Interops Hasn't Pumped Yet

This is a web3 gaming blog, so why am I talking about interoperability protocols? Boooring. 
I'm cool with that!. Stay poor. And while you're waiting on Alex Becker and Elliotrades' downline to come through (seriously; how many more times can they shill $BEAM $SFUND $RNDR $SHRAP), smart money will be rotating out of the frontline games into the picks and shovels that always make more money for investors than the low hanging fruit.

Web3 Game Adoption Isn't All About the Games

Like it or not, there is a financial layer in Web3 that makes a significant difference in how a game is adopted. At this point, the financial layer for most games is siloed by chain, leading to siloed experiences. The current situation certainly doesn't lend itself towards web3's promise of interoperability and huge metaverses and swappable NFTs and all that.
For instance: If you're a Cardano maxi right now, you can't really play on any other chain without completely upending your infrastructure. Why? No other chain easily connects to Cardano. The closest thing to a Cardano gaming ecosystem, Cornucopias, had to sell its nodes on Ethereum L2 Base just to pull in the player base it needed to move forward. The chain maxi is created as a function of convenience and composability, creating a chain v. chain competition that need not exist. There aren't enough people in web3 to split the audience like this.
Fortunately, there are projects taking on the problem of split liquidity and infrastructure. Some you know like the Graph, Filecoin and Chainlink, which allows crosschain applications like Premia and Dodo to service liquidity and trade perps and options outside of chain siloes. Magic Eden overtook Opensea as the premier NFT marketplace when it combined operations for unconnected chains like Bitcoin and Solana. EVM parallel projects like Neon are letting Rust developers code in their native language rather than learning Solidity. So we know where the trend is going.

Fewer Clicks, More Users (FCMU)

Web3 maxis certainly benefit from using Magic Eden over Opensea and swaps like Dodo over chain-specific LP providers. But web3 builders know the solutions can't stop here; normies still find this level of UX clunky. And the larger market still hasn't achieved true buy-in from important web3 silos like Gala, who seem to be building in the direction opposite to interoperability with other major chains. But even stingy closed circuit thinkers like Bitbender will have to consider bridges when he sees FCMU taking his userbase from him.
Stage 2 interoperability projects like Symbiosis, (and dare I say it, Apecoin?) move towards a FCMU future. Symbiosis provides omnichain pools that connect non-EVM chains including Bitcoin and Tron in a seamless way, taking cues from Celer and Synapse. Apecoin is upgrading its $APE ERC-20 to be an OFT (omnichain fungible token) so it can function as a crosschain tool for its new Arbitrum gaming sub-chain.
Why stuff like this matters: An omnichain $APE reduces the number of clicks a real world user would need to pay for a Happy Meal at a Bored N Hungry. Instead of having to click an MM dropdown, scroll up the chain list, switch to Mainnet, find the $APE, then pay because you left your wallet on BNB Chain, OFT gets you closer to that no-click QR code experience web3 is competing with.
Maybe we don't get there tomorrow, but the next step — $ZETA, $NGL, $MZERO — take interoperability and composability in the right direction, setting up the proper base layers to stack up to that no-click future.

The Intersection of Defi and Gaming

I don't even like writing that. "tHe InTeRsEcTiOn Of DeFi AnD gAmInG." Huh? Honestly makes no sense to me. Divisionist language is just as guilty as anything of creating the "defi maxi" and "blockchain gaming maxi." Defi and gaming are two functions of the same animal — burps and farts. You can't very well play financial games efficiently without banks, and banks have little purpose without financial games to play. There is no way to separate defi and gaming in the real world. So thinking of them as two separate items in any form or fashion is detrimental to the FCMU mindset.
I do admit the segmentation is useful to the investor looking to make money through a specialized knowledge of one or the other function. Keep in mind, though, that the best investments from either specialty close the inefficiencies between them.
So what do projects like Zeta, Entangle and Metazero mean for gaming? 🧐

Zeta ($ZETA)

Zeta is the most interesting L1 I've seen with the goal of aggregating liquidity across all the important EVM and non-EVM chains. This includes non smart contract chains Bitcoin and its derivatives (Dogecoin) as well as Cosmos (Zeta was developed on Cosmos tech).
Devs who deploy contracts to Zetachain only have to deploy once to access all connected chains. Hopefully this leads to web3 games that truly put wallet interactions in the background where they belong, and the user won't have to worry about whether to open Keplr or Phantom to make a game work.

Entangle ($NGL)

Entangle is providing a layer for omnichain liquidity. Successful implementation here means more efficient swaps. Can you imagine the outrage if a web2 gamer loses 15% on a token swap because of a low liq pool? He's not going to look into or care about LP inefficiencies. All he knows is he lost 15% and feels cheated. Here come the Reddit threads and Youtube haters, and down goes the game.
Hopefully, Entangle keeps this from happening. I also think $NGL is the best investment now, as it hasn't even launched yet as of this writing. A pair of private sales totalling $1.35M just took place. After that, the team announced $NGL would be listed on Bybit. With such a low starting mcap and immediate inclusion on a tier 1 exchange, there's plenty of upside potential for quick movers on TGE.
I will say this: The team used goofball tactics in the run up to $NGL, like botting its own Discord to increase chat volume right before the sale. Lame. Doesn't mean the token can't pump, but it does mean I'm going to keep my eye closely on this team. In any case, the shit worked. They sold out the private, and they returned value for holders of their previous NFT sale (sale price was 0.15E/0.5E for the two tiers of NFT; they reached a high of 1E/3.5E and currently sit at 0.45E/3.5E).

Metazero ($MZERO)

"Bringing RWA Omnichain tokenization to your favorite gaming assets." That's the tagline on the Metazero website, and it's a mouthful.
"Did we include every relevant buzzword possible in an H4 heading?"
"Yeah, bro! Good to go!"
I know I've spent too long in web3 because I actually get the tagline. If they can actually accomplish this, we get the FCMU scenario we need to put the web3 gaming experience at least on par with web2 circa PS2.

Honorable Mention: Izumi ($IZI)

I've seen this project everywhere. This is the swap of choice for all of the new hot chains like Mantle, Manta, Zeta and zkSync.
But now to the important part: This meta hasn't pumped yet.

Interops Hasn't Pumped Yet

Hopefully I've been able to detail somewhat convincingly that interops focused on FCMU is what brings web3 gaming to the masses. Fun games, yes. I think we've all internalized that message — Shrapnel is fun; Mirandus is going to be fun; Spider Tanks was fun; AI Arena is fun. Fun, fun, fun. We got it, guys. Stop using that as your Spaces hook.
The projects mentioned above are just as important as game designers to blockchain gaming's future. And as people turn away from the hype on the actual games, because many of them still aren't ready, they're going to need something else to pump their bags until launch dates start to materialize. What I see:
The talk around Blackrock filing for an Ethereum ETF will keep the market buoyant until May although BTC may sag it a bit. This is a perfect setup to get in on these interops plays, as all of them could be considered Ethereum reflexive. This is where that $3K ETH money goes to try to grab a few more altcoin pumps before the inevitable sell-the-news bitcoin halving event.