While the cryptocurrency world has gone insane with the buzzword DeFi I have been frankly not that interested. Sure I have my Hive staked and I earn a little passive Hive from it along with a bunch of other benefits. Beyond that all of the hype and “insane” returns a lot of projects out there have been promising are not for me as I’m not a high-risk taker like that.

One of my biggest reasons for staying away from staking assets, in general, has been the fact that most of it have been on ETH. I just can’t stand the high ETH gas prices and anytime there is a game I’m thinking about getting into and I start hearing the hundreds of dollars’ worth of ETH people are blowing just on gas alone. Many times exceeding the actual item they are purchasing. It’s a hard pass from me.

My other big reason is just the pure insanity of those 100000000% returns that so many projects claim. I mean really? Even more so when it’s named after some food and you have already heard in a week of a dozen rug pulls, to begin with. Yet people still pour money into them hoping to chase after profits like a drunken wildebeest.

Just recently I have started to play Alien Worlds on Wax. While my focus was more on mining the game's currency over getting the NFTs. Your chances are quite low of getting anything but the lowest rarity of NFTs on the odd chance you find any. My thoughts on that have changed into thinking I would prefer a balanced build of getting both NFTs and the game's currency Trilium (TLM) if I happened to find some good deals.

In Aliens Worlds you can also stake TLM. The benefits of that however are quite small for the time being. It is still something being developed which should release later on. As such I don’t have a use case for holding TLM and would rather convert it into something else for now.

Most of the NFTs I have been getting is the lowest rarity called abounded and among them quite a few of a card called Grey Peacemakers among other types of minions. The part of the game minions are used in is not out yet. With makes them quite a speculative thing to hold and with them being the lowest rarity as well they are not worth much.

I was selling Grey Peacemakers for around 1 Wax which was 4 cents at the time of writing this. They have however dipped below that price point in some cases. While I was thinking of picking some up last night for .5 Wax or around 2 cents and seeing how NFT flipping goes I decided against giving it a try.

What has changed my mind about wanting to mine for a chance at some NFTs and holding the lower almost worthless ones was due to a Tweet by Alien Worlds themselves. While the article shared was posted on October 28th and therefore the current market prices should already have this baked in for the time being. That changes my thoughts on the situation.

The article itself goes over the fact you will be able to increase the card's shininess by combing four of the same lower tier to get one of the next tiers. Also, it will increase stats on those cards. While not all blockchain games out allow you to can combine and even further increase the stats for doing so on that NFT. Alien Worlds is planning that and that means more than just collectors will want these higher shine cards. As they will hold a usability benefit in-game.

It gets even better as just the other day a different game called if you could call them that R-Planet announced on Twitter Alien Worlds players will be able to stake their NFTs to earn Aether. R-Planet is still in development with only the staking part out as of yet. Aether itself is just about worthless with around 1550 Aether for 1 Wax on Alcor assuming that is the correct token.

It looks like R-Planet is going to be a crafting game of sorts. They are now collaborating with six other Wax projects where people can stake NFTs and get some kind of yield out of them. What I like most is Aether is going to have a major use. You will be able to convert it into different elements and then craft those elements to make a whole range of undiscovered things in the R-Planet itself one day.

The Grey Peacemakers and a bunch of other low valued abundant rarity NFTs I have to get you .6 Aether per hour. I have 13 of them now staked netting me around 187.2 Aether total per day. While that is only around 0.12 Wax per day even after the price went up by 30% in a single day. That is still netting me something for an unused NFT for the time being.

The beauty of all of this is it’s all done on Wax. Transactions are only costing me a little bit of CPU for the most part that I regen back over time. Staking and Unstacking these game NFTs is almost instant as well. By the time I checked my wallet from unstacking an NFT it was already showing back in there. So my costs for doing so are just any risk for doing it and not anything extra like gas.

Final Thoughts

• I have NFTs I’m getting a lot of in a game by playing it
• The low valued NFTs I now want to hold and speculate on for use or sell later on
• I can now stake it while I wait and earn tokens in a different game still in development
• There is nothing cost prohibiting me from playing around with low valued NFTs

Now there are several fun scenarios about possible outcomes to think about.

Both the NFTs I’m holding and the Aether I’m farming skyrocket in price months down the road. I sell both or use both to try and make further gains in these two different games.

The NFTs keep losing value and in a few months the Aether retains or gains value and I keep gaining more of it. This could cover the opportunity costs of being speculative by holding the NFTs if not at least help me break even.

The NFTs go up in value but Aether remains near worthless or becomes worthless. I can sell the NFTs or use them and I just don’t get anything extra out of the situation. Outside of any crafting for fun, the Aether could have once that part of R-Planet is out.

Both lose all value and neither Alien Worlds nor R-Planet comes out with the expected use cases. There is also the worse option I get rugged pulled and just lose everything. Either way, we are talking about 2 to 4 cent NFTs being risked. These would take time to sell anyway if they even do with how many I’m getting in the short run.

Some side benefits could occur as well. If Aether ending up having a big use case or something fun to do in R-Planet as it sounds. That could drive up the NFTs prices as people buy more to stake for Aether. If that does not end up being the case I expect people are more speculative on the Alien World NFTs for future use cases in Alien Worlds and not earning Aether in R-Planet at this time. So I don’t see there being much if any impact for now if R-Planet does not take off.

I also won’t be staking anything higher than abundant rarity NFTs from Alien Worlds into R-Planet at least for now. You only get slightly more Aether and the NFTs are worth quite a few times more. I don’t see the risk vs reward for now. There are also the opportunity costs of wanting to progress further in Alien Worlds in the short term which selling high rarity NFTs will help me achieve that short-term goal faster.

Ultimately though I’m just playing with small amounts that if I lose it’s not a big deal at all since I farmed for them anyway. My out of pocket cost is just time which I’ve had fun with and nothing else.

Other Content

• Taking A Look At Alien Worlds

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from Alien Worlds and R-Planet.

Disclosure: Not financial advance.