Gaming and metaverse tokens since the 2021 peak

The 2021 prices depended on growth that could not last. In a play-to-earn game, the tokens paid to players have to be bought by somebody, usually new players joining the game. When the number of new players stopped rising in 2022, the rewards were sold into a market with fewer buyers, which pushed prices down, which made the rewards worth less, which drove more players away. That loop, together with the end of the wider bull market and the Ronin bridge hack, explains most of the fall.

The metaverse tokens had a slightly different problem, in that their land prices were set during a burst of excitement after Facebook's rename, and the expected wave of users and brands spending time in virtual worlds did not arrive at anything like the scale those prices assumed.

To get back to its high from 99% down, a token has to rise a hundredfold, which is far more than recovering from a typical bear market. It has happened to some coins in earlier cycles, usually when the project found a new use, but most tokens that fall that far never return to their previous peak. Our cycle targets shrink each coin's previous cycle multiple by a decay factor, on the view that rebounds have tended to get smaller with each cycle, and the methodology page shows the calculation.

Because it trades on the same things as they do. Beam was built as a gaming network, and its price reacts to game launches, player numbers and appetite for gaming as a crypto theme, just as the 2021 games do. Its high came in March 2024 rather than November 2021, so it shows the theme trying to revive in a later cycle, and on 10 October 2026, at 94% below that high, how hard that has been so far.