In truth, I‘m not sure I should be doing this write up at all since it is a high risk move. But as the saying goes: No guts, no glory. And I’ve gotten plenty of glory from calculated guts. This write up here does not constitute financial advice. Everybody should do their own research and make their own financial decisions. I am here just to share my thoughts. You should know that I have only dedicated a very insignificant portion of my portfolio (0.5–2.5%) to this project and I don’t mind losing it. However I believe the upside is potentially huge.
Usually I only entertain blue chip tokens — especially L1s — since I believe they tend to offer the best steady returns with low risk. On this occasion, I’m doing the complete opposite. Truthfully, the token for Hash Rush has on some days been almost completely ‘dead’. I mean that fully. If you check the Uniswap exchange, there were periods of time where the daily volume exchanged for the $RUSH token was literally 0. Nobody was buying it. Secondly, because of its incredibly low liquidity, small buys and sales cause the price of the token to skyrocket and dump when trades do take place.
So why would anybody enter this project?
Over the past year there has been a huge interest in Play-To-Earn model games. Axie Infinity, a single player PvP game, currently has a towering market cap of nearly $10B, having pulled a 150X since its January lows of being $1 per $AXS token (when its market cap was only $20–30M). Illuvium, an open world RPG game, was only $60 per $ILV token in May 2021 and went on to 20x and reach prices of over $1200 per token. Other games did more, some did less. Some were released with a high market cap (such as $ATLAS) so haven’t pulled many X’s… but regardless, I believe this shows a great interest in the field where gaming and crypto intersect. Merit Circle, which is looking to set up a DAO for gaming, did a token offering a week or two ago and the token tripled almost immediately upon launch. Its current market cap is around $300M.
Merit Circle is a serious project that has been involved in investing and funding production & development of all 4 games I’ve listed above and they still support all of them, including Hash Rush, a low market cap RTS game. Where the market cap of Axie Infinity is $10B, Illuvium $740m, and Atlas $320m, the market cap of Hash Rush is only somewhere between $20M and $30M. It is my personal belief that Hash Rush can move significantly from this market cap and go much, much higher when the game is released, which is supposed to be in Q1 or Q2 of 2022.
Many reasons can be made for this. Firstly, not a lot of marketing has been done in the past as it wouldn’t make sense to do marketing for a game that wasn’t playable yet for 3.5 years. Currently, you can watch game play on YouTube to judge the project for yourself and possibly compare it to other crypto games (or download it and play the game yourself). I’ve shared a video you can check out at the end of this article to see what game play is like. Also note, the token hasn’t been listed on any exchanges yet and is only available on Uniswap. If interest in Blockchain gaming continues, and Merit Circle starts heavily marketing Hash Rush, and Hash Rush’s development continues and is released as planned and if it were to reach the market cap of Star Atlas, which has the lowest market cap of the 3 games Merit Circle is involved with, mentioned above, it would be more than a 10X from this point. If it were to reach anywhere higher, well, all the better I’d say.
Personally, my favorite games when I was younger were Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games like Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos, Stronghold Crusader, and Starcraft. These games enjoyed huge popularity in the early 2000s and a cult following. Hash Rush being an RTS game obviously means I have a bias towards it, but I think it’s one that other people, especially crypto fanatics, may share. Given that release of the game is still a few months away, I am certainly not FOMOing into the project. That said, I have established a small position in the project since it has been in development for so many years and it has serious backers. I would certainly not say it’s impossible for it to reach a billion dollar market cap in the future. I would recommend reading through the tokenomics of the project so you can form your own opinion on it.
Of course, things can go wrong. Project release may be delayed because of bugs. The bull market may be over by then. Or people may genuinely not be interested in the game and so the project lies and does nothing whatsoever. In the end, the market does what it wants. Being cognizant of these facts, I’m taking a measured approach and am only dedicating a small portion of my portfolio to the $RUSH token as a long term play.
On a final note, please be aware that there are two tokens called $RUSH, one which is completely unrelated to Hash Rush game. Below is a video where you can watch Hash Rush game play.