How Fake World Assets and onchain gacha became crypto’s latest craze

Just when you thought crypto was getting boring, a new phenomenon is lighting up Crypto Twitter — Fake World Assets (FWAs). Yes, really.It’s the latest iteration of the onchain gacha craze, where users receive a random collectible, or collectibles, that are usually worth very little, but are sometimes worth quite a lot.Within four days of launch, FWAs guzzled so much Ethereum gas that they briefly became the chain’s largest gas consumer by fees over a 24-hour period. At its peak on July 25, FWAs generated approximately $1.53 million in daily fees, and even leapfrogged Tether and Circle to briefly rank among Ethereum’s biggest consumers of blockspace. Its creators, TokenWorks, proclaimed:“4 days since launch. Fake World Assets are the next big thing.”TokenWorks is far from an impartial observer, but TVL continues to climb, reaching over $6.15 million on July 31. Fee revenue has now eased to around $350,000 per day, which equates to an annualized run rate of roughly $268 million. By August 1, FWA had seen 10,000 ETH in volume, and 100,000 purchases. Some of the activity is driven by users trying to access early FWA token incentives, but there also appears to be genuine interest in th...