Gaming dominates blockchain usage as DeFi crumbles: report

The blockchain industry recorded yet another bleak month in August with two major exploits and a continued decrease in DeFi activity, a new report has found. However, the information by decentralized applications analytics platform DappRadar revealed that gaming has continued to be a bright spot for the industry, accounting for half the blockchain usage.

The biggest headline in August was the exploit on the Nomad cross-chain bridge in which about $200 million was stolen. In the same month, Polkadot-based DeFi platform Acala was also hacked, as were thousands of Solana wallets.

The month also saw the unique active wallets drop by 3.5% from July and 14.7% from a year ago to hit 1.67 million.

On the bright side, gaming continued to be the prime use case for blockchain technology throughout the month. Unique active wallets dedicated to gaming accounted for $698 million in transactions and 50.5% of the activity on blockchain networks, DappRadar found.

“It is worth mentioning that even if the dominance of games for the UAW has decreased from 57.30% to 50.51% MoM, it still represents a good indicator for the sector,” it pointed out.

The report is consistent with many others that have found gamers to be the most eager adopters of digital assets and blockchain technology. This industry has always been a first mover with most technologies, including virtual and augmented realities (AR), and blockchain was a natural fit. With in-game tokens, a mainstay in most games for decades, jumping onto digital assets and even NFTs came easy.

Gaming has been an integral part of the success that BSV has seen over the past four years. Games like Fyx Gaming’s CryptoFights have demonstrated what is possible with a massively scaling blockchain network, while others like Haste Arcade have shown just how revolutionary nanopayments over Bitcoin can be in gaming.

CryptoFights, in particular, has been a standout and has consistently accounted for the most transactions of any application on the BSV network, recording 5.9 million transactions in the past week alone. On most days, the game alone accounts for as many transactions as the entire Ethereum network combined.

As BSV Blockchain Association’s general counsel Marcin Zarakowski noted during the Blockchain 4 Gaming event in Warsaw, gaming is by far the best example of the efficiency of the BSV blockchain.

Watch: The BSV Global Blockchain Convention presentation, Scaling Games on Layer One: Why It Matters