Top 10 Blockchains for Gaming

Decentralized networks that make play-to-earn gaming an amazing experience

What are the best blockchains for gaming projects? Any blockchains that tailors to gamers should offer fast transactions and cheap transaction fees to allow even one dollar game items to transfer swiftly between players. We’ve put together a list of the top 10 blockchains for gaming to give you a head start in your search for the best games. Let’s dive in!

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The 10 best blockchains to build games on

With so many protocols and blockchain terms out there, it may be confusing for a game developer to understand where to begin. First and foremost, our tip is to research the Web3 gaming industry.

DappRadar’s Games Ranking is undoubtedly the best place on the market to find the best blockchain games. No one else presents such a broad range of titles from so many different blockchains for our users to discover at the click of a button.

For anyone who wants to start earning money for playing, there really is no better place to start looking than DappRadar.

Without further ado, here are the top 10 blockchains for gaming – in no particular order.

1. WAX

Some of the biggest games in the play-to-earn market are built on the WAX blockchain. Alien World and Farmers World are among the most played blockchain games, measured against the number of Unique Active Wallets. The Proof-of-Stake network launched in 2019, originally designed to handle e-commerce transactions. 

WAX stands for Worldwide Asset eXchange and it offers free transactions. For anyone trading NFTs, WAX takes a 2% cut. On of this, WAX claims to have ‘solved the environmental issues presented by NFTs minted on Ethereum. The blockchain has been completely carbon-neutral since its inception.

The blockchain also has its own WAX Game Studio, which launched in 2021 and delivered its first game, Blockchain Brawlers, in March 2022. The blockchain’s native token is WAXP.

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2. Flow

For a long time, Flow’s success was due almost entirely to its basketball card-collecting mega-hit  NBA Top Shot. In recent months though, some games built on Flow have started to climb DappRadar’s Games rankings and now have a settled position near the top.

Solitaire Blitz and Trickshot Blitz are two simple play-to-earn games from the development studio Joyride. Both are easy to understand and play. And users shouldn’t expect to make lots of money by playing them. But they’re both fun, casual games that have a small amount of earning potential on the side.

The FLOW token is well off its all-time high of $42.40, which it achieved in April 2021. It got to this peak around the time that NBA Top Shot was at its most popular.

3. BNB Chain

BNB Chain is the blockchain of Binance. It’s EVM compatible, which makes it perfect for bridging to other blockchains. Binance and its BNB token are more well-known as a centralized exchange and one of the main backbones of DeFi and cryptocurrency trading. But it’s become the platform of choice for plenty of play-to-earn game developers.

Some of the biggest games on BNB Chain are Era7: Game of Truth, MOBOX, Tiny World, SecondLive and X World Games. But the network also bridges to Alien Worlds (WAX), CPL (Polygon) and Tap Fantasy (Solana).

Users can enjoy average transaction fees between $0.10 and $0.30. DappRadar’s article about games on BNB Chain offers a more in-depth look at some of the platforms that fans are currently enjoying.

4. Polygon

Polygon is a Layer-2 sidechain that acts as a scaling platform for Ethereum. The idea is to give users all the benefits of Ethereum without any of the drawbacks, such as high gas fees and lengthy confirmation finality. 

Some of the biggest play-to-earn games in the world are built on Polygon. Sunflower Land, Arc8 and Pegaxy are all hosted on the network. Alongside these names, more than 37,000 other dapps chose Polygon to help them scale to a wider audience. 

Its native token is MATIC, of which there are roughly 4 billion staked on the network. Users have made more than 1.8 billion transactions across Polygon and they save an average of $140 million in gas fees every day.

5. Ronin

Ronin is known as the Axie Infinity chain, while also hosting other heavy hitters in terms of user numbers and transactional volume. Sky Mavis developed and manages the Ronin Network, and DappRadar is a node validator supporting the ecosystem.

Ronin launched as an ecosystem for Sky Mavis’ popular play-to-earn game Axie Infinity. The game moved from Ethereum to the Ronin network after the network launched on 1 February, 2021. 

Initially, transaction fees were set to zero for the Axie Infinity marketplace. But in April 2022, Sky Mavis began introducing small costs. It’s not a flat rate and the Ronin network released a statement showing the different prices.

The RON token reached its current all-time high on January 27th, 2022. Since then, it’s followed a downward trend as the Ronin Network suffered a string of issues and a record-breaking $600 million exploit.

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6. NEAR

Launched in late 2020, NEAR is a public blockchain that has focused on allowing dapps to benefit from usability and scalability. Perhaps because of its fast transactions, many dapps built on this proof-of-stake blockchain fall into the categories of gaming, as well as DeFi.

Especially since 2022, NEAR has also started to bet heavily on bringing gaming dapp developers to its project. The blockchain went on to promote that the future of gaming is in Web3 and that NEAR was the protocol to “put gamers in the driver’s seat”.

Some of the most popular games using NEAR are the move-to-earn game Sweat Economy and the mobile web3 games platform PlayEmber.

7. Solana

By far one of the most famous blockchains in the world, Solana also remains a strong candidate for game devs to build their projects on.

Although the protocol – and all the projects involved – suffered after the fall of the FTX exchange in late 2022, the experienced team of gaming experts at Solana maintain the strong position that nothing will derail the projects in the future.

The Solana Hackathons, conferences organized several times a year around the world, are great hubs from which famous web3 games have already emerged, such as the move-to-earn game StepN and the agriculture-simulation metaverse DeFi Land.

8. Avalanche

Another recurring blockchain when it comes to web3 gaming is Avalanche. This blockchain with popular dapps shifted its original focus on DeFi after the Terra collapse in 2022 to Gaming – turning into one of the best alternatives not just for developers but also for players.

Dapps built on this blockchain benefit from eco-friendly, cheap and fast transactions – which helps improve gamers’ experience.

Step.app, the move-to-earn game, as well as the fun mobile game Crabada, use this technology. Both have quickly become popular among web3 gamers and built themselves strong communities.

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9. Immutable X

Often referred to as the gaming blockchain, Immutable X couldn’t stay out of our list. This Ethereum layer-2 network was truly built for high speed, scale and gamers.

It was launched in 2018 and for long desired to become the best Ethereum alternative out there but became much more than that. Today, Immutable X is one of the best blockchains to build gaming dapps thanks to its free NFT minting and 9,000 transactions per second.

Unsurprisingly, some of the most popular web3 games at the moment use its technology. Illuvium, Guild of Guardians and Gods Unchained are some of the top names in the industry and are all on the Immutable X blockchain.

10. Hive

Originally Hive forked from the Steem blockchain, and now the platform has become home to the trading card game Splinterlands. Even though the card game is responsible for the lion’s share of the activity, Hive is actually an open ecosystem where everybody can build projects.

Without a doubt Splinterlands rules the Hive ecosystem, but smaller projects pop up all the time. In Spring 2023 a futuristic idle strategy game TerraCore launched, while the team at Splinterlands is working on a tower defense game called Soulkeep.

Keep track of the best blockchain games

If you’re interested in learning and investing more in blockchain games, DappRadar is the right place to start.

Here you can access real-time data on the main gaming projects and learn about them with educational content through our guides and industry reports.

Useful links

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