Portal, known for its major PORTAL token launch, has introduced a cross-chain gaming hub and wallet . Supporting 20 EVM chains, it aims to streamline interoperability and address fragmentation in the growing crypto gaming space.
The PORTAL token launch, which was the fifth-largest gaming token launch of 2024, and the subsequent airdrop drew significant attention to Portal earlier this year. The wallet and game discovery center are now being launched by the crypto gaming project, several months after its inception.
Cross-Chain Gaming Hub Launch
Portal is confident that it is addressing two of the lingering issues and impediments to mainstream adoption in the crypto gaming space, which has continued to grow and evolve. Initially, the availability of games is dispersed across a multitude of networks, with the emergence of a new layer-2 gaming network approximately once a month.
This is the reason why Portal Wallet supports 20 Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains, including Ethereum itself and general-purpose scaling networks such as Arbitrum and Base, as well as prominent gaming chains like Immutable, Ronin, and Xai. The objective of this wallet is to mitigate interoperability concerns between chains.
The Portal Hub may be addressing the most pressing issue of game discovery, however. Crypto games have encountered onboarding challenges, such as a prohibition from the premier PC gaming marketplace Steam on NFT and crypto games. The Portal Hub endeavors to consolidate games into a singular entry point for players.
“I think Web3 in general has this problem of: there are a lot of things to find and there are a lot of things that are hidden,” Portal General Manager Ezra Strauss told Decrypt.
“One from a trust perspective—like there are problems around what you can trust in Web3 because of security issues—and then there’s just general quality issues.”
Crypto gaming is characterized by the prevalence of low-quality games that are designed to extract money from users. The Portal Hub aims to mitigate the risk that players encounter when engaging in these types of titles.
Through a combination of data and team curation, over 200 titles will be featured and promoted to users at the time of launch. This includes a section of recommended picks from the team.
“Today it’s sort of like: Let’s take what the best games are from our community feedback,” he said. “But ultimately, what we’re working towards is […] this community driven-content discovery, where users are incentivized to hold PORTAL and engage with the community in other ways, in order to drive what discovery looks like and what’s discoverable on the platform.”
In February of this year, the PORTAL token was introduced on Ethereum, generating substantial anticipation. In one of the most significant launches of the year, the token’s market capitalization soared to $561.6 million as a result.
PORTAL has since declined to a market capitalization of approximately $70 million, as reported by CoinGecko at the time of writing. This trend is consistent with the trajectory of numerous gaming tokens that reached their zenith in the early part of the year.
The team has affirmed that it is actively working toward the objective of allowing token holders to participate in curation, despite the absence of a set timeline. However, the discovery platform does not necessitate the possession of PORTAL, nor do the featured games need to be compatible with the wallet.
