By Cristian Bustos. Originally published at ValueWalk.
This year was a sizzling one for crypto and blockchain projects, with the growth of the DeFi world and lots of innovations in the NFT and play-to-earn games fields. A proper niche is emerging, one that is increasingly attracting mainstream users —something that can be seen as the greatest achievement of 2021.
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Looking into 2022, there are opportunities galore thanks to the myriad of innovative, startup-led projects that blossomed this year. These are the hottest crypto projects that are bound to shake up this industry.
SynCity, The Most Successful Binance IGO
SynCity is a free play-to-earn crypto game that is aiming at offering wider access to potential users. As blockchain veterans and gamers already know, play-to-earn games have gained substantial popularity as they offer the chance to get paid a full-time salary while playing online.
However, since the most-liked crypto games —such as Axie Infinit— require an initial investment to enter, SynCity is free and enables all users to spring right into action. It is also the first Mafia-based crypto game with a unique “Mafia as a DAO” governance system, through which gamers are able to manage their own syndicates.
SynCity has collected over $3.5 million in the first 30 minutes of its IGO launch on Binance, where users have been able to primarily purchase NFTs and tokens to be used in-game.
Further, SynCity IGO’s success came right after the company, led by the former head of business Roy Liu at TRON —Corner Growth Acquisition Corp 2 (NASDAQ:TRON)— had raised $8 million in a November fundraising round by Twitch co-founder Justin Kan and Goat Capital. Other participants included A&T Capital, Hack VC, Animoca Brands (ASX:AB1) and Spartan Group.
Right now, it is rated as #1 for collections on the Binance NFT Platform, and with over 200,000 subscribers it might blow up the crypto-game ecosystem.
SPACE, The Social Commerce Platform
This is a social commerce platform for the SPACE Metaverse that just recently raised $7 million from numerous well-known VCs such as Coinfund, Dapper Labs, Digital Currency Group, Animoca Brands, Hof Capital, and more.
Since the cryptocurrency and the DeFi worlds are very “techy” —despite being convenient and secure – SPACE wants to bring back the human aspect of the experience. The social ecosystem offers users the chance to virtually gather, chat, and naturally evolve a community-managed economic environment.
With dedicated virtual rooms, SPACE allows people and businesses to access the metaverse and sell items such as works of art, fashion, and music, hence incentivizing collaboration with users who want to create and evolve virtual businesses with a dedicated tool-kit.
As the founder of SPACE Metaverse Batis Samadian said, the SPACE hub aims to become the “Shopify of the Metaverse.”
DOGAMÍ, The NFT-based Crypto Game
So far NFTs and play-to-earn games have boomed separately. While most P2E games are NFT-based, they are still a bit of a sideshow compared to the game itself. Imagine an NFT collection that also has gamified mechanics, like the ability to upgrade and develop NFTs and increase their rarity.
One such NFT-based crypto-game that has hogged attention in the last few days is DOGAMÍ. Supported on the Tezos blockchain —which relies on the eco-friendly proof-of-stake consensus mechanism— DOGAMÍ enables users to breed and raise virtual 3D puppies.
Being able to choose between over 300 dog breeds, each NFT-based puppy is unique and leads to earning DOGA Tokens as rewards for completing tasks. DOGA Tokens can be used for in-game purchasing and upgrades or exchanged on secondary centralized and decentralized markets.
Besides aiming to create value, DOGAMÍ wants users to interact through an AR mobile app to bond with the puppies. With this additional feature, DOGAMì focuses on developing an entire “Petaverse” for its users.
DOGAMÍ has recently secured $6 million from high-rated companies such as Ubisoft, Animoca Brands, The Sandbox‘s co-founders, XAnge, Blockchain Founder Fund, Ghaf Capital, and Draper Goren Holm.
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