Gaming Tokens Gala, Pixels, and Ronin Skyrocket as Bitcoin Price Hits $70,000

Prominent crypto tokens tied to video games and gaming chains have skyrocketed in value this weekend, with some hitting new all-time high prices and others rising to their highest point in years—all while Bitcoin briefly returned to the $70,000 mark.

The Gala ecosystem’s GALA token is the biggest winner in this weekend’s gaming and metaverse coin surge, with the price jumping 42% over the last 24 hours alone to nearly $0.08 at present, per data from CoinGecko. It nearly hit $0.085 earlier Sunday and is now up 77% on the week and 230% over the last month.

There’s no single, clear trigger to explain the sudden pump, though Gala has been busy lately and long-term holders have been awaiting a breakout. Gala recently launched its GalaSwap decentralized exchange (DEX) on its own layer-1 GalaChain network, and also is sponsoring a $1 million hackathon at this month’s Game Developers Conference.

The weekend surge has pushed GALA into the top 50 cryptocurrencies ranked by market cap, according to CoinGecko. However, the token still remains over 90% off its all-time high price of $0.82 from November 2021.

Elsewhere, surging crypto farming game Pixels and the network that runs it, Ethereum scaler Ronin, are both up big this weekend. The PIXEL token spiked to a new all-time high price above $0.94 overnight, just weeks after the token launched. It’s now sitting at $0.88, up 63% on the week.

PIXEL’s surge comes amid data that points to growing interest in the game, with a new peak of over 500,000 daily active users. And the Ronin network’s RON token hit $4.05 overnight, marking a more than two-year high price.

RON came close to beating its all-time high price of $4.29 from January 2022, but the price has since dipped to $3.70 at present. Even so, it’s up 24% over the past week. Another token rising in the Pixels orbit is Yield Guild Games’ YGG token, which is up 64% this week after being announced as the game’s guilds infrastructure partner.

Another notable gaming token that spiked to a new all-time high price overnight was PRIME, the token of NFT card battler Parallel. PRIME peaked at $19.78 early Sunday, and is up 132% over the past 30 days. The latest pop comes after Parallel opened up in beta to all players, and after major crypto exchange Coinbase announced a giveaway to lure in new users.

The BEAM token of the Beam gaming network also set an all-time high price of $0.044 early Sunday. And Immutable’s IMX—the biggest gaming token by market cap—spiked to a two-year high of $3.62 on Saturday.

Axie Infinity’s AXS governance token is up 75% over the past 30 days at a current price of $13, while Iluvium’s ILV token spiked to $155 overnight—the highest it’s been since June 2022. Up and down CoinGecko’s list of GameFi tokens, you’ll find sizable gains.

And in many cases, those gains are sharply higher than those of Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency by market cap. Bitcoin again rose above $70,000 on Sunday after breaching that price point for the first time ever on Friday. It’s down just below $69,500 as of this writing, still putting the coin up 11% over the past week.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.