The volume of trading in the Wolf Game skyrockets right after its launch.
NFT collectors have moved on to trading sheep and wolves in the Metaverse after exchanging digital pebbles and cats.
Wolf Game, a new initiative that debuted on Thursday, has rapidly become a popular among the NFT community. It now has the second greatest volume on OpenSea, after only Bored Ape Yacht Club with almost 12,300 ETH exchanged.
NFTs and DeFi are combined with play-to-earn and game theory dynamics in this game. Players may acquire digital sheep, which can be bet to gain the WOOL in-game coin. Digital wolves, on the other hand, may abduct sheep and earn WOOL as a tax. The game’s characters—in this instance sheep and wolves—can be used to breed additional NFTs, similar to other popular play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity. Players may also obtain uncommon plots of virtual land; the game’s primary creator, known as The Shepherd, stated earlier this morning that early backers will be able to claim free plots.
Though the whole game won’t be released until early 2022, it had a “stealth debut” last week, with 10,000 NFTs produced in less than an hour. Sheep, originally priced at 0.06942 ETH, are currently selling for as much as 7.75 ETH, or almost $30,000. Wolves, on the other hand, are more expensive since they may be employed to steal sheep in the game. At the time of publishing, many rare wolves had already sold for between $75,000 and $85,000.
Exploits of Smart Contracts
The game’s rapid rise was undoubtedly aided by the support it got from a number of NFT influencers. Beanie, a well-known collector, has been promoting the game actively on Twitter in recent days, while COLE, the co-founder of Pudgy Penguins, claims to have minted a collection of wolves and lambs worth over $500,000.
Last night, Gary Vaynerchuk, who has been engaged in the NFT market all year, stated he bought a Gen0 Alpha 7 Wolf, one of Wolf Game’s rarest NFTs, over the game’s Discord channel. FaZe Banks, a buddy of Vaynerchuk’s with a 2.8 million-follower Twitter account, has also said he’s been following the project on his official account. In a Sunday tweet, he said, “Gm to those playing games on the blockchain @wolfdotgame.“
In its initial few days, Wolf Game has also had to overcome a number of significant obstacles. Players were apparently able to ensure that they would mint wolves, the more expensive NFTs, rather than sheep, because to a flaw in the smart contract’s design, leading The Shepherd to amend the rules of the game. A new issue, as revealed by Twitter user notstoops, allowed players to collect 6 million WOOL tokens instead of the expected 20,000 when unstaking their sheep NFTs. After notstoops raised the problem, the Shepherd acknowledged that they had suspended minting on Saturday and then paused other aspects of the game. They stated:
“Honesty is an important part of my work. @not__stoops is 100% correct. He has found a vulnerability that puts WOOL creation and unstaking at risk. In aiming to revolutionize NFT gaming, my #1 priority is to fix this.”
Despite the smart contract concerns, the strong trade volumes show that the market is still interested. Several branch forks, like Avax WolfGame, WolfGame BSC, and Wizards & Dragons, have appeared in recent days, as is common with the most popular crypto projects. To generate the same level of buzz as Wolf Game, each of them will need to develop an active community.