After Axie Infinity boomed around the world in the summer of 2021, the GameFi (or NFT game) development craze has never boomed in Vietnam like that before.
However, according to data from PooCoin Chart, a series of prominent Vietnamese GameFi projects belonging to the click-to-earn line (click to receive tokens) similar to CryptoBike are witnessing a very strong sell-off wave of investors in recent days.
For example, the value of CGAR (the token of the CryptoGuards project) is currently ‘deeply sinking’ when it has plummeted by 5.3 times compared to the ATH (all-time high) mark set on December 27. Like CryptoGuards, the other 2 projects, CryptoCars and CryptoPlanes (both belonging to a large project, CryptoCity Metaverse) have both decreased by 15 times and 14 times in token value compared to the ATH mark. Some long-time investors believe that these projects may have been influenced by CryptoBike, which is said to have ‘followed’ the name of this trio of projects while having nothing to do with each other in terms of developers.
Similarly, CryptoShip, another click-to-earn GameFi project with a similar name, is also experiencing a sharp drop in token value (CSHIP). From an ATH peak of 1.3 USD on December 22, 2021, the CSHIP token is currently trading at $0.16 on January 4, 2022 – which has decreased by 8 times in value after 2 weeks.
The frequency of bad and negative articles about CryptoBike last week in the Vietnamese press has drawn the public into endless debates.
The decline in a series of Vietnamese click-to-earn games like dominoes can be traced back to CryptoBike’s case.
“The event that the CryptoBike development team performed a trick to appropriate $1.4 million and then disappeared is creating a FUD (Fear – Uncertainty – Doubt) psychological effect on the majority of investors when they put money into similar projects developed by Vietnamese people. Among these, there are a lot of investors from abroad,” shared an unnamed employee working for a GameFi project in Hanoi.
Of course, this only stops at speculation, when no evidence or clear data is showing that foreign investors are actually withdrawing capital from Vietnamese GameFi projects.
In fact, except for some click-to-earn games, some of the top GameFi projects that are carefully invested in gameplay have not been affected too much by the CryptoBike incident.
However, it is incidents like the above that are somehow making the reputation of several ‘real’ blockchain projects in Vietnam be significantly affected in front of the public.
“The fact that some GameFi projects from Vietnam cause loss of confidence in public opinion is significantly affecting the communication campaigns of some blockchain projects developed by Vietnamese people, which are invested very seriously. While these upcoming projects all aim to bring the greatest value to users and are not after short-term profits, pre-existing prejudices can make the international community feel afraid even when the investment decision has not been made”, said Mr. Canh Ho, Vietnamese co-founder of VerseHub, which is developing a Metaverse-oriented 3.0 social networking project called NextVerse.