Welcome to the April edition of BlockchainGamer.biz’s regular Mavens group.
With Aavegotchi and TreasureDAO both shutting down their L3 gaming chains, will the trend for 2025 see further consolidation when it comes to blockspace?
Rebecca Liao – Co-founder and CEO, Saga
The abandonment of L3 gaming chains highlights a broader reality in web3: infrastructure should empower creativity, not burden it. The next chapter of this industry will belong to those who let game developers dream freely by creating environments that provide scalability, customizability, and ease of deployment without asking studios to become infrastructure operators. Success lies in giving builders the freedom to focus on gameplay and community, while the tech quietly works in the background.
The recent moves of L3 chains shutting down their gaming chains are less a definitive signal towards mass blockspace consolidation and more a reflection of the ongoing search for sustainable, scalable, and developer-friendly blockchain architectures. Building and maintaining bespoke chains, even layered ones, involves significant technical and operational overhead. When that burden outweighs the benefits for specific applications, developers will naturally seek simpler or more managed solutions.
Robby Yung – CEO, Animoca Brands
I think that this issue speaks to user communities, and if there is a sufficiently large player community to warrant an L3 (or an L2), then it makes sense. But where community numbers don’t support maintaining that infrastructure cost, then it seems like consolidation is inevitable.
So it’s less about a wave of consolidation or the structure of making subnets, but really the ability of individual products to attract communities at scale.
Jack O’Holleran – Co-founder and CEO, SKALE Labs
The recent shutdowns we’re seeing aren’t indicators of consolidation but rather market maturation. What’s happening is that players and developers are gravitating toward chains that truly solve gaming’s core needs: zero gas fees, fast transactions, and a seamless user experience.
Looking ahead to the rest of 2025, I expect we’ll see specialization rather than consolidation. The successful gaming ecosystems won’t be determined by who can spin up the most L3s, but by who can deliver quality infrastructure that becomes invisible to the end user. As I’ve said before, quality is what will matter in the next wave – ecosystems that attract the highest quality apps, users, and partners will ultimately prevail.
Russell Bennett – CEO, Metacade
We’re going to see major consolidation in block space through 2025 – not because chains are merging, but because many will simply die out. Attention and liquidity are everything.
Projects building in ecosystems like Base, which are bringing in real users at scale, will thrive. The rest? They’re building on islands with no bridges and no visitors. We chose Base for exactly that reason – no heavy bridging, no isolation, just smart alignment with where the users are going.
Mitja Goroshevsky – GOSH co-founder, Acki Nacki co-author
Aavegotchi pulling Gotchichain and TreasureDAO shelving Treasure Chain show that piling new roll‑ups on top of roll‑ups just adds latency and operational grief without fixing core UX. L2s are no refuge here: every extra hop still means more block time, more bridges, and more ways to lose players. 2025 will see studios collapse back onto a handful of ultra‑high‑throughput base layers where the infrastructure is run by specialists, not game designers.
For web3 games to matter, *every* in‑game action must hit chain in real time and at near‑zero cost, making blockchain an invisible substrate rather than a gated checkpoint. The projects that crack that – leveraging consensus designs built for sub‑second finality instead of bolting on yet another ‘L‑something’ – will finally let gameplay and community, not token hype, lead the conversation.
Alexander Goldybin – Founder and chairman, iLogos
L3 shutdowns aren’t a surprise. They reflect where the market really is, not where founders hoped it would be.
Too many chains launched on the idea that custom infrastructure would attract games. In reality, they added more problems – technical overhead, low liquidity, and poor player onboarding. These were never game development priorities.
The space is shrinking for a reason. Developers and players are gravitating to platforms that are reliable and widely adopted. L3s haven’t proven they can compete at that level.
Next year will bring more shutdowns. Most chains offer nothing that justifies their existence. Expect a short list of platforms to remain, those that provide speed, tooling, and users. Everything else is noise.
Quinn Kwon – Head of web3 strategy, Delabs Games
The combination of ecosystem dynamics and user experience seems to be driving a shift away from L3 chains. But firstly, maintaining an L3 chain on its own necessitates significant infrastructure investment, which includes funding ongoing development, maintaining nodes, and guaranteeing security. In certain instances, this amount of spending has proven unsustainable.
Another key advantage of L2 solutions over L3 chains is ease of use. L3s often require users to bridge assets and set up wallets on unknown networks, which can be intimidating to novices. In contrast, L2 solutions like Base, which is closely linked with Coinbase, make onboarding easier by providing a recognizable and efficient experience. This is one of the main reasons Aavegotchi chose to migrate to Base.
Lastly, dominant L2s tend to have stronger liquidity and larger, more vibrant ecosystems. As of 2025, Base had accumulated $2.5 billion in TVL, surpassing networks like Polygon. These robust ecosystems naturally attract a broader base of developers, users, and projects, making them a more practical choice for games and applications that rely on token and NFT activity.
Anthony Anzalone – Founder and CEO, XION
With 16,000 chains strangling the space, fragmentation’s killing the vibe. The Blockchain Game Alliance is calling it; everyone’s running to heavyweights like Base for liquidity and seamless play.
Small chains? They’re often soul-sucking cash vampires, trapping devs and players in a splintered hell. Sequence’s Megan Doyle ain’t mincing words, “adapt or get buried”.
Yukai Tu – Chief technical officer, CARV
Gaming chain fortunes closely follow the market and it’s been a bumpy few months to say the least. Standalone gaming chains are important innovation facilitators but it’s not surprising that some are falling on tough times. The web3 gaming sector is facing a significant downturn with total investment down year-on-year by 70% in Q1. Under these conditions, something’s got to give.
Chain consolidation will likely continue and those that find success will answer bigger questions. For example, rather than just isolated chains, projects that build infrastructure and connect established ecosystems will more easily withstand market pressures. Likewise, the technology needs to be adaptable and usable.
This is something we’re doing with CARV SVM Chain – currently in testnet and slated for mainnet – by addressing specific needs in AI agents and data sovereignty that other blockchains don’t or won’t. There’s a unique and specific application that benefits developers as the chain grants access to both Ethereum and Solana without requiring separate infrastructure.
The blockspace consolidation trend we’re witnessing is forced market maturation. The chains with unique selling points and wide application will be best positioned to weather the storm.
Sam Barberie – Head of strategy and partnerships, Sequence
The blockchain industry is desperately in need of consolidation. Not simply consolidation in the number of entities that do or offer certain things (e.g. do we really need 500 indexers?), but consolidation in what each entity does. What I have seen over the last 6-9 months is that blockchain companies are starting to think strategically about what they do well, what their unique value proposition is, and how they can best thrive and find stability. Aavegotchi and TreasureDAO are examples of companies starting to make these choices.
A game is a product. A chain is a product. A token is a product. A community is a product. A wallet is a product. Many companies, not just these two, spread themselves thin in taking on initiatives that
- 1) weren’t core to their value in the market and
- 2) required significant internal resourcing on what was largely re-inventing the wheel.
This sounds harsh, but my criticism comes from a place of wanting all boats to rise, and these reckonings are key to helping web3 gaming focus and flourish. Scaling down unnecessary L3s is just one example of companies thinking critically about their foci. Managing the extremely demanding tasks of running a live ops game, as Aavegotchi needs to, is a full-time company itself. Building out infrastructure when better and more secure options exist in-market, as TreasureDAO tried to do, distracted from the core value prop of their community and go-to-market support. Adding managing chains on top of any requires time, money, and humans.
It’s easy to understand why a lot of folks have thought about launching their own chain, but the reasons underpin wishful thinking or stopgaps. Very few games have maxed out the performance and throughput of existing chains, especially when using proper tech like re-layers to batch and parallelize transactions. For some, chains offer a new narrative to rally funding, or to potentially earn protocol fees as additional lines of business. There are already more chains than games in web3, and while the future is definitely very much in an ever-expanding metaverse of connected networks, we’re all still waiting for the value of what gets built on these chains to demonstrate why we’re all here. The number of new chains won’t stop growing, but these instances will not be the last networks to wind down.
Chris Heatherly – CEO, Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow
Most of the strategies of web3 gaming of the last 2-3 yrs are going to fail. Games reliant on token speculation get hot for a minute and then fall off because they are ponzis. Most of the L2s are ETFs of ponzis. Some have good communities that hold because they chase one ponzi after another hoping the next will be the big hit, but it never comes because they are just ponzis. Until we break the ponzi thinking, its a doom loop. Chasing CT is a navel gazing exercise.
For mass adoption, we need to convince great devs and regular normie gamers to come on-chain and that’s not going to happen in a casino with odds so bad even the house doesn’t win. We need a complete pivot. The two most bullish things this year are AppTokens and the Mysten deal with Pokemon Home because they are new approaches. The rest is noise.
Tony Pearce – Co-founder, Reality+
At Reality+, our focus has always been on integrating emerging technologies in ways that enhance player experience without adding friction. Most players are unlikely to engage with complex blockchain mechanics unless there’s a compelling incentive, which is why we prioritize making these technologies run seamlessly in the background.
The recent closures of Aavegotchi and TreasureDAO’s Layer 3 gaming chains reflect a broader shift in the blockchain gaming landscape, a move toward consolidation. Looking ahead to 2025, this trend is expected to continue, with developers and platforms increasingly emphasizing unified ecosystems, frictionless technology integration, and user-centric design. These elements are key to driving sustainable growth and wider adoption across the industry.