Recently, there's talk that Binance may have assisted a big trader in making money from play-to-earn crypto. One of these special traders is known as DWF, who got special treatment from Binance. DWF supposedly talked about boosting the trading volume of a token by three times using a fake, "believable" trading pattern.

Investigators believe that DWF manipulated the price of YGG and at least six other tokens on Binance by doing wash trades worth over $300 million last year.

Not too long ago, venture capitalists at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) told a story about play-to-earn crypto. They imagined a future where Web 3 and the metaverse would create a thriving industry for online work. They thought that through crypto games, people could lift themselves out of poverty.

In this future, rich folks from the West would want in-game items worth billions, paying low-income workers to earn them in-game. This was supposed to become so common that rich players would make play-to-earn guilds, managing their assets with blockchain technology.

A16z invested millions into Axie Infinity's game studio, hoping to make money from this future. They also put millions into an Axie Infinity play-to-earn guild, Yield Guild Games (YGG), thinking it would give economic opportunities in emerging markets.

But today, the prices of AXS, SLP, Axie NFTs, and YGG have dropped a lot. DWF is said to have made millions by selling YGG tokens when they were high, according to the Wall Street Journal's look into it.

It seems that the real story of play-to-earn crypto is the profit made by selling a dream of the future that didn't happen.