In just about every forum in the WAX universe one can find the same theme rumbling through any kind of half-serious discussion: WAX blockchain is losing relevance. Factually, it hasn’t helped that WAX as a token has fallen from the range of $0.25 a unit to now $0.03. That kind of value erosion has caused more than a few whales out the exit doors. However, big volume players are not the primary cause of devaluation; it’s the lack of infrastructure concern with the blockchain as crypto-environment.

Sitting in the Minor Leagues

WAX was never a Las Vegas strip style blockchain like Ethereum or Polygon. Instead, it was like a close-circle secret. You found out about it by accident or through a friend. More importantly, you got into WAX because someone helped you start a wallet your you knew your way around a DEX to get started. My introduction was actually accident and mention; I found out about WAX through Publish0x as well as Discord at almost the same time.

By then, mid-2019, WAX was definitely humming with some very established games like Alien Worlds, Pandas, Farmers World, and the heyday of R-planet had already passed. But there was still plenty of strong surges to come before the chain went into what people are now describing as a death spiral. What changed? General greed for the most part.

WAX almost single-handedly forged the way for play-to-earn to become viable and worth the time spent on it. People were actually making very good money with early WAX games, both in grinding as well as through secondary market sales of NFTs, WAX’s backbone. However, that second part became the driving element that broke the chain as well. The value of games took second fiddle to launching projects and making as much money as possible as possible on the initial NFT issuance. In the meantime, the earlier members and OG jumped on every new train to be the first to receive the first issue drops and resell them as fast as possible. It became less about the game itself and more about selling or flipping as fast as possible. That ended up bringing us where we are today.

The present WAX chain is seeing an exodus, games are a shadow of what they were before, community is a curse-word, and rugs are a plenty. 

Time for a Serious House-Cleaning

So what would be needed to bring it all back?

• First off, the powers that be of WAX need to refocus their WUF effort to actually mean something instead of fixating on a useless meme coin. The gig is up; WUF never produced and everyone is dumping. All that momentum that might have been fizzled because it was just another marketing exercise with no substance.
• Second, Telegram is not the answer to WAX’s revival. While TG might seem attractive, it is narrow in offering as well as function. The first tapper was novel and a bit interesting. Now, it’s just clickbait to see how many followers one can get in their project for ad revenue. Again, like WUF it’s going nowhere fast.
• Third, WAX project developers need to focus again on long-term projects with community building as a priority and less on instant rewards for attracting instant followings. So what if the flippers get upset? They never cared about projects in the first place, only secondary sales. Good projects that push players to invest, build, produce and support their game community end up being those that live the longest, as well as provide ongoing income for developers to keep going. In that vein, WAX chain controllers need to make the inroads for new projects as easy as possible. The idea of going the opposite direction, forming insular guilds will be a chain-killer, driving people away to other chains where growth is promoted.
• Fourth, there needs to be a culling of useless tokens in the WAX environment. At this point one out of every three tokens is an annoying deflationary meme issuance that does nothing but clog up wallets, the network, and hides good projects. If useless deflationary tokens should continue on WAX, they should be charged a tenancy fee to the infrastructure for the resources and traffic they are clogging up. Tokens aside from WAX should be project specific and designed to help boost in-game development, providing cash flow liquidity doors for players to get in and out of the games as needed.
• Finally, to bolster the WAX network and make it worth the time to support, there should be a gas fee. That same income should then be used to help provide grants to new projects needing startup help and marketing boosting, and that should exclude any applicants already part of WAX’s management and network administration.

It’s a nice vision, but unfortunately the above is unlikely to happen anytime soon. The chain is so fragmented now, it’s not surprising many see things as a matter of time before WAX goes the way of many other chains and becomes a ghost town. And as volume leaves for the exit door, the chain devalues more and more every day.