Due to Cheating, Immortal Chess Platform Shuts Down Crypto Features
According to Blockworks, Immortal, a play-to-earn chess app, has shut down its financialized crypto features after heavy cheating disrupted the gaming experience. Previously, users could earn CheckMate (CMT) token rewards while playing on the free online chess site. The platform also hosted a marketplace for chess piece NFTs, with some selling for as much as $14,300. However, following the announcement, sales only netted a few cents. Immortal raised $15.5 million in a Series A funding round led by The Chernin Group in September 2022.
Built with Immutable X's layer-2 scaling technology, the chess platform plans to continue using Web3 tech for anti-cheat measures and community engagement. The play-to-earn model, which incorporates crypto rails into gaming, has faced multiple challenges, including this recent instance of cheating.
In other news, Arbitrum, the largest Ethereum layer-2, experienced a partial outage on Friday due to a sustained surge of inscriptions clogging the sequencer. The outage lasted for nearly two hours, during which layer-2's swap fee spiked far above Ethereum's. The Arbitrum team later announced that the sequencer was back up and running.