Recently, amidst a low market heat, Fantasy.Top on the Ethereum Layer 2 network Blast has driven a surge in trading volume and become one of the most profitable protocols or applications in the entire cryptocurrency field. On May 8th, according to The Block's report, Fantasy.Top ranked sixth among cryptocurrency protocols based on fees and generated revenue. According to the cryptocurrency data analysis platform Parsec's statistics, Fantasy.Top has consistently topped the Blast by Gas trend contract list since its launch. As of May 9th, it had minted 60,000 card packs (300,000 cards), with 224,000 cards traded on the secondary market. The treasury has received $10 million, and the initial distribution has yielded nearly 800,000 BlastGold, with a total of 292,000 distributed to players.
Fantasy.Top: A Card Game Combining SocialFi and Fantasy Sports
Fantasy.Top is a SocialFi collectible card game (TCG) launched on the Blast mainnet on May 1st by the creator known as Travis Bickle. The project initially attracted attention from the crypto community, becoming one of the 47 winning projects in the Blast-launched BIG BANG competition. Blast referred to Fantasy.Top as "a combination of fantasy games and SocialFi, collecting cards of crypto Twitter influencers and rewarding them based on their weekly performance on X."
Similar to the gameplay of the Ethereum fantasy football game Sorare, players need to collect influencer cards through pack openings or market purchases, requiring a minimum of 5 cards to form a match lineup. By creating their fantasy lineup in tournaments, players will earn points and rewards based on the social engagement of their selected "heroes" on the X platform. Each card pack contains 5 cards, priced dynamically based on demand, with a price of approximately 0.4 ETH, or around $1200, as of May 10th.
Based on the Crypto Twitter community, the game features over 100 unique "hero" cards, all based on well-known traders, investors, analysts, and content creators within the crypto industry, including Blast founder Pacman, trader Ansem, "Big Brother Ma Ji" Huang Licheng, and Su Zhu, co-founder of Three Arrows Capital.
Hero cards are categorized as common, rare, epic, and legendary, with a leveling mechanism allowing the fusion and upgrade of 5 identical cards. Each card has three scoring indicators, with stars representing their potential score based on last week's performance, and the two numbers below representing their scores based on various Twitter-related metrics over the past 7 days and their current ranking from left to right. These reference indicators help players make decisions when arranging their lineups.
According to analyst Hildobby's Flipside Crypto dashboard, Fantasy.Top's NFT trading volume exceeded 7,000 ETH in the first week of this month, with a total of over 31,000 users. As Fantasy.Top's popularity rises, card prices have also surged. On May 6th, a Pacman Blur card was sold for 18.9 ETH. The seller accidentally upgraded the card from rare to legendary when upgrading it, with a cost of only 2.6 ETH, resulting in a profit of 16.3 ETH. The project, with its soaring income, has also provided a generous prize pool for the first "main competition," including over $150,000 worth of Ethereum (50 ETH), airdropped distribution of 222,222 BlastGold, as well as card packs and other in-game rewards.
Alternative Monetization of KOL Content
Fantasy.Top aims to become the ultimate financial infrastructure for online creators to monetize their content on a large scale. This is similar to friend.tech, which also targets KOLs and monetizes their influence. However, the advantage of Fantasy.Top's reward mechanism lies in its complete reliance on the traditional social media space of TwitterCrypto, where influencers or creators do not need to create additional content on different platforms, but only need to interact on the X platform, continuing to do what they have been doing for years.
It is worth noting that on the evening of May 10th, another recently popular Web3 social platform, Friend.Tech, announced that all Fantasy.Top users share a total of $3 million worth of BlastGold, while their individual users have already earned $2 million worth of ETH, using a different approach. Subsequently, Fantasy.Top founder Travis Bickle retweeted and replied, "We need to work harder." Currently, Friend.Tech has deleted this tweet.
As the main characters of the game, these "heroes" earn a 1.5% fee from the trading of their cards, and 10% of all card pack sales revenue is distributed to them. In the first week alone, all heroes collectively received 409 ETH, approximately $1.25 million in bonuses, with 300 ETH from card pack set sales and 109 ETH from the card trading market. On average, each hero also received an additional 7,500 FAN points, which may be used for future airdrops.
In the first week, the highest-earning content creator, Jenn Duong, received 6.7 ETH, approximately $20,500 in rewards, and is also a problematic "hero." Last weekend, Duong noticed unusually high engagement on one of her Twitter videos and voluntarily set her Twitter account to private. She expressed concern that users were "manipulating" her content or artificially increasing engagement, fearing potential issues for her game.
Due to the presence of automated bots, the total social media engagement of many "heroes" has been manipulated and artificially inflated. Therefore, on May 9th, Fantasy.Top prematurely ended the "main competition" and will address such issues by applying anti-bot systems to better identify bot-driven interactions, distinguish replies and main tweets, and reduce differences between heroes.
How Long Can Viral Spread Last?
In the recent market downturn, the sudden rise of Fantasy.Top undoubtedly demonstrates significant growth potential and momentum. From the core game design perspective, its user profile mainly consists of native Twitter crypto community members. While many crypto-related projects are calling for mass adoption, Fantasy.Top has focused entirely on the crypto community's territory and cleverly leveraged the industry influence of crypto KOLs.
However, in addition to the need for the project to eliminate malicious bot disruptions, long-term observation is required to determine whether it can establish a fair competition system. The combination of crypto Twitter influencers and NFT games, along with its winner-takes-all design mechanism, has also raised concerns within the community that the project may be just a short-term hype. Some players have indicated that upon discovering Fantasy.Top as a whale game, they sold their cards and left the game. After the free and discounted pack promotions ended, the high card pack prices also deterred ordinary players, leading to a significant decrease in card minting. Additionally, many players have provided feedback that they have inexplicably gained or lost cards in the game, suggesting potential frontend issues.
In conclusion, the viral spread of Fantasy.Top has only just begun, and this newcomer in the crypto world still has many issues to address. Will it continue to thrive or return to calm after the excitement? PANews will continue to monitor its future developments.
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