Portal attracted a lot of attention earlier this year following its massive PORTAL token launch—which is the fifth-largest gaming token launch of 2024—and its airdrop. Now, several months later, the crypto gaming project is launching its wallet and game discovery hub.

While the crypto gaming space has continually grown and evolved, it still has lingering issues and roadblocks to mainstream adoption—two of which Portal believes it’s addressing. First, games are spread across a plethora of networks, with what feels like a new layer-2 gaming network appearing every month or so.

That’s why Portal Wallet supports 20 Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains, including prominent gaming chains like Immutable, Ronin, and Xai as well as the likes of Ethereum itself and general-purpose scaling networks like Arbitrum and Base. This wallet aims to help smooth over interoperability issues between chains.

However, maybe the most pressing issue of game discovery is being addressed through the Portal Hub. Crypto games have faced onboarding issues, including a ban from leading PC gaming marketplace Steam on NFT and crypto games. The Portal Hub aims to pull together games into a single starting 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 rife with low-quality games, simply looking to extract money out of users. The Portal Hub seeks to reduce the risk players run into these kinds of titles. On launch, over 200 games will be featured and promoted to users through a combination of data and team curation—including a section of recommended picks from the team.

But there is a long-term vision that puts community at the center of the Hub, Strauss said.

“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.”

The PORTAL token launched on Ethereum in February of this year with significant hype behind it. With that, the token skyrocketed to a $561.6 million market cap, in one of the biggest launches of the year.

At the time of writing, according to CoinGecko, PORTAL has since fallen to a market cap of about $70 million, echoing the path of many gaming tokens that peaked early this year.

While no timeline has been set, the team confirmed that it is actively working towards this goal of token holders having a say in curation. That said, there is no requirement to hold PORTAL to use the discovery platform, nor do featured games need to be compatible with the wallet. 

“At release, [hub] games won't have the wallet integrated,” Strauss confirmed. “But what we're really excited about is there are already a couple of partners that are really interested in this. And I think we'll have the first few wallet integrations pretty soon.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward