The value of Atari’s new token plummeted shortly after trading began, leaving investors with almost nothing in their hands.

Atari Token (ATRI), the first digital currency adventure of the legendary video game developer Atari Interactive, closed its first 36 hours of trading with a drop of almost 70%. The current price is well below the retail price and even lower than the discounted price offered in pre-sale rounds.

The sale of the token, which was held on the Bitcoin.com exchange and concluded two days before the start of trading, would have been hampered by several setbacks. Among these were problems with order processing, failed to credit funds and delays in withdrawals of up to 16 hours. Atari Token’s team has not yet commented on these difficulties and their usually very active Twitter account has been relatively quiet in recent days.

By the time the public sale participants were finally able to access their tokens on 2 November at around 15.00 UTC, the price of the ATRI had already plummeted to $0.04 – an 84% reduction on the public sale’s purchase price of $0.25.

The tokens had also been sold at a discounted rate in three pre-sale rounds, at $0.08 per token in the first two rounds and at $0.16 in the third. On all these three occasions, sales reached the hard cap previously set at $1 million per round.

Although initially launched on the Bitcoin.com exchange, ATRI trading moved almost immediately to Uniswap, which now hosts the most traded token pair: ATRI/WETH.

Atari Token’s mission is to „bring decentralization and universality to the video game and interactive entertainment industry“: ATRI should be used as a token utility on more video games.

The token concept was introduced by Atari in June this year. On 2 November, Atari announced that the online multiplayer game Karma the Game of Destiny will use ATRI as in-game currency for purchases and transactions.

In addition to the token utilities, Atari also plans to launch a line of collectible NFT on the WAX blockchain. The first series to hit the market will also feature illustrations of Atari’s original console games, with the addition of 3D graphics and motion elements.