Hamster racing, snail racing, and now marble racing. It’s all taking place in Web3.
Hamsters.gg, a platform purporting to be the primary ever to livestream hamster races, has quickly gathered a devoted following of betters within the Web3 area desirous to amass fortunes by means of races. Hamsters are put into specifically designed racing lanes outfitted with automated beginning gates. Previous to the start of every race, customers can place wagers on the racing hamster they favor.
The idea rapidly turned well-liked, resulting in the creation of quite a few related platforms that includes completely different animals, corresponding to Snail Path ($SLIME), Race (RABBIT), and Rat Roulette (RAT).
CoinGecko, a distinguished cryptocurrency analytics platform, has even taken the step to create a devoted class on its web site particularly for this area of interest. On the time of writing, the market cap for animal racing cash is $7.44 million.
Whereas stranger issues have caught the curiosity of the NFT area, the query stays: Why is there a rising fascination with these unconventional racing tokens?
How did we get right here?
It’s no secret that the crypto panorama is at present bearish, and NFT gross sales have been experiencing a downturn for some time now. At the beginning of 2023, we skilled an optimistic second the place gross sales have been up 43 %. Nonetheless, this pattern wouldn’t proceed because the 12 months wore on. The ground costs of well-liked collections — corresponding to Azuki and Bored Ape Yacht Membership — noticed regular declines, and highly-anticipated drops resulted in letdowns.
When the efficiency of conventional investments is lackluster, some buyers discover various methods, significantly people who could provide substantial returns, corresponding to coin presales, quick-flip NFT tasks, and pump-and-dump schemes.
Consistent with this, the pursuit of extra profitable alternatives has performed a major position in fueling the elevated curiosity in playing tokens. Traders are attracted to those high-risk, high-reward avenues as they search to maximise their income, even towards the backdrop of a broader market downturn.
The scenario isn’t completely unfamiliar. Not way back, we noticed an analogous pattern with the frenzy surrounding meme cash corresponding to $PEPE and $WOJAK.
Whereas this will likely current alternatives for some people to get wealthy rapidly, it doesn’t assist with crypto’s already damaging repute related to scams, presumably hindering the trade’s capability to realize broader acceptance.
Parallels to conventional markets
The thrill surrounding the potential to capitalize on all these fast-paced investments isn’t distinctive to Web3. It’s no completely different from people who proceed to spend on lottery tickets or on line casino video games during times of financial downturn.
In actual fact, based on a research from the Nationwide Library of Drugs, “individuals who skilled monetary issues because of the financial disaster have been 52 % extra more likely to have purchased a lottery ticket in the course of the recession interval in comparison with those that weren’t affected financially by the disaster.”
In essence, this underlines a elementary similarity between conventional and digital economies. Whether or not or not this pattern will final, it reveals the age-old human inclination to hunt alternatives for speedy wealth creation, even amid financial downturns and towards appreciable odds. The mixture of thrill, novelty, and potential for revenue is a compelling proposition that continues to attract increasingly more individuals to those streams of revenue.
