Web3 Watch: Chess app discontinues play-to-earn after ‘heavy cheating’

“Any of us that invested and lost money should mostly blame ourselves for the losses. We invested in a fringe high-risk area of a fringe high-risk industry. And I say that as someone who lost a significant amount of money,” one wrote.

Immortal was built with Immutable X’s layer-2 scaling technology. The chess platform said it would still use Web3 tech for “anti-cheat measures and community engagement.”

The so-called “play-to-earn” model has been a popular one for adding crypto rails to gaming but has encountered multiple roadblocks along the way, this instance of cheating being the latest.

Arbitrum experiences downtime after jump in inscriptions

Arbitrum, the largest Ethereum layer-2, suffered a “partial outage” on Friday after “a sustained surge of inscriptions” clogged the sequencer.

The pseudonymous hildobby, who works in data at the venture fund Dragonfly, published a Dune dashboard showing that 90% of Arbitrum’s data was inscriptions in the two hours leading up to the outage. Hildobby’s data showed the mass majority of the inscriptions were labeled “fair.”

For nearly two hours, Arbitrum’s sequencer struggled to process transactions on the network. At one point, the layer-2’s swap fee appeared to spike far above Ethereum’s.

Shortly after 3 pm ET, the Arbitrum team said that the sequencer was back up and running.

Multiple networks have developed some form of inscriptions, a way of encoding arbitrary data such as art or fungible tokens, onto blockchains. Bitcoin ordinal inscriptions have brought congestion in the network’s mempool to near all-time highs.