Central & Southern Asia and Oceania (CSAO) ranked as the third largest cryptocurrency market according to Chainalysis, with citizens of CSAO countries receiving $932 billion in cryptocurrency value from July 2021 to June 2022. CSAO is also home to seven of the top twenty countries: Vietnam (1), the Philippines (2), India (4), Pakistan (6), Thailand (8), Nepal (16), and Indonesia (20). Numbers themselves are already impressive, but the data gets more interesting when we dig into what’s driving that DeFi adoption.

Web traffic patterns suggest NFTs are perhaps the biggest on-ramp into DeFi for CSAO today. 58% of DeFi-related web traffic from CSAO users in Q2 2022 was NFT related; another 21% was to the websites of play-to-earn blockchain games. Play-to-earn games and non-fungible tokens are intimately related. In P2E games, players have the opportunity to take real ownership of their in-game assets, to be minted as NFTs on the blockchain. Although virtually identical in function to their traditional counterparts, having in-game items minted as NFTs and in-game currency fully usable as crypto opens a host of possibilities for the player to earn real money. It is a very exciting new space, given that the marketplace value for NFTs hit a staggering $41 billion by the end of 2021.

To give practical examples, assets like Axie pets in Axie Infinity and Sneakers in STEPN are NFTs which can be resold on a number of different marketplaces, like MagicEden and OpenSea. For countries with high web traffic to NFT marketplaces – especially Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines – a large portion of that NFT-related traffic may therefore come from players of blockchain games.

Not surprisingly, the new industry giant, Gala Games is looking to Asia to be one of their new markets of expansion. Earlier this year, back in February, Gala confirmed that it would allocate $5 billion during 2022 to expand its NFT offerings. Their idea was to begin pouring capital into music, movies, and theme park NFTs (non-fungible tokens), according to Gala Games’ President of Blockchain Jason Brink. The division goes as follows: out of the $5 billion allocated to Gala Games’ NFT expansion, $2 billion is expected to go to gaming, $1 billion will be allocated for the studio’s music ambitions, $1 billion for movies, and Gala theme park NFTs will pick up the remaining $1 billion.

Gala Games was created by Eric Schiermeyer, one of Zynga’s original partners, responsible for developing Mafia Wars and Farmville. The Gala (GALA) team’s goal is to create fun Blockchain P2E games that everyone will enjoy playing. It is intended to integrate all system players with innovative thinking with the aid of blockchain technology. It has now 1.3+ million monthly active users and 15 game titles launched or in development.