TL;DR
- Gaming tokens like Cambria and POWER thrive despite broader crypto market declines.
- Cambria’s Gold Rush generated over $1 million in prize pool activity.
- POWER Token rose 230% post-launch, showcasing utility-driven economic resilience.
Cambria and the POWER Token registered sharp early activity even as major crypto assets slid between September and December 2025. The gaming sector’s resilience, highlighted by Cambria’s prize-pool surge and POWER’s post-launch rally, suggests utility-driven game economies can attract liquidity and engagement despite marketwide losses.
Market backdrop and the selective nature of gaming adoption
Between September and December 2025, Bitcoin lost nearly 20% of its value and Ronin token dropped about 65%, creating a broadly negative market tone. Yet gaming projects bucked that trend, with “day-one momentum,” according to Juicenews.io on 8 December 2025, capturing how specific Web3 titles converted player activity into measurable on-chain value at launch windows. On-chain transactions are blockchain-recorded operations that create immutable traces of asset movement and user interaction.
Not all gaming tokens survived the market cull, underscoring the selective nature of adoption. Treeverse’s END token fell more than 90% since July, and other projects collapsed despite apparent early demand: Nyan Heroes’ token plunged over 95% after a studio shutdown, Ember Sword—once backed by about $200M in land NFT pledges—closed operations in May 2025, and a licensed title, The Walking Dead: Empires, was scheduled to go offline in July 2025. Conversely, the HYPE token demonstrated outsized volume—reported at $29B—with a modest price uptick, showing that exceptional trading activity can coexist with broader market stress.
Cambria’s Gold Rush and POWER Protocol performance
Cambria’s Gold Rush Season 3 generated over $1.000.000 in prize-pool activity within its first 24 hours around 8 December 2025. Season 2 data show players produced nearly $1.000.000 in on-chain transactions across Abstract and Ronin, and spent more than $1.300.000 inside the game; the prize pool was approximately 894 ETH (about $1.52M). Top participants classified as “Paymasters” earned 12.3 ETH and amassed 240.000.000 Silver, while “Guild Viceroys” secured 6.78 ETH and more than 300.000.000 Silver. The in-game Auction House cleared nearly 20.000.000.000 Silver, equivalent to over $700.000 in player-driven volume. Cambria’s model emphasizes skill-based, “risk-to-earn” mechanics, where players stake effort or assets to compete for rewards.
The POWER Protocol launched alongside Fableborne Season 4 and underpinned a fresh token economy for that title. POWER rose more than 230% since debut and traded around $0.2981 with a market capitalization near $62.6M. The protocol’s stated utility ties token use to progression, content unlocks and on-chain interactions. A publicly listed entertainment company with reported annual user spend of more than $600M is slated to integrate with the network, a development that will serve as a concrete adoption milestone.
The Cambria and POWER cases illustrate that focused tokenomics and playable utility can attract engagement and liquidity even in a down market. The sector’s near-term watchpoint is the announced integration with the listed entertainment company; that partnership will test whether these early gains translate into sustained user growth and revenue. Next verified milestone: monitoring integration progress and subsequent season-level metrics.
