The cross-chain NFT marketplace Magic Eden has launched its long-anticipated gaming hub, Magic Eden Games, following an announcement on March 22.

Magic Eden Games is on a mission to assist gamers in uncovering the finest web3 gaming experiences. Every game on their platform is given a dedicated “explore game” page, which includes a detailed description of the game and the studio behind it, captivating videos, and an NFT marketplace specific to the game.

Chris Akhavan, Magic Eden’s Chief Gaming Officer, commented,

“Magic Eden Games continues to drive growth for leading web3 games studios… We look forward to continuing to fuel the growth of the entire web3 gaming ecosystem[…]

Game developers can leverage our platform to acquire new player communities, share game updates, document their game’s milestones, and tap into significant revenue opportunities through the best marketplace experience in all of web3.”

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In addition, this is not the first push by Magic Eden to empower the web3 gaming space, as it recently launched Mint Madness — a campaign allowing multiple web3 gaming NFTs to be minted for free on Polygon, Solana, and Ethereum. The Mint Madness campaign highlights the potential for NFTs in the gaming industry by offering new onboarding methods for game studios.

Further, the NFT marketplace partnered with Polkastarter Gaming to add value to the web3 gaming community by syndicating content and reviews on the Magic Eden platform.

A core part of Magic Eden’s messaging is focused on supporting web3 game developers. The new gaming hub intends to provide a platform for web3 game developers to grow their brand recognition, player base, and community while offering rewards for engagement.

Furthermore, studios can “generate revenue by minting collections on the Magic Eden Launchpad and the secondary marketplace, where creator royalties are enforced on all chains.”

The Magic Eden team described the launch of the gaming hub as “a labor of love from our games team.” It also expanded on direct involvement in the gaming industry, stating that  “after launching 70+ projects & investing in a dozen studios, we’re honored to help games shine even more w/ our dedicated hub.”

Ultimately, Magic Eden’s launch of a hub for web3 game developers is significant for the growth of the web3 gaming ecosystem. Pushing away from centralized services continues in favor of decentralized marketplaces — offering more control for gamers.

Network activity on Arbitrum has been booming, with the popular Ethereum layer-2 solution seeing an unprecedented uptick in the number of transactions and addresses.

According to data from Arbiscan, the network processed over 1.3 million transactions on March 21 — up from 1 million transactions recorded on March 20. The sharp increase in the number of daily transactions began in late January and pumped further after Arbitrum announced a massive airdrop to its users.

The airdrop will see 1.27 billion ARB tokens distributed to users based on a Feb. 26 snapshot. The 1.27 billion ARB tokens represent 12.75% of the token’s circulating supply. Out of the 10 billion tokens, around 56% will be allocated to the community.

Set to take place on March 23, the airdrop will also see 112.8 million ARB tokens distributed to various DAOs in its ecosystem. The network said that this was a way to “empower the subcommunities” and entice them to participate in governance decisions once it fully transitions to a DAO.

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) GMX and TREASURE would get 8 million tokens each, while Uniswap (UNI) and SushiSwap (SUSHI), would get 4.3 million and 4.2 million ARB tokens, respectively. MakerDAO, KyberSwap, DODO, Camelot, and 24 other projects would receive over 1 million ARB tokens.

The number of unique addresses on Arbitrum has also been growing rapidly. Since the beginning of the year, the network saw almost 1.5 million new addresses created.

Interest in Arbitrum has also gone up thanks to Coinbase following the announced that it would support its upcoming ARB token and list it for trading. Trading is expected to begin sometime after the airdrop once sufficient supply and liquidity conditions are met. The exchange said that the USD-ARB trading pairs will launch in phases and be considered “experimental.”

The Arbitrum frenzy also saw many users start selling wallets eligible for the airdrop. The current speculative value of ARB hovers around $1, but various IOU markets show that the token is expected to trade around $6 following the airdrop.

Github’s Polkadot (DOT) developer community may be tapering, but it is still an industry leader. Twitter account @ProofofGithub, has been charting such activity since DeFi summer of July 2020.

“Find out who’s actually building in the bear market.”

On March 22, Proof of Github highlighted the daily development activity. The price of DOT at the time of writing is $6.30 — up 4.15% in the last 24 hours at press time.

Polkadot development activity

Meanwhile, developer activity on the Polkadot platform has been thriving — indicating promising prospects for its future development, adoption, and overall success. In fact, Polkadot achieved an all-time high in development activity during Q3 of 2022, as measured by GitHub commitments.

This impressive growth was also highlighted in the Electric Capital Developer (ECD) report. The ECD report revealed that Polkadot’s developer community had expanded from less than 200 in 2018 to over 2,000 presently — making it the second largest community with 764 full-time developers.

Remarkably, Polkadot achieved the milestone of 200 full-time developers in just 2.2 years — making it the fastest ecosystem to reach this target compared to the average of over 4 years.

However, Polkadot’s total number of developers only increased by 2% by the end of 2022 — indicating a slowing, tapering rate of growth.