Original author: Zen
Source: PANews
Recently, at a time when the market is in a downturn, Fantasy.Top on Ethereum's layer 2 network, Blast, has fueled a spike in trading volume and has become one of the most profitable protocols or applications in the entire cryptocurrency space. On May 8, The Block reported that Fantasy.top became the sixth-ranked cryptocurrency protocol by fees and revenue generated; As of May 9, 60,000 card packs (300,000 cards) have been minted, 224,000 cards have been traded in the secondary market, $10 million has been deposited into the treasury, and nearly 800,000 BlastGold has been allocated for the first time, of which 292,000 have been distributed to players, according to Par Fantasy.Top sec, a crypto on-chain data analysis platform, and nearly 800,000 BlastGold have been distributed to players for the first time.
Fantasy.Top: A card game that combines SocialFi with fantasy sports
Fantasy.Top is a SocialFi trading card game (TCG) that was launched on May 1st on the Blast mainnet by the creators who went by the pseudonym Travis Bickle. The project initially attracted the attention of the crypto community as one of the 47 winning projects in the BIG BANG contest launched by Blast. In its announcement, Blast referred to Fantasy.Top as "combining fantasy games and SocialFi to collect cards from crypto Twitter influencers and earn rewards based on their weekly performance on X." ”
Similar to the Ethereum fantasy soccer game Sorare, players need to open packs or buy them in the market to collect influencer cards, and at least 5 cards are required to assemble the match lineup. By creating their own fantasy lineup in a tournament, players will ultimately determine the scores of the selected "heroes" based on their social engagement on platform X for points and rewards. Each pack has 5 cards, which are dynamically priced according to demand, and as of May 10, their price is about 0.4 ETH, or about $1,200.
Based on the Crypto Twitter community, more than 100 unique "Hero" cards in the game are based on well-known traders, investors, analysts, and content creators in the crypto industry, including Blast founder Pacman, trader Ansem, "Big Brother Maji" Huang Licheng, and Su Zhu, co-founder of Three Arrows Capital.
Hero cards have four categories: Common, Rare, Epic, and Legendary, and have a level mechanic, such as owning the same 5 cards, you can also fuse them to upgrade. In addition, each card has three scoring indicators, with stars representing their scoring potential based on last week's performance, and the two numbers below, from left to right, representing the hero's score and current position over the past 7 days based on various Twitter-related metrics. These metrics help players make decisions about how to place their lineup.
According to analyst Hildobby's Flipside Crypto dashboard, the Fantasy.Top NFT trading volume exceeded 7,000 ETH in the first week of the month, with a total of more than 31,000 users. As the popularity of Fantasy.Top climbs, so does the price of cards. On May 6, a Pacman Blur card was sold for 18.9 ETH. When the seller upgraded the card from rare to epic level, he accidentally upgraded directly to the highest legendary level, which cost only 2.6 ETH and made a profit of 16.3 ETH. The project side that has skyrocketed in revenue also offers a generous prize pool for the inaugural "Main Competition", including more than $150,000 worth of Ethereum (50 ETH), an airdrop distribution of 222,222 Blast Gold, as well as card packs and other in-game rewards.
Alternative monetization of KOL-created content
The goal is to be the ultimate financial infrastructure for online creators to monetize their content at scale, Fantasy.Top said. This is similar to friend.tech that also target KOLs and make them monetize their influence. However, the advantage of the Fantasy.Top reward mechanism is that it relies entirely on TwitterCrypto's traditional social media space, and influencers or creators don't need to create additional content on different platforms, but only interact on platform X and continue to do what they have been doing for years.
It is worth mentioning that on the evening of May 10, another recently popular Web3 social platform tweeted Friend.Tech official X account, saying that all Fantasy.Top users shared $3 million worth of Blast Gold on paper, and their single user had earned $2 million worth of ETH, which was built in a different way. Founder Travis Bickle then retweeted and replied Fantasy.Top, "We need to work harder. "At the moment, Friend.Tech has deleted this tweet.
As the main characters of the game, these "heroes" earn 1.5% of the fees from the trading of their cards, and 10% of the sales revenue of all card packs will also be distributed to them. In the first week of opening, all heroes received a total of 409 ETH, equivalent to about $1.25 million in prize money, of which 300 ETH came from card pack sales, 109 ETH from card trading markets, and an average of 7,500 FAN points per hero were added, which may be used for airdrops in the future.
In the first week, the highest-paid content creator, Jenn Duong, was rewarded with 6.7 ETH, or about $20,500, and is also a problematic "hero". Over the weekend, Duong consciously made her Twitter account private for the time being after noticing an unusually high level of engagement on one of her Twitter videos. She said users are "manipulating" her content, or artificially inflating engagement, which she worries could cause potential problems for her game.
Due to the presence of automated bots, the total number of social media content engagements of many "heroes" is manipulated and abnormally inflated. As a result, Fantasy.Top ended the "Main Contest" event early on May 9 and will address such issues by applying anti-bot systems to better identify bot-driven interactions, distinguish between replies and main tweets, and reduce differences between heroes.
How long does virality last?
In the recent sharp cooling of the market, the sudden emergence of Fantasy.Top undoubtedly shows full growth potential and momentum. From the perspective of the core design of the game, its user portraits are mainly indigenous to Twitter's crypto community. While crypto-related projects are shouting slogans aimed at mass adoption, Fantasy.Top is focusing entirely on the one-third of an acre in the crypto circle, and cleverly leverages the influence of crypto KOLs in the industry.
However, in addition to the need for the project team to eliminate malicious interference by robots, it remains to be observed whether it can establish a fair competition system. The combination of crypto Twitter influencers and NFT games, as well as its winner-takes-all design mechanics, has also raised concerns in the community that the project may be just a short-term hype. Some players said that after finding out that the Fantasy.Top was a whale game, they sold their cards and quit the game, and after the free and discounted package events launched by the Fantasy.Top, the high price of the card packs also discouraged civilian players, and the minting volume of the game was greatly reduced. In addition, there are many players who report that they will inexplicably get or lose cards in the game, and it is suspected that there is a problem with the front end of the game.
In short, the virality of Fantasy.Top has only just begun, and the crypto upstart still has a lot of problems to solve. Will it be a carnival to the end, or will it calm down after the hustle and bustle, and what will the future hold? PANews will also continue to pay attention.