Yield Guild Games (YGG) has released its Community Update for Q1 2022, revealing that total scholarships rose 39% overall as the guild continues to farm copious amounts of the Axie breeding Smooth Love Potion (SLP) token. The Community Report shows that the month-on-month growth of scholarships in YGG has been strong despite a downturn in the market. January saw 50.13% growth, February saw a 28.8% increase, while March had 41.93% growth fueled by new partnerships and the rollout of SubDAOs. By the end of March, the guild had 29,458 scholarships, mostly from Axie Infinity. SubDAOs are decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) …

Axie Infinity, the popular play-to-earn nonfungible token (NFT) game, faced another attack on its Discord server earlier on Wednesday, leading to a compromise of its MEE6 bot. MEE6 is a popular discord bot mainly used for automating roles and messages and is used by numerous crypto projects. The attackers used the compromised bot to add permissions to a fake Jiho account and later issued a fake announcement regarding a mint. The developers managed to remove the compromised MEE6 bot from the main server and deleted the fake messages as well. However, the official Twitter account of the project warned that …

The United States Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced Friday that it was sanctioning cryptocurrency mixer Blender.io for its role in laundering proceeds from the hacking of Axie Infinity's Ronin Bridge. North Korean state-sponsored hackers Lazarus Group have been identified as the perpetrators of the attack. Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian E. Nelson said in a statement: “Today, for the first time ever, Treasury is sanctioning a virtual currency mixer. […] We are taking action against illicit financial activity by the DPRK and will not allow state-sponsored thievery and its money-laundering enablers to …

SpongeBob and Warhammer mobile game scores Polygon partnership Free-to-play mobile games publisher Tilting Point has entered a multi-year partnership with Polygon Studios to launch 10 Web3 games over the next two years. Polygon Studios and Tilting Point plan to help native Web3 game developers scale their games alongside free-to-play developer partners, as well as studios that want to bridge from Web2 to Web3 gaming. The first three titles in the works are interstellar strategy game Astrokings from Korean developer AN games, which Tilting Point acquired earlier this year, virtual slot game The Walking Dead: Casino Slots, based on the AMC …

The native tokens of move-to-earn lifestyle app STEPN swung higher on news that they would be available to trade on Coinbase, a U.S.-based crypto exchange. The price of STEPN's governance token Green Metaverse Token (GMT) rallied by nearly 20% to reach over $4 in the past 24 hours, hitting as high as $4.50, its best level to date. Similarly, the other STEPN token, called the Green Satoshi Token (GST), which players earn after walking, jogging and running outdoors with STEPN's "NFT Sneakers," gained 6.5% to about $6.25 on a 24-hour adjusted timeframe with a new record high of $7.20. STEPN …

Via a Twitter post on Friday, Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, said that the cryptocurrency exchange recovered $5.8 million spread over 86 accounts in digital assets moved to the exchange by Lazarus Group. Last month, the North Korean cyber-criminal group allegedly stole 173,600 Ether (ETH) and 25.5 million USD Coin (USDC), worth over $600 million at the time, belonging to Axie Infinity's Ronin bridge. As of Friday, the wallet address associated with the Ronin has around $280 million in digital assets remaining. Blockchain forensics company Elliptic recently uncovered that the hackers have been sending the money to centralized exchanges and …

STEPN (GMT) has rallied strongly against the United States dollar this week as it looks likely to form a classical bullish technical pattern called “the bull flag.” GMT eyes more upside GMT’s price rose 30% week-to-date, including a strong rally to establish an all-time high near $3.85 followed by a relatively modest correction to nearly $3.00. In particular, the correction phase occurred inside a descending parallel channel, raising possibilities that the price would eventually break out of it to the upside. That is precisely because traditional analysts consider strong run-ups, followed by range-trapped price corrections, as bullish continuation setups. And, …

The decentralized finance (DeFi) world saw another week of increased on-chain and developer activity while token prices entered the second week of the bear market, with many of the tokens bleeding in double digits over the past week. MetaMask expanded its institutional offering by partnering with four institutional custodians, while Polygon has pledged to go carbon neutral. We will also look at how users can bridge different tokens to the Polygon network and look into Reputation DAO, a project that collateralizes users’ private information for DeFi loans. MetaMask expands institutional offering by integrating new crypto custodians DeFi wallet and browser …

Axie Infinity (AXS) price has fallen by nearly 30% two weeks after losing $625 million to a hacking incident involving its play-to-earn gaming platform's underlying blockchain, the Ronin Network. AXS/USD dropped to $46.69 on Monday, its lowest level since March 16, signaling a dampening buying sentiment among traders and investors following the hacking incident. Independent market analyst TJ asserted that there is "no sign of buyers" even with the price entering areas with a history of attracting accumulators. For instance, AXS broke below the demand zone that TJ highlighted as a potential inflection point during the weekend, a move that …

The decentralized finance (DeFi) world saw another week of increased on-chain and developer activity even when the overall market cap took a slight dip amid overall market retrace. The creators of the popular play-to-earn nonfungible token (NFT) game Axie Infinity raised $150 million to reimburse hack victims of the Ronin bridge exploit. The decantralized application, o daily user count surged to 2.4 million in the first quarter of 2022, while SushiSwap (SUSHI) and Synthetix (SNX) were booted out of Grayscale’s popular Decentralized Finance Fund. The widely-popular DeFi protocol Yearn.finance announced its support for the newly-passed ERC-4626 tokenized vault standard. The …

Sky Mavis, the creator of the popular play-to-earn nonfungible token game Axie Infinity has raised $150 million in a new funding round led by Binance. The fundraiser is aimed at reimbursing lost funds from the recent exploit on Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge, resulting in losses of over $600 million. The funding round also saw participation from Animoca Brands, a16z, Dialectic, Paradigm and Accel. As Cointelegraph reported earlier, the explorer behind the hack managed to drain out 173,600 Ethereum (ETH) and 25.5 million USD Coin (USDC) in just two transactions using hacked private keys. At the time, the creators behind the …

The last week of March saw the decentralized finance (DeFi) market surge to new highs as institutional investors returned to the market. Amid the rising popularity of DeFi products, Axie Inifity’s Ronin bridge faced the worst hack in crypto history, raising security concerns for the market. MetaMask integrated Apple Pay support, allowing users to purchase crypto using their Apple Pay account directly, and Binance launched Bridge 2.0 to integrate CeFi and DeFi into one platform. Looking at the price side, the majority of DeFi tokens in the top 100 not only registered double-digit gains but also rose to new multi-month …