Everybody in the crypto world will be aware by now of the crash of the second most popular crypto trading exchange, FTX. The crash was caused by a lack of liquidity and mismanagement of funds by the likes of FTX and Alameda Research.

Followed by this was a significant amount of withdrawals by depositors and investors. This crash had a ripple effect on the entire crypto industry, with Ethereum and Bitcoin hitting new two-year lows.

There are many aspects to the crypto industry, from the Metaverse to NFTs. However, one of the industries seeing the largest impact from this downfall is the GameFi industry due to the close link between Solana and FTX.

Sam Bankman-Fried had planned to invest $100m into GameFi projects on the Solana blockchain, but things have turned since then.

Some of Solana’s top gaming projects, such as Aurory, saw their in-game tokens drop in value by more than 70%, and Solana’s SOL token dropped by more than 56%, according to data from CoinGecko.

The Solana blockchain has previously been criticised for outages causing unrecoverable network partitions and transaction overloads. The entire Solana blockchain is sometimes impeded by one single point of failure.

In our view, this leaves the future of gaming on the Solana blockchain in question, with Web3 projects on Solana losing investment, and some users reconsidering how they use and stake their tokens.

When it comes to the crypto sports betting vertical of GameFi, some users will now prefer to use sports betting platforms built on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchain platforms to avoid certain risks. EVM-Compatible dApps are fast, reliable, have lower transaction fees, and are not dependent on any one chain to be functional.

This allows options in case a different blockchain is having issues, making it the right choice for iGaming, in our view. Solana is not an EVM-compatible blockchain, but developers from Neon Labs do have plans to implement an Ethereum-based smart contract layer on the blockchain this year.

Games built on EVM-compatible blockchains, such as Polygon and Avalanche, are proving to become leaders in the space. Some crypto sports betting apps built on these blockchains do not take custody of user funds at all, allowing players to place individual bets directly from their Web3 metamask wallets and withdraw their winnings safely and instantly.

Another factor to consider is that this bear market should predominantly affect those investing for capital gains, and not those using crypto as a form of gaming and transferring money, as they are most likely already comfortable with the risk. Those who use crypto as means of an investment may walk away in fear and panic, but gamers using it as a payment method will stay strong, in our view.

This information is a key indicator that the future of crypto sports betting and gaming remains, but it will now depend on developers making the right decisions regarding which blockchains they will build on, with investors and users following suit.

Thawfeek Ameen, CMO of Betswap.gg, is a crypto sports betting pioneer. He has years of experience in the iGaming industry in areas such as sports betting and risk management.

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