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Here’s Why Metacade (MCADE) and Axie Infinity (AXS) Will Lead the Metaverse in 2023 and Beyond

The metaverse is shaping up to be one of the most pivotal technological changes of the 21st century. While the industry is still in its infancy, getting…

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1 year ago

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The metaverse is shaping up to be one of the most pivotal technological changes of the 21st century. While the industry is still in its infancy, getting in on the right metaverse projects could be like investing in Amazon or Google in the early days of the internet, returning life-changing gains for years to come. 

This article will discuss two projects, Metacade and Axie Infinity, and why they could lead the metaverse in 2023 and beyond. 

What is Metacade (MCADE)?

Metacade is a community hub built for everything metaverse and play-to-earn gaming. It’s a platform where you can connect with fellow gamers and crypto investors, discover how to boost your income in the metaverse, and play your part in producing some of the best play-to-earn games. 

Metacade’s vision is to create a fun, vibrant community environment where everyone is welcome, regardless of their gaming experience. That’s why you’ll find features like reviews, forums, real-time chat, leaderboards, and areas for exploring the hottest alpha posted by industry experts. Each of these features has been designed to make Metacade one of the most valuable Web3 gaming platforms out there.

What Makes Metacade (MCADE) a Metaverse Leader?

An All-in-One Solution

With the metaverse and play-to-earn industries evolving at a rapid pace, it can be tricky to get started. Metacade aims to provide everything you’ll need to get ahead in Web3 gaming by offering the ultimate repository for metaverse and play-to-earn knowledge. You’ll not only be able to find out which games are worth playing, but you can also learn how to make the most from play-to-earn gaming while strategising with like-minded players.

Community Rewards

While the premise sounds great in principle, it requires users to contribute to Metacade in the first place. To encourage players to share their thoughts and expertise, Metacade rewards everyone who posts reviews, tips, and other helpful content with the MCADE token. This means that veteran players have the incentive to share their experiences for the rest of the community to learn from. Even new players can earn MCADE by simply writing reviews about the latest games they’ve been playing.

Multiple Earning Opportunities 

Rewards aren’t the only way to earn through Metacade, however. You can participate in prize draws and tournaments for your chance to win MCADE and other exciting prizes, as well as stake your MCADE for an additional stream of income! Most importantly, you might even find an opportunity to replace your traditional working income with Metacade.

In 2024, Metacade will launch its testing environment and a job board. The testing environment will enable users to become casual testers for Metacade’s developer community, earning MCADE as they go. On the job board, you’ll find exclusive gigs, internships, and full-time positions working with some of the most respected names in Web3. 

Funding the Best Metaverse Games With Metagrants

One of the most hotly anticipated features of Metacade is the Metagrant. Metagrants are a way for the Metacade community to finance the developers building the games they want to play. To win funding, developers must first enter their projects into a Metagrant competition and earn the most votes for their idea. The winner is allocated funding from the Metacade treasury to get their vision off the ground while being supported by their game’s most avid fans.

Metacade’s goal is to play a vital role in producing the next wave of play-to-earn and metaverse titles. Instead of allowing venture-capital-backed game studios to dictate the direction of the Web3 gaming revolution, Metacade is putting the power back into the hands of the players and allowing them to decide what games they’ll be playing. Eventually, Metacade plans to fill its virtual arcade with dozens of community-backed titles for the whole world to play and enjoy. 

Plans to Be Entirely Player-Owned

Once Metacade becomes a bubbling, self-sustaining community at the heart of metaverse and play-to-earn gaming, it’ll be time to hand over full control to the players by forming a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO). At this point, the core Metacade team will step down and offer leadership positions to the community’s most valued members, allowing MCADE holders to vote on who they want to lead them into the future. From here, every key decision will be put to a vote for MCADE holders to determine.

To ensure community trust is maintained, multi-signature wallets will also be implemented. This means that any transactions made from the Metacade treasury will require two or more private signatures, drastically reducing the chances of community funds being misused.

What is Axie Infinity (AXS)?

Axie Infinity is a play-to-earn mobile game that has undoubtedly taken inspiration from Pokémon. Set in the mystical land of Lunacia, the game’s goal is to raise, battle, and trade cute monsters known as Axies, which are stored on the blockchain as NFTs. It runs on the Ronin chain, a blockchain designed explicitly by Sky Mavis, the creators of Axie Infinity, to achieve much faster speeds and lower fees than its former network, Ethereum. 

Like Pokémon, players build up a team of three Axies to battle other players with for their chance to win Smooth Love Potion (SLP) and Axie Infinity Shards (AXS), two cryptocurrencies that can be traded for cash. Axies have an almost unlimited combination of characteristics, meaning that some are rarer than others. The rarest Axies can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars!

What is Likely to Drive the Axie Infinity Future Growth?

Different Ways to Earn While Gaming

Axie Infinity offers quite a few different ways to earn while playing. Not only can you earn SLP by winning battles with other players, but you can also breed Axies to sell on for a profit. Those with a strong ability synergy can be considered much rarer and sell for much more than regular Axies. For example, a triple Mystic, known as Angel, sold for 300 ETH in November 2020 (OpenSea), or around $380k today!

Like other metaverse games, players can also choose to purchase land in Axie Infinity and rent it out to others for a steady return. Alternatively, players can choose to farm resources on their land, becoming a producer of key components needed to breed Axies. Prefer a simpler experience? You can still earn just by completing quests or battling against AI foes in Adventure Mode. 

Potential to Replace Traditional Income Sources

As one of the world’s most successful metaverse projects, Axie Infinity garnered quite a bit of attention in 2021 for its ability to offer an alternative income stream for players in the Philipines and Indonesia. Despite their initial high investment, players were able to rent Axies from “scholarship programs” with no startup costs. They just had to agree to split their profits, usually in an 80/20, 70/30, or 60/40 split. 

Given the high value of SLP and AXS at the time, players in these countries were earning between $30 and $50 per day for a few hours of work – which is pretty good, considering the Philipines’ minimum wage is around $5 to $10 per hour. This was vital for some players during the pandemic as many in-person jobs were unavailable, cutting many off from a regular source of income. Play-to-earn is a new model, but Axie Infinity proved that players across the globe could earn a living wage from home while having fun gaming. 

The Lunacia SDK

Axie Infinity has cemented itself in GameFi history as one of the most popular play-to-earn games out there. At its peak, Axie Infinity had 2.7 million monthly players (Active Player) and now, Sky Mavis is preparing for the next wave of metaverse gamers. In the Axie Infinity whitepaper, it states that “we aim to gradually decentralize the game creation aspect of the Axie universe. It will be impossible for one team to build out all the content needed for Lunacia, especially if we reach hundreds of millions of users.”

To solve this issue, Sky Mavis is launching the Lunacia SDK. This software development kit allows users to use Axie Infinity art assets to create games and other experiences, which are then stored as NFTs. These NFTs can be placed on land inside Axie Infinity and clicked on to enter the experience inside. 

This SDK is expected to launch before the end of 2022 and will open doors for creators to generate unique games and experiences for other Axie Infinity users to play. This seems like a smart move by Sky Mavis, as other user-generated metaverse projects, like The Sandbox and Decentraland, have attracted thousands of players looking for the freedom to build whatever they like. 

Metacade (MCADE) Could Be One of the Best Metaverse Projects Out There

This article has explored two excellent projects today. Axie Infinity has been one of the most successful play-to-earn games to date, with an over $10 billion market at its peak in 2021 (CoinGecko). Its exclusive network, the Ronin chain, has the second-highest NFT volume of all time, according to Crypto Slam – an incredible achievement! 

While player counts have declined since the crypto bear market, Axie Infinity will likely be seen as a metaverse pioneer for years to come. At the very least, we can expect Sky Mavis and Axie Infinity to continue setting the trend for the rest of the metaverse market.

Meanwhile, Metacade is filling a vital need by providing a community space for connecting over, learning about, and earning more from Web3 gaming. Its ideas around player ownership and community-driven funding are likely to attract plenty of gamers dissatisfied with the current state of the gaming industry and could quickly become the norm for metaverse gaming. 

Community platforms are critical to gamers. Twitch and Discord quickly rose through the ranks to become household names in the gaming industry and Metacade could see the same epic rise. Combined with the fact that Metacade is still in presale, so it takes the lead over Axie Infinity as an exceptional investment opportunity.

If you think Metacade could become a leader of metaverse gaming, then it’d be wise to check out the presale sooner rather than later. That’s because the earlier you buy, the more MCADE you get! For example, if you invest in phase 1 of presale, you’ll get 125 MCADE for $1. If you invest in phase 9, you’ll get just 50 MCADE for that same $1. That means you could more than double your long-term earnings on Metacade if you’re quick. Take note: it could be your best metaverse investment yet.
You can participate in the Metacade pre-sale here.

The post Here’s Why Metacade (MCADE) and Axie Infinity (AXS) Will Lead the Metaverse in 2023 and Beyond appeared first on Invezz.

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February Employment Situation

By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000…

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9 hours ago

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March 9, 2024

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By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert

The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000 average over the previous 12 months. The payroll data for January and December were revised down by a total of 167,000. The private sector added 223,000 new jobs, the largest gain since May of last year.

Temporary help services employment continues a steep decline after a sharp post-pandemic rise.

Average hours of work increased from 34.2 to 34.3. The increase, along with the 223,000 private employment increase led to a hefty increase in total hours of 5.6% at an annualized rate, also the largest increase since May of last year.

The establishment report, once again, beat “expectations;” the WSJ survey of economists was 198,000. Other than the downward revisions, mentioned above, another bit of negative news was a smallish increase in wage growth, from $34.52 to $34.57.

The household survey shows that the labor force increased 150,000, a drop in employment of 184,000 and an increase in the number of unemployed persons of 334,000. The labor force participation rate held steady at 62.5, the employment to population ratio decreased from 60.2 to 60.1 and the unemployment rate increased from 3.66 to 3.86. Remember that the unemployment rate is the number of unemployed relative to the labor force (the number employed plus the number unemployed). Consequently, the unemployment rate can go up if the number of unemployed rises holding fixed the labor force, or if the labor force shrinks holding the number unemployed unchanged. An increase in the unemployment rate is not necessarily a bad thing: it may reflect a strong labor market drawing “marginally attached” individuals from outside the labor force. Indeed, there was a 96,000 decline in those workers.

Earlier in the week, the BLS announced JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) data for January. There isn’t much to report here as the job openings changed little at 8.9 million, the number of hires and total separations were little changed at 5.7 million and 5.3 million, respectively.

As has been the case for the last couple of years, the number of job openings remains higher than the number of unemployed persons.

Also earlier in the week the BLS announced that productivity increased 3.2% in the 4th quarter with output rising 3.5% and hours of work rising 0.3%.

The bottom line is that the labor market continues its surprisingly (to some) strong performance, once again proving stronger than many had expected. This strength makes it difficult to justify any interest rate cuts soon, particularly given the recent inflation spike.

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Mortgage rates fall as labor market normalizes

Jobless claims show an expanding economy. We will only be in a recession once jobless claims exceed 323,000 on a four-week moving average.

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1 day ago

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March 8, 2024

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Everyone was waiting to see if this week’s jobs report would send mortgage rates higher, which is what happened last month. Instead, the 10-year yield had a muted response after the headline number beat estimates, but we have negative job revisions from previous months. The Federal Reserve’s fear of wage growth spiraling out of control hasn’t materialized for over two years now and the unemployment rate ticked up to 3.9%. For now, we can say the labor market isn’t tight anymore, but it’s also not breaking.

The key labor data line in this expansion is the weekly jobless claims report. Jobless claims show an expanding economy that has not lost jobs yet. We will only be in a recession once jobless claims exceed 323,000 on a four-week moving average.

From the Fed: In the week ended March 2, initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits were flat, at 217,000. The four-week moving average declined slightly by 750, to 212,250


Below is an explanation of how we got here with the labor market, which all started during COVID-19.

1. I wrote the COVID-19 recovery model on April 7, 2020, and retired it on Dec. 9, 2020. By that time, the upfront recovery phase was done, and I needed to model out when we would get the jobs lost back.

2. Early in the labor market recovery, when we saw weaker job reports, I doubled and tripled down on my assertion that job openings would get to 10 million in this recovery. Job openings rose as high as to 12 million and are currently over 9 million. Even with the massive miss on a job report in May 2021, I didn’t waver.

Currently, the jobs openings, quit percentage and hires data are below pre-COVID-19 levels, which means the labor market isn’t as tight as it once was, and this is why the employment cost index has been slowing data to move along the quits percentage.  

2-US_Job_Quits_Rate-1-2

3. I wrote that we should get back all the jobs lost to COVID-19 by September of 2022. At the time this would be a speedy labor market recovery, and it happened on schedule, too

Total employment data

4. This is the key one for right now: If COVID-19 hadn’t happened, we would have between 157 million and 159 million jobs today, which would have been in line with the job growth rate in February 2020. Today, we are at 157,808,000. This is important because job growth should be cooling down now. We are more in line with where the labor market should be when averaging 140K-165K monthly. So for now, the fact that we aren’t trending between 140K-165K means we still have a bit more recovery kick left before we get down to those levels. 




From BLS: Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 275,000 in February, and the unemployment rate increased to 3.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in health care, in government, in food services and drinking places, in social assistance, and in transportation and warehousing.

Here are the jobs that were created and lost in the previous month:

IMG_5092

In this jobs report, the unemployment rate for education levels looks like this:

  • Less than a high school diploma: 6.1%
  • High school graduate and no college: 4.2%
  • Some college or associate degree: 3.1%
  • Bachelor’s degree or higher: 2.2%
IMG_5093_320f22

Today’s report has continued the trend of the labor data beating my expectations, only because I am looking for the jobs data to slow down to a level of 140K-165K, which hasn’t happened yet. I wouldn’t categorize the labor market as being tight anymore because of the quits ratio and the hires data in the job openings report. This also shows itself in the employment cost index as well. These are key data lines for the Fed and the reason we are going to see three rate cuts this year.

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Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Last month we though that the January…

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March 8, 2024

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Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Last month we though that the January jobs report was the "most ridiculous in recent history" but, boy, were we wrong because this morning the Biden department of goalseeked propaganda (aka BLS) published the February jobs report, and holy crap was that something else. Even Goebbels would blush. 

What happened? Let's take a closer look.

On the surface, it was (almost) another blockbuster jobs report, certainly one which nobody expected, or rather just one bank out of 76 expected. Starting at the top, the BLS reported that in February the US unexpectedly added 275K jobs, with just one research analyst (from Dai-Ichi Research) expecting a higher number.

Some context: after last month's record 4-sigma beat, today's print was "only" 3 sigma higher than estimates. Needless to say, two multiple sigma beats in a row used to only happen in the USSR... and now in the US, apparently.

Before we go any further, a quick note on what last month we said was "the most ridiculous jobs report in recent history": it appears the BLS read our comments and decided to stop beclowing itself. It did that by slashing last month's ridiculous print by over a third, and revising what was originally reported as a massive 353K beat to just 229K,  a 124K revision, which was the biggest one-month negative revision in two years!

Of course, that does not mean that this month's jobs print won't be revised lower: it will be, and not just that month but every other month until the November election because that's the only tool left in the Biden admin's box: pretend the economic and jobs are strong, then revise them sharply lower the next month, something we pointed out first last summer and which has not failed to disappoint once.

To be fair, not every aspect of the jobs report was stellar (after all, the BLS had to give it some vague credibility). Take the unemployment rate, after flatlining between 3.4% and 3.8% for two years - and thus denying expectations from Sahm's Rule that a recession may have already started - in February the unemployment rate unexpectedly jumped to 3.9%, the highest since February 2022 (with Black unemployment spiking by 0.3% to 5.6%, an indicator which the Biden admin will quickly slam as widespread economic racism or something).

And then there were average hourly earnings, which after surging 0.6% MoM in January (since revised to 0.5%) and spooking markets that wage growth is so hot, the Fed will have no choice but to delay cuts, in February the number tumbled to just 0.1%, the lowest in two years...

... for one simple reason: last month's average wage surge had nothing to do with actual wages, and everything to do with the BLS estimate of hours worked (which is the denominator in the average wage calculation) which last month tumbled to just 34.1 (we were led to believe) the lowest since the covid pandemic...

... but has since been revised higher while the February print rose even more, to 34.3, hence why the latest average wage data was once again a product not of wages going up, but of how long Americans worked in any weekly period, in this case higher from 34.1 to 34.3, an increase which has a major impact on the average calculation.

While the above data points were examples of some latent weakness in the latest report, perhaps meant to give it a sheen of veracity, it was everything else in the report that was a problem starting with the BLS's latest choice of seasonal adjustments (after last month's wholesale revision), which have gone from merely laughable to full clownshow, as the following comparison between the monthly change in BLS and ADP payrolls shows. The trend is clear: the Biden admin numbers are now clearly rising even as the impartial ADP (which directly logs employment numbers at the company level and is far more accurate), shows an accelerating slowdown.

But it's more than just the Biden admin hanging its "success" on seasonal adjustments: when one digs deeper inside the jobs report, all sorts of ugly things emerge... such as the growing unprecedented divergence between the Establishment (payrolls) survey and much more accurate Household (actual employment) survey. To wit, while in January the BLS claims 275K payrolls were added, the Household survey found that the number of actually employed workers dropped for the third straight month (and 4 in the past 5), this time by 184K (from 161.152K to 160.968K).

This means that while the Payrolls series hits new all time highs every month since December 2020 (when according to the BLS the US had its last month of payrolls losses), the level of Employment has not budged in the past year. Worse, as shown in the chart below, such a gaping divergence has opened between the two series in the past 4 years, that the number of Employed workers would need to soar by 9 million (!) to catch up to what Payrolls claims is the employment situation.

There's more: shifting from a quantitative to a qualitative assessment, reveals just how ugly the composition of "new jobs" has been. Consider this: the BLS reports that in February 2024, the US had 132.9 million full-time jobs and 27.9 million part-time jobs. Well, that's great... until you look back one year and find that in February 2023 the US had 133.2 million full-time jobs, or more than it does one year later! And yes, all the job growth since then has been in part-time jobs, which have increased by 921K since February 2023 (from 27.020 million to 27.941 million).

Here is a summary of the labor composition in the past year: all the new jobs have been part-time jobs!

But wait there's even more, because now that the primary season is over and we enter the heart of election season and political talking points will be thrown around left and right, especially in the context of the immigration crisis created intentionally by the Biden administration which is hoping to import millions of new Democratic voters (maybe the US can hold the presidential election in Honduras or Guatemala, after all it is their citizens that will be illegally casting the key votes in November), what we find is that in February, the number of native-born workers tumbled again, sliding by a massive 560K to just 129.807 million. Add to this the December data, and we get a near-record 2.4 million plunge in native-born workers in just the past 3 months (only the covid crash was worse)!

The offset? A record 1.2 million foreign-born (read immigrants, both legal and illegal but mostly illegal) workers added in February!

Said otherwise, not only has all job creation in the past 6 years has been exclusively for foreign-born workers...

Source: St Louis Fed FRED Native Born and Foreign Born

... but there has been zero job-creation for native born workers since June 2018!

This is a huge issue - especially at a time of an illegal alien flood at the southwest border...

... and is about to become a huge political scandal, because once the inevitable recession finally hits, there will be millions of furious unemployed Americans demanding a more accurate explanation for what happened - i.e., the illegal immigration floodgates that were opened by the Biden admin.

Which is also why Biden's handlers will do everything in their power to insure there is no official recession before November... and why after the election is over, all economic hell will finally break loose. Until then, however, expect the jobs numbers to get even more ridiculous.

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/08/2024 - 13:30

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