What if video games destroyed your wallet instead of your thumbs?

Gaming’s newest, most controversial feature asks just that question.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, NFTs are coming to your favorite console.

But this divisive tech is splitting the gaming industry into battle lines.

The gaming industry is in a full-server, no-holds-barred deathmatch.

And no, Mom, I can’t pause, it’s online.

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That’s why the Coffee & Crypto team also subscribes to Finance Homie. Finance Homie is a fun and easy to read newsletter that completely demystifies traditional finance.

On top of that, they cut through all of the crazy financial news and tell you exactly what it is you should be paying attention to, including specific venture capital fundraising and major Wall Street deals.

So skip that Wall Street Journal subscription, turn off Jim Cramer’s CNBC BS, and stay plugged in with Finance Homie’s free weekly newsletter.

Espresso Shots

☕️ BlackRock Refiles ETF Application 🪨📝

BlackRock is refiling its spot Bitcoin ETF application after the SEC pointed out several flaws in the current wave of spot Bitcoin ETFs.

The SEC took issue with the surveillance-sharing section of the ETF applications. Surveillance-sharing is a practice intended to prevent market manipulation and promote transparency.

This has prompted BlackRock to refile with an amended application. BlackRock has a new surveillance section that indicates that there will be a surveillance-sharing agreement between the NASDAQ and Coinbase.

Additionally, Coinbase will serve as the new ETF’s custodian and provide spot market data pricing.

Will this be enough to send the first spot Bitcoin ETF across the finish line? Only the SEC has the answer.

Off the record, the SEC took BlackRock’s face into both hands and insisted that it loves Blackrock’s application — not despite its flaws, but because of them.

☕️ Bored Apes Crash 🙈📉

The Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection reached a two-year low, down roughly 88% from its peak.

Last Sunday, July 2, the Bored Ape Yacht Club reached a floor price of roughly 27 ETH, the collection’s lowest in two years.

This dive is the result of an overall bear market for NFTs, possibly brought on by the over-saturation of brands in the space.

The last time things looked this bad for apes, a kid fell into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo.

☕️ Read Ancient Egyptian with AI 📜🤖

Researchers are using chatbots to translate ancient languages with Natural Language Processing (NLP) AI programs.

This includes languages such as Cuneiform, the character-based script of Mesopotamia, Akkadian, and even ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

This solved the long-standing problem of how “most of these documents remain untranslated and inaccessible due to their sheer number and limited quantity of experts able to read them,” according to the study published in the journal Oxford Academic.

And now that workload has been significantly alleviated by AI. There are several AI projects focused on ancient language translation, notably Fabricius, which is dedicated to decoding ancient hieroglyphs into English.

"The easiest way to understand hieroglyphs is to imagine that they are the ancient Egyptian equivalent of emojis," reads the Fabricius site, according to a Decrypt report.

It’s an exciting development for laymen and historians alike, as archaeologists will now be able to download curses at lightning-fast speeds.

Spilling the Beans

Will NFTs Destroy Gaming? 🎮 🔨

Crypto and gaming seem like a match made in heaven.

Both passions are enjoyed inside or on your phone. Parents and romantic partners widely misunderstand both fandoms. And both crypto and gaming somehow require the use of a gaming chair.

So, why isn’t it working? The conflict ultimately comes down to money.

Once you plop down that $60 (or $70 now), the game is yours.

You’re free to level up and accumulate in-game currency to your heart’s content, pushing your initial deposits, the millions of dollars spent on the advertising of the game, and that overworked firm of fifty MIT coders, to the back of your mind.

In other words, traditional game creation puts money into the back end.

But Web3 gaming, crypto’s answer to the console wars, keeps the money up-front.

When you’re playing a Web3 game under the play-to-earn model, there’s a part of you that never forgets that the resource at stake is real money.

For example, “Axie Infinity,” one of the most popular Web3 games. Requires users to link a MetaMask account (a crypto wallet) and deposit $100 upfront just to play.

And that’s a high barrier of entry for what’s ostensibly a Pokemón clone with the flash graphics of a mobile game.

Sadly, when it comes to Web3 gaming, the numbers speak for themselves.

There’s currently only one Axie Infinity player for every 2,155 playing “Roblox,” a free-to-play multiplayer game-creator with its hooks in millions of American pre-teens.

But this isn’t an absolute moratorium on crypto and gaming. Like any border, there are leaks, underground tunnels, and scalable fences between the territories.

And those low, chainlink fences? Those are NFTs.

NFTs, far more than the play-to-earn model, seem like a natural fit for the current state of gaming.

Roblox, as well as countless other online games, offer in-game items and cosmetics for real-world money. Paid DLC has been around since 1997.

It seems that rebranding the paid elements of video games as NFTs would be a no-brainer.

But the gaming industry doesn’t seem to think so.

Rockstar, the studio behind “Grand Theft Auto” and “Red Dead Redemption” has banned NFTs and crypto from its fan servers.

And they’re hardly alone in this sentiment.

“NFTs change the meaning of what a game is, and that to us is quite worrying,” said Minecraft developer Cory Scheviak in an interview with Bloomberg. “People can make all of the side arguments they want about giving people jobs and the things they say are positives. But at the end, it’s never really been about the players. It’s never really been about helping people. It’s always been about making as much money as possible.”

And NFT critics are taking action.

The Climate Replay, an activist group made up of developers and artists across the gaming industry, has signed a pledge to limit or fully resist implementing NFTs in their games.

They’re motivated not only by NFT’s potential harm to gaming as an established form of gaming and art, but also by the drain that the trading and production of NFTs have on the environment.

But these blanket anti-NFT measures don’t account for the entire industry. There’s one very notable exception.

Epic Games, the studio behind the global mega-hit “Fortnite,” intends to release 20 new games in the Epic Marketplace, all of which use NFTs.

Epic Games currently has five NFT games available in its marketplace. Epic is a massive presence in the industry and their free-to-play hit “Fortnite,” has become something of a tastemaker.

And while it hasn’t concretely tied NFT to Fortnite, things are moving in that direction, as in the case of the recent collaboration between Fortnite and Nike’s .Swoosh NFT platform.

But will this divide destroy the gaming industry?

Most likely, no. Like any industry, gaming thrives on competition.

NFTs’ ultimate role in crypto and Web3 will probably resemble motion controls.

Some video game companies are going to go all-in on this tech, and others are going to entirely ignore it. Nobody is going to die over this.

While in its current state, NFTs in gaming don’t look phenomenal.

But there is some serious, long-term potential for that industry.

As the unrelenting march of AI development inevitably scoops up more of the job market, it would make a lot of sense to create new jobs in the ultimate vestige of the unemployed, gaming.

Until we reach that inevitable dystopia, the conflict around NFTs will rage on.

And while only time will tell how it plays out, gaming will always host a few, incontrovertible truths.

Like when your mom’s boyfriend hands you a sweaty Xbox controller after hours in the “NHL 22” player creator and insists “‘Animal Crossing’ is for girls and babies.”

Meme of the Day

Crypto 101

Play-to-earn: also known as “P2E,” it’s the model where blockchain-based games offer in-game tokens or NFTs as monetary incentives in gameplay.

This style of Web3 gaming offers the “seamless” wedding of gameplay with crypto rewards.

This model has been applied to every genre of Web3 gaming, from zombie shooters to “Candy Crush” clones.

In our opinion, Web3 gaming may be lagging in adoption because of excess focus on the “earn” aspect, and not enough on the “play.”

The Last Sip

The Last Sip: The gaming industry seems to have some serious hesitation about the presence of NFTs in their products. But if AAA games were to permit NFTS, here’s the kind of functionality we would like to see:

3. Unlock access to Union meetings in “Super Mario.” How will the plumber and pipefitters’ medical plan cover the ever-growing threat of goombas?

2. Unlock pacifist gameplay in “Grand Theft Auto.” What if instead of hijacking a car, you tried asking them nicely? Better yet, make small talk about how the city’s changing with an in-game Uber.

1. Unlock the psychiatric counselor class in “Call of Duty.” Help players unpack their trauma after a match. “When everyone watched him headshot you with a 360 no-scope, how did that make you feel?”

Stay Caffeinated,

Coffee & Crypto Team

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