My Neighbor Alice has spent 2026 fighting a familiar battle for veteran play-to-earn projects — keeping a community engaged while the token grinds through one of its weakest stretches since launch. ALICE is currently trading around $0.126, with the token having hit an all-time low of $0.09776 on February 24, 2026. The Fear & Greed Index for the asset is sitting at 22, deep in Extreme Fear territory, reflecting a market that has largely moved on to newer narratives.

Against that backdrop, the team’s strategy has been consistent: keep players inside the ecosystem through structured rewards rather than waiting for price action to do the work of retention.

A New Year Built Around Engagement, Not Speculation

The team opened 2026 with a New Year’s Airdrop, launching a new wave of quests and activities on February 5 with a prize pool of 100,000 ALICE for active players and community members. The framing mattered as much as the mechanics. Rather than a one-off giveaway, the campaign was positioned as a broader engagement push blending gameplay, quests, and community participation — explicitly designed to reward existing players who stayed active through quieter development periods, while also serving as a soft re-entry point for players who had drifted away.

That distinction is worth sitting with. Distributing ALICE through gameplay rather than pure speculation reinforces the token’s role as a utility asset tied to the game’s economy — aligning with the project’s original vision of weaving ownership, creativity, and progression into a single player-driven economy.

The momentum continued through February. Game Night #2, held on February 27, featured a main prize pool of $2,500 in ALICE alongside a Golden Collection item raffled to a top-50 finisher, with entrants required to hold at least four flute charges to fully participate. These recurring community events have become a structural part of how the project sustains daily engagement between larger content updates.

Where the Token Stands Technically

The price chart tells a story of steady erosion rather than dramatic collapse. ALICE moved from around $0.143 in early March down to roughly $0.114 by mid-March, with daily trading volumes ranging from roughly $10 million to over $200 million during sharper moves. The token’s current circulating supply sits at 100.3 million ALICE, with a yearly supply inflation rate of 476.43% — meaning roughly 82.9 million tokens were created over the past year, a meaningful overhang for a token already trading near its floor.

That inflation rate is the figure most worth flagging for anyone evaluating ALICE today. A token can run consistent community campaigns and still struggle to appreciate if new supply is entering circulation faster than demand can absorb it — and that dynamic has clearly been a headwind through the token’s slide to its February low.

The Bigger Picture for a Veteran Web3 Game

My Neighbor Alice remains one of the more established names in blockchain gaming, built on Chromia’s relational, gasless architecture that stores player progress and world state fully on-chain rather than relying on traditional backend servers. That technical foundation hasn’t changed, and the team’s commitment to regular content cadence — quests, game nights, leaderboard resets — suggests a project still actively maintained rather than coasting on legacy reputation.

What ALICE needs now is less about new announcements and more about whether sustained player engagement eventually shows up as demand strong enough to offset ongoing token issuance. The community infrastructure is clearly in place. Translating that into price recovery is the harder problem the team hasn’t yet solved.

Axie Infinity has reached a genuine inflection point. On June 17, 2026, Sky Mavis permanently shut down Homeland, the game’s original land gameplay mode, and replaced it with Terrariums V1 — the first playable land experience that lets axies actually explore biomes rather than sit on static plots. It’s a vision the team first outlined back in 2019: a world where land genuinely lived and grew around a player’s collection rather than functioning as a passive yield mechanism.

AXS is trading around $1.02, up 3.3% on the day of the launch — a modest move for a token that once traded above $164 in November 2021 and now sits roughly 99% below that peak. The muted price reaction reflects a market that’s seen plenty of “this update changes everything” moments from GameFi projects before. What makes Terrariums different is the context it’s launching into.

What Actually Changed

Terrariums launches with empty plots. Activating land puts it into a resting mode, where it recharges Local Lunium over roughly five days — a deliberate pacing mechanic rather than instant, frictionless yield. Players without owned land can still explore by claiming a free plot, which comes with 10 axie slots but no earnings and no AXP — letting newcomers experience the system before committing capital.

The shift mechanically expands Axie Infinity beyond pure battle gameplay into land-based exploration, increasing potential utility and engagement for both land NFTs and axies themselves. For a game whose original economy collapsed under the weight of unsustainable SLP emissions, that diversification away from a single reward loop matters.

The Tokenomics Lesson Sky Mavis Is Trying to Apply

As of early 2026, SLP emissions have been completely removed from the Origins game mode to combat the hyperinflation that plagued the original play-to-earn model. Rewards are now distributed primarily through bonded AXS, known as bAXS, based on competitive leaderboard rankings and what the team calls “Risk-to-Earn” mechanics. Converting bAXS back into liquid, tradable AXS requires a treasury fee that decreases as a player’s in-game “Axie Score” increases — directly tying liquidity access to sustained engagement rather than allowing instant cash-out.

That’s a meaningfully different design philosophy from the original Axie economy, which was eventually undone by players extracting value faster than the system could sustain. Historical data shows announcements like the bAXS shift have already driven rallies, with AXS surging over 270% year-to-date following the news — though sustained price support still depends on whether players actually adopt the new mechanics rather than treating them as a temporary novelty.

Axie Classic, the original V2 client, will be officially shut down after June 24, 2026, concentrating liquidity and attention fully into the modernized Origins game engine. Consolidating the player base into one client, rather than splitting development resources across legacy and current versions, is a sensible move for a team trying to do more with focused effort.

What’s Still Ahead

Sky Mavis is also developing Atia’s Legacy, an ambitious MMO planned for 2026 and beyond that aims to integrate the broader Axie lore, assets, and a deeper gaming experience as a flagship title within the universe. A second playtest was announced in April 2026. If executed well, a genuinely AAA-quality MMO could meaningfully expand the addressable player base beyond the existing crypto-native audience — though the long development timeline carries real execution risk.

AXS has shown resilience above the $1.00 mark through 2026, with volume profiles suggesting a shift from retail panic selling toward more measured institutional-style accumulation at these levels. Whether that floor holds will depend heavily on how players respond to Terrariums in the coming weeks — genuine engagement metrics, not just the initial launch-day price reaction, will tell the real story.

Axie Infinity has been here before — hyped update, brief price pop, faded enthusiasm. The difference this time is that the team is explicitly building around the lessons of its own collapse rather than chasing a new feature for its own sake. Whether that’s enough to reverse years of retention decline is the question the next few months will answer.

For a few tense days, Zcash faced the kind of uncertainty that rattles even seasoned crypto holders. A serious vulnerability had been uncovered in its privacy infrastructure, triggering an emergency response from developers and raising uncomfortable questions about the protocol’s integrity. The mood has since shifted considerably — and for good reason.

An audit requested by Shielded Labs and conducted by Claude Mythos, Anthropic’s AI model specialized in identifying complex software vulnerabilities, found no additional major flaws in the Zcash protocol. For a privacy-focused network where trust is the entire value proposition, that outcome matters enormously.

How the Vulnerability Was Found

The story starts with independent researcher Taylor Hornby, who — with the assistance of Claude Opus 4.8 — identified a critical flaw in Zcash’s Orchard private pool. The vulnerability had been sitting dormant for roughly four years before being discovered. Its potential consequences were severe: if exploited, it could have allowed an attacker to mint an unlimited quantity of counterfeit ZEC within the Orchard pool, entirely undetected.

Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox didn’t downplay the severity. He confirmed publicly that the flaw represented a genuine threat to the protocol’s monetary integrity, while also noting — critically — that no exploitation had been detected on the main network. No ZEC was illegally created, and user privacy remained intact throughout. Developers moved quickly, temporarily suspending Orchard transactions before deploying a corrective patch.

The AI Audit That Followed

Once the patch was applied, Shielded Labs commissioned a comprehensive follow-up audit — less emergency surgery, more thorough post-operative review. Claude Mythos was the tool of choice. The result: no other serious vulnerabilities identified in the Zcash protocol.

Wilcox acknowledged Anthropic’s contribution publicly, thanking the team for its role in protecting network security. He also confirmed that security reinforcement work was continuing methodically, without any rushed decisions that might introduce new risks.

The scope of what Mythos is capable of is itself worth noting. Anthropic has indicated the model has identified more than 10,000 critical vulnerabilities across software considered strategically important to global digital infrastructure — a number that speaks to both the power of AI-assisted code review and the sheer scale of vulnerabilities quietly embedded in widely used systems.

The Double-Edged Sword AI Represents for Crypto Security

The Zcash episode arrives in the middle of a much larger conversation about what AI means for cybersecurity in crypto. The same capabilities that allowed Claude Opus 4.8 to help discover this flaw — and Claude Mythos to verify the protocol afterward — are equally available to malicious actors looking to find exploitable weaknesses before defenders do.

Mitchell Amador, CEO of Immunefi, has described the proliferation of advanced AI models as shifting the cybersecurity playing field toward attackers, warning of a “vulnerability apocalypse” that is driving a resurgence of DeFi hacks. The data gives that warning real weight. According to DefiLlama, crypto hacks reached $634 million in April alone — the worst single month recorded since the Bybit attack in February 2025.

For Zcash specifically, the outcome of this audit is a meaningful positive. The vulnerability was found, patched, and independently verified before any damage occurred. That’s the best-case scenario for a privacy protocol facing this kind of discovery. Whether the broader industry can keep pace with AI-assisted attackers using the same tools in the opposite direction is a question that has no clean answer yet.