Apes Together Strong

One rumor is all it takes to kick the value of a cryptocurrency into action. That’s what happened with the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s ($BAYC.NFT) native token ApeCoin ($APE.X) today, which rose after a pseudonymous duo tweeted that BAYC and MAYC holders will be granted virtual land inside Yuga Labs’ new metaverse, “Otherside.”

@renegademasterr and @WillyTheDegen, the two users most central to the rumor, also indicated that ApeCoin would become the de facto payment token. People did not care to verify the rumor and jumped to buy ApeCoin ($APE.X), and as a result, the tokens surged 24% in the past 24 hours and 104% since its inception in March, trading at $16.5. The market capitalization shot up to $4.6 billion this week.

Yuga Labs, the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, announced Otherside in March. The metaverse platform and roleplaying game has not yet been released, so information is limited. However, the announcement seems to indicate that Otherside will be a multi-land metaverse – there could be a lava landscape, an ice landscape, a crystal landscape, a sand scene, a purple mystic landscape, and a distinctive earthlike landscape. Not only that, but the Otherside is expected to include other prominent NFT projects as well. The trailer shows NFTs from other collections such as the CryptoPunks, Cryptoads, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Meebits, World of Women, and Cool Cats. This could mean that the Otherside will support interoperability – which is one of the biggest objectives of the DeFi world. 

Yuga Labs has neither confirmed nor denied the rumor, but Yuga Labs tweeted in March that it would be “adopting ApeCoin as the primary token for the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem as well as future Yuga products and services.” It also announced that the Otherside would launch in April 2022.

We’ll have to wait and see what happens, but it’s a pretty good bet that the Otherside land sale will be a turning point for the NFT space.

We all keep important receipts and checks for our records just to be sure all transactions were correct. But where are the receipts for cryptocurrency transactions?

Cryptocurrency is different from traditional money, where a third-party, such as a bank, confirms the transaction. With cryptocurrencies, the entire history of a cryptocurrency is stored on the blockchain, which records all transactions — and all the transactions can be seen. 

Block explorer is a search engine, like Google, where you can see all the crypto transactions that have ever existed on a blockchain. Here, you can see a detailed record of each transaction, check the balance for each address, and more.

There are different types of block explorers supporting different types of blockchain networks. For instance, Etherscan provides the history of the Ethereum transactions, Blockchain.com is used for Bitcoin, and Solscan focuses on Solana. 

Transaction history can be viewed easily.

You can use block explorer to check what you sent to whom, and when and how much they sent to you. Here, we’re giving you an example of Etherscan, the block explorer of Ethereum—the biggest blockchain network. Other block explorers, such as Solscan, are fundamentally the same. 

By clicking on Etherscan, you will see a list of the latest Ethereum transactions. Blockchain users are identified by their wallet address. On Ethereum, it starts with 0x. If you see the image below, for instance, it shows that a user has sent Ether to Mutant Ape Yacht Club.

You can put your Ethereum wallet address on the search bar to check your transaction history. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin disclosed his personal ETH address in October 2018. If you want to check his transaction history, type 0xAb5801a7D398351b8bE11C439e05C5B3259aeC9B and see the results. 

Block explorer is important because…  

Well, you can see how people are getting richer than you. 

But jokes aside, it’s an important tool to trace how much amount you received or sent. That means, if you ever fail to see the correct amount of Ether or Bitcoin in your wallet, you do not need to spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out what’s wrong. Take a look at the block explorer and see what happened to your money. If someone says they have sent you the tokens already, don’t refresh your wallet again and again – all you need to do is visit the block explorer and check.

In the crypto world, there is a famous saying, “Don’t trust, verify,” and that is exactly what block explorer does.

Cryptocurrency adoption has multiplied in recent years, and that’s why blockchain-based games are no longer surprising. A recent report by market tracker DappRadar claims that blockchain-based games increased 2,000% from the previous year, equaling 52% of all blockchain activity.

The report – which was prepared in tandem with the Blockchain Game Alliance (BGA) – indicates that 2022 will be a landmark year for crypto games developers. This is because the total investment raised for blockchain games in Q1 alone was $2.5 billion, which could reach a whopping $10 billion by the end of the year. Leading that fundraising haul were brands such as Animoca Brands (raised $360 million), blockchain  Polygon (which raised $450 million), and Yuga Labs ($450 million) to launch the Otherside metaverse with play-to-earn (P2E) games.

Per the report, there were 1.22 million unique active wallets (UAW) for blockchain-based games in March, and more than half of the activity in the industry was generated by decentralized applications (DApps) or gaming applications with rewards and incentives. Furthermore, Splitterlands is ranked #1 among play-to-earn DAPPs, while Polygon is on top among layer-2 sidechains with the top played P2E games. Additionally, despite being among the top 10 most played games, Axie Infinity ($AXIE.NFT) saw a decrease in UAW after the $650 million hack of Ronin Bridge in mid-February.

Overall the report seemed to be very optimistic about the future of the metaverse, saying it is “one of the most exciting opportunities in the blockchain industry.” 

“The ownership entitled by NFTs and the underlying financial ecosystem enabled by cryptocurrencies and play-to-earn games will shift the paradigm from the traditional metaverse that is limited to a virtual, augmented reality,” the report said.