabs—because nothing says “ecosystem incentives” like throwing tokens at people who mint and click shiny things. Anyway, bullish on cute NFT creatures and corporate blockchains? Or does this feel like Pokémon GO with a MetaMask wallet? Jury’s still out. Let’s hear it degens: minting or waiting for the inevitable 95% floor drop before sweeping Yokis at 3AM?

In the latest episode of “As the Web3 Turns,” the Supreme Court of Gibraltar just unfroze 450 million PLAY tokens that had been stuck in legal limbo since February. That’s 46% of the total supply—yes, nearly half the tokens were chilling under court custody. Backstory? US-based Ready Games and investor Bitkraft came out swinging earlier this year and got a court order to freeze the stash, alleging… well, something compelling enough at the time. Fast forward to now, and turns out the claimant—Ready US—was dissolved as a company in March 2024 and hadn’t complied with anything since 2023. 🙃 So the court said, “Yeah nah,” and lifted the order. Also officially crowned Christina Macedo, CEO of PLAY Network, as the sole legal owner of the Gibraltar entity behind the token. Meanwhile, the PLAY token price got absolutely nuked during this whole legal circus:💥 $100M market cap pre-lawsuit☠️ $3.4M market cap post-freeze➡️ Around 19,000 wallets left holding melted ice cubes Big win for Macedo and PLAY’s legal squad, including James Ramsden KC (the lawyer equivalent of a legendary NFT drop) who dropped this spicy line in the ruling: “This is a salutary lesson for claimants in digital asset litigation who don’t understand the tech or the fragility of interim orders.” Translation: “If you don’t know what a blockchain is, maybe don’t come for half the supply.” So what’s next? There’s another hearing on April 25 to sort out indemnity costs, aka who’s footing the legal bill for this mess. Moral of the story? Don’t bring TradFi legal tactics to a crypto fight unless your paperwork is tighter than a Ledger seed phrase. Bullish on unfreezing season? Or are you still waiting for that PLAY chart to respawn?

On-chain analysis is a method of studying data directly from blockchain networks to better understand market behavior, spot trends, and make informed decisions. Unlike technical analysis, which focuses on price and volume patterns, on-chain analysis looks at structural metrics like coin circulation, wallet activity, investor accumulation, and market liquidity.It offers full transparency, allowing anyone to track transactions and capital flows in real time. This method is especially useful for evaluating DeFi project health through metrics like Total Value Locked (TVL), assessing network security via hash rates, and identifying market cycles to optimize buying and selling decisions. Choosing the right on-chain analysis platform depends on user needs, but key factors include data accuracy, user-friendly visuals, advanced tools, and affordability.

Alright, it finally happened: someone put ChatGPT on-chain and gave it a yield farming bag. Eliza Labs just launched auto.fun (yes, that’s the real name, not a joke I made), a no-code playground where you can spin up your own autonomous AI agents using their ElizaOS simulation framework. Basically, it’s like SimCity, but instead of traffic jams, your agents are aping into 12% APY staking farms while auto-posting on X and maybe trading low-cap tokens. 🤖 Example use case? “Find me the best staking opportunities with at least 12% APY and automatically allocate funds.”Yes, we’re now outsourcing degen behavior to bots. Each AI agent gets its own token, of course. But wait, they’re doing it “Fairer Than Fair™” – a bonding curve system that lets projects buy up to 50% of their tokens before public listing to avoid the bots… because giving the bots their own AI agents would just be too meta. Also, creators get a cut of swap fees, so congrats in advance to everyone launching the “SleepySnek Agent” that YOLOs into random farming pools at 3am. 🚀 Early launch projects include: FightFi – because of course someone made “AI agent PvP” a thing Comput3 – decentralized compute Sigma Music Agent – social AI DJs, basically And apparently everyone from Nifty Island to Planet Mojo is getting into the “AI agents but make it web3” game. So yeah, either this is the start of Skynet farming Pendle, or we’re finally making Discord mods obsolete. Alpha or cope? LMK below.

So Improbable (aka the UK team behind all those “we swear the metaverse isn’t dead” tech plays) just dropped their most ambitious project yet: Chunked. It’s a real-time multiplayer sandbox MMO built entirely onchain—because apparently servers are too old-school now. Built in under three weeks (no backend, no stress), this thing runs on their Somnia infrastructure + Msquared metaverse sauce. Every block you mine? It’s an ERC-1155 token. No, not just another "own your dirt" pitch—this one’s actually playable in your browser, right now. Improbable swears it’s not just Minecraft + NFTs. They want to prove that “high-performance blockchain virtual worlds” are more than a buzzword soup. The core loop? 🧱 Every mined block is an actual token in your wallet 🔁 Players can fork the contracts, build their own experiences 🛍️ Player-run economies and marketplaces are encouraged 🤷‍♂️ Devs aren’t even making the trading dApp—they’re just giving you the tools and walking away Their CPO even went on X Spaces to say: “If someone wants diamond blocks for their clout-house, and you’ve got the time to mine ‘em—boom, trade it. It’s all tokens. Someone else can build the market.”Translation: "We're too busy. You do it." So yeah, Chunked might not be the next Fortnite, but it is a flex on how composable Web3 gaming can get when you don’t try to shoehorn blockchain into a Web2 game loop. Is this the first real onchain sandbox that’s actually fun? Or is this just Minecraft with commitment issues? Curious to hear what degens and builders think. Try it out (guest login works too) and report back.

Waylon Wilcox, a 45-year-old from Pennsylvania, pleaded guilty in federal court to failing to report around $13 million earned from selling 97 NFTs between 2021 and 2022. His actions allowed him to evade approximately $3.3 million in taxes. Investigators confirmed the omission was deliberate. Under current U.S. tax law, NFT and crypto sales are taxable, and Wilcox could face up to six years in prison, though his guilty plea may reduce the sentence. The case highlights the IRS’s ongoing crackdown on crypto-related tax evasion.