Gunzilla Games’ GUN token hits $68M market cap within hours of launch

This is a segment from The Drop newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

---

Gunzilla Games’ GUN token — for its Off The Grid game and Avalanche subnet Gunz — is now live. 

GUN climbed up 12% since its launch early Monday morning, but has since fallen slightly. As of 11:30 am ET Monday, its price was $0.09. The token had a market cap of roughly $60 million at that time, with 604 million GUN in circulation out of a possible 10 billion. 

GUN already has a trading volume of $126 million just a few hours after launch, per CoinGecko data.

The Gunz chain has already seen over 487 million transactions across 14.5 million wallets, according to Avascan data and Gunzilla’s Director of Web3 Theodore Agranat.

“Unlike most Web3 projects, we’ve spent five years now building everything first and testing it in testnet for over a year,” Agranat said in an interview with Blockworks, noting that the team chose to launch the token on Binance because it’s the biggest crypto exchange.

Agranat says he’s seen crypto exchanges engaging with gaming projects less over the past year — but says those projects that did launch have largely missed the mark.

Off The Grid is free to play on PC and console — and doesn’t require a wallet or any crypto. The game is largely a skill-based shooter, though some characters’ “cyberlimbs” grant special abilities. Items can also be bought and used in the game. 

Those wishing to pour money into the game can pay for Off The Grid’s Pro membership ($12 a month) to use the game’s marketplace, which uses blockchain on the backend. But even if you’re playing for free, you’ll slowly earn GUN as you go. 

If you’ve already been playing the game, though, those GUN token numbers you’re seeing won’t be turned into actual GUN tokens, Gunzilla has confirmed. 

“Their main benefits are the rare items that they earned or received with OTG Pro — many of which no one will ever be able to access in the future,” Agranat explained on the benefits for early players in a message.

“Hexes” and other items earned early on will transfer over, though. And though it’s challenging, extracting hexes while playing the game will get you more loot (each hex can be decoded to reveal an item). Agranat noted during our interview that over 380,000 hexes had been extracted in just one day last week. 

I’ve sunk some hours into the game so far, and I like both solo mode and trios mode. This game is fast — more like Call of Duty: Warzone than Apex Legends in terms of time-to-kill and overall speed. But even without its crypto elements, Off The Grid brings something unique to the extraction battle royale shooter genre with its cyberlimbs and gritty, futuristic aesthetic. 

A little scoop: Tomorrow, on April 1, expect a “very, very fun new skin activation,” Agranat shared. There’ll be a new skin coming out — could it be April Fool’s-themed?

Bigger picture, Off The Grid is just the beginning for Gunzilla.

“It is just the first of many games that we will launch in our ecosystem,” Agranat said.

---

Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

• Blockworks Daily: The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam.
• Empire: Start your morning with the top news and analysis to inform your day in crypto.
• Forward Guidance: Reporting and analysis on the growing intersection of crypto and macroeconomics, policy and finance.
• 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox. Market highlights, data, degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance and more.
• Lightspeed: Built for Solana investors, developers and community members. The latest from one of crypto’s hottest networks.
• The Drop: For crypto collectors and traders, covering apps, games, memes and more.
• Supply Shock: Tracking Bitcoin’s rise from internet plaything worth less than a penny to global phenomenon disrupting money as we know it.