🪐 Web3 Weekly News | 17 August 2022

August 17, 2022

Welcome to our #Web3 Weekly News. Every week, our team aims to share updates focusing on the current meta, news in the space, and noteworthy articles and resources.

Read on to see our highlights of the week and find a full list of all DeFi, GameFi, NFTs, and Metaverse updates on our Notion board.

Note: 🎉 Newman team is going to attend Token2049 Singapore this year. We are excited to be sponsoring the official closing party (Sep 30, 2022). Come to say Hello if you drop by. 👋

💸 DeFi

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Acala Stablecoins Near $1 Peg After Community Burns 1.2B aUSD Minted by Exploiters

Acala’s native stablecoin, aUSD, came close to regaining its peg to the U.S. dollar after the Polkadot-based decentralized finance (DeFi) platform burned over 1.2 billion aUSD tokens. Over the weekend, these tokens were minted by exploiters who took advantage of a bug in one of the platform’s liquidity pools. Launched earlier this year, aUSD successfully held its soft peg to the U.S. dollar until the hack. After the attack, the price of aUSD plunged from roughly $1.03 per token to $0.009.

🎮 GameFi

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Blockchain Games defying the market trend

According to DappRadar, blockchain games continue to attract the curiosity and attention of people around the world. Despite the overall crypto market turmoil, blockchain games have been the least affected, with average UAW activities fallen by only 7% since Q1, indicating that people continue to interact with blockchain dapps at a more or less the same rate as before the Terra incident. In the meantime, the amount of game-related NFT transactions has decreased drastically by 51% since Q1, and the sales volume dropped by 82%. Despite this, the year-over-year transaction count has increased by 19%. The activity has not affected all blockchains equally, with BSC and Ronin experiencing the most significant lost at 23% and 36% of UAWs since May. Sprinterlands remained the most popular game in Q2 despite a 16% loss in average activities due to the revamping of the reward system.

👾 NFTs

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The latest debate across NFTT over the last week was over royalties as SudoSwap gains traction. Sudoswap is a decentralized NFT marketplace that charges sellers a 0.5% platform fee while project creators receive no royalties from secondary sales. Some thoughts from NFTT this weekend:

While different parties may have different views, for many, this is their first time learning that a majority of NFTs do not have royalties built into the original smart contracts and that royalties are usually agreements between creators and individual marketplaces. @cygaar_dev tweeted a thread diving into ways artists/projects can continue to earn royalties.

🌌 Metaverse

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NVIDIA Unveils Powerful AI, Simulation and Creative Tools for Creators and Developers of Virtual Worlds

At SIGGRAPH, NVIDIA announced updates for creators and developers using NVIDIA Omniverse, a real-time 3D design collaboration and world simulation platform. They revealed that Omniverse users can accelerate complex 3D graphic workflows using the platform’s core rendering, physics, and AI technologies. They also launched the NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE). They also unveiled new features for: