Original article: "From the Loot imitation market running wild and successfully running away, TreasureDAO's MLP strategy may be the right evolution direction for blockchain games"
Author: Beichen
Treasure DAO is a phenomenal project in the field of blockchain games. When we examine it directly, we will inevitably be distracted by its rich and even complex ecosystem - what exactly is TreasureDAO?
Chain Teahouse has sorted out the iteration path of TreasureDAO according to the timeline. We can clearly see "where it comes from" and "where it is going", so as to have a more accurate judgment on "who it is".
Getting Started: Loot Copycat
It all starts with Loot, which came out of nowhere in August 2021.
Loot is a series of 8,000 NFTs, which are TXT files consisting of 8 phrases. Each phrase is equivalent to a randomly generated attribute (such as weapons, chest armor, head armor, necklaces, rings, etc.) with different rarities.
This NFT project, which only has 8 lines of text and even no front-end interface, made people feel mysterious and powerful. A few hours after its release, a community of holders appeared, and the price quickly soared from free mint to a floor price of 20 ETH. This incomprehensible but exciting emotion did not reappear until XEN in October 2022.
Loot holders are free to interpret and use them in any way, which completely subverts everyone's imagination of NFT, games and even the metaverse. It can be said that it has opened up a new paradigm for constructing the metaverse from the bottom up.
A series of derivative projects have emerged based on Loot. Some of them visualize the text of Loot, some generate new Loot NFTs starting from 8001, and some borrow the ideas of Loot but start from scratch to create a new set of phrases as NFTs. Treasure is based on this idea.
As a derivative project of Loot, Treasure's NFT also follows the style of Gothic mystery and darkness, but the phrases are historical and legendary currencies such as gold coins, silver pennies, emeralds, pearls, shells, and dragon tails.
Treasure has a total of 10,000 NFTs, the first 90% are free mint, the remaining 7.5% are airdropped to Loot, xLoot, The N Project and AGLD communities (in short, all are Loot ecosystems), and 2.5% are controlled by the team.
At this point, Treasure is no different from other Loot clones, except that Loot is original and clones cannot be operated no matter how hard they try (the current floor price is only 0.049 ETH).
Treasure officials also seem to be trying hard to distance themselves from the history of Treasure NFT - the early project Twitter has been deregistered, and the official website does not mention Treasure NFT. Now everything is operated as TreasureDAO.
A roundabout way to save the country: blockchain games + DeFi
Copycat projects are doomed to fail, but the reason why Treasure has come this far is that after issuing NFT, the team immediately issued MAGIC tokens with a total of 350 million. The mining incentives are halved every year, and a DeFi project was tailored for MAGIC - MAGIC Farm.
This logic is a bit jumpy, please be patient and understand...
MAGIC Farm is easy to understand. Users deposit Treasure NFTs, Loot NFTs, and AGLD tokens, and then earn MAGIC tokens. But what are MAGIC tokens?
In order to empower Treasure's NFT series, the Treasure team announced that it would develop a blockchain game Legions, which is to re-launch a PFP series and make it into a PFP vs PFP game (the gameplay can be referred to Tiny World), and MAGIC is the game token that can be used to make tools and upgrade props.
From Treasure NFTs to Legions
But how does the blockchain game Legions empower Treasure’s NFT series? As mentioned earlier, depositing Treasure’s NFTs into MAGIC Farm can earn MAGIC tokens, thus indirectly increasing the value of Treasure’s NFTs…
The reaction arc of this roundabout way of saving the country is too complicated, and its success or failure depends on whether the blockchain game Legions can explode. Judging from the current situation that Treasure's NFT has basically failed, the original intention of saving the country by roundabout way has completely failed, but it accidentally opened up a new base - the MAGIC ecosystem.
Abandoning the original intention: MAGIC becomes the core
Less than a month after the launch of MAGIC Farm, the Treasure team has fully felt the potential of MAGIC - more than 40% of The N Project and 10% of Loot are locked in MAGIC Farm, and 60% of the produced MAGIC is reinvested in MAGIC Farm.
Since the market's interest in MAGIC tokens is far greater than Treasure's NFTs, let's simply abandon MAGIC's original intention of empowering the Treasure NFT series, which is a Loot copycat. From now on, everything will revolve around empowering MAGIC.
On October 6, MAGIC Farm migrated from Ethereum to Arbitrum, and the Treasure team specially launched an incentive plan - for every 10,000 MAGIC pledged and 1 Treasure NFT owned, one ordinary legion will be obtained, and for every 100 ordinary legions, a special category of legion (assassin, warrior, siege, caster, and ranged) will be airdropped.
At this time, the Treasure community has begun to take shape. Not only do community members donate money, but there are also developers, designers, etc. who come spontaneously as community volunteers to assist the team in carrying out tasks.
Note that the value of MAGIC lies in the fact that it is the platform currency of the blockchain game Legions, but there is no shadow at this time.
Empowerment Failure: Life NFT
It is impossible to develop the blockchain game Legions in one month, which means that MAGIC is still a virtual currency at this time. Since Treasure wants to empower MAGIC, it must give new expectations.
The Treasure team and Jumpman jointly launched another blockchain game, Life NFT, which is a simplified version of "The Sims". The way to empower MAGIC is that users can only keep their virtual characters alive by staking MAGIC, otherwise they will die directly after 48 hours.
But Life NFT later came to nothing, and Jumpman developed another NFT data analysis platform, Origins NFT, and Mirana Ventures led the $4 million seed round.
The blockchain game Legions was not officially launched until May 2022 and was placed in a larger narrative - Bridgeworld.
Separate central authority: Treasure DAO
MAGIC is still being released. Although the Treasure ecosystem has nothing, it has the most valuable thing - community consensus, especially the consensus on the expected price of MAGIC.
The Treasure team officially launched Treasure DAO in November, not only handing over the team's power to this DAO (MAGIC distribution plan, which projects to incubate within the ecosystem, etc.), but also designating the DAO as the sole recipient of MAGIC incentives. The DAO is managed by staked MAGIC holders through voting.
From then on, Treasure was officially built around empowering MAGIC, which was something the team had not expected when they launched the Loot clone.
But then again, the narrative of Treasure DAO is not new. At that time, almost all blockchain game platforms had the same narrative template - issuing platform coins, and then continuously creating blockchain games (created by the team themselves in the early days and directly opened to the public in the later days). Users need to consume platform coins to play these blockchain games, and eventually form a huge blockchain game ecosystem.
But so far, only Treasure DAO has succeeded.
It’s not just because Treasure DAO later continued to launch successful mini-games, because to be honest, that series of mini-games could always find earlier launched and better competitors (in terms of the product itself), so what’s more important is that its community operation is very good, so only Treasure DAO took off.
Fission: Building an ecosystem on top of an ecosystem
After the establishment of Treasure DAO, it officially started its narrative as a blockchain game platform in 2022 - continuously creating blockchain games and absorbing external blockchain games or other projects. These scenarios require the consumption of platform currency MAGIC, and ultimately form an ecosystem with MAGIC as the core, or a decentralized Nintendo.
The previously mentioned blockchain version of “The Sims” Life NFT is the product of this idea, but it was launched before the establishment of Treasure DAO.
After Treasure DAO was established, it continued to launch independent small projects to increase the usage scenarios of MAGIC.
The first step is to upgrade the originally planned blockchain game Legions to Bridgeworld. Legions is to Bridgeworld what Tiny Kingdom is to Tiny World. In other words, Bridgeworld is not just a single game in the MAGIC ecosystem, but an ecosystem that can continue to expand.
Secondly, another ecosystem, Smolverse, was launched, which contains a series of NFT mini-games such as Smol Bodies, Smol Cars, Smol Brains, etc. For example, Smol Brains is a monkey NFT, but their IQ will continue to grow with staking, thereby unlocking more tasks.
In addition, in addition to games, NFT trading platforms Trove and Smolville were also launched to compete with OpenSea.
In addition to launching its own mini-games, it also actively expands external blockchain games into the MAGIC ecosystem. For example, it cooperates with the Strider team to establish a 3A-level NFT and blockchain game studio.
Treasure DAO is still launching new blockchain games. There is no need to elaborate on the subsequent stories. In short, it continues to attract external users and funds into the MAGIC ecosystem like a snowball, or at least maintains the players who have already entered the ecosystem to settle down instead of being lost in the bear market.
Summary: Community Culture + MLP Strategy
We can now summarize Treasure DAO’s path to success.
To be honest, their games and other products are not very outstanding in terms of product strength (compared to competitors), but Treasure DAO was successful, while competitors performed far worse than it. I think there are two key factors.
First of all, it has a natural community culture.
Treasure DAO started as a copycat of Loot. This experimental project quickly gathered the consensus of those who dared to try new things in the crypto industry (mainly attention and funds). As a copycat, Treasure took advantage of the situation to attract traffic within the core community by incentivizing air coins, thereby accumulating this part of core users to become early contributors.
This kind of community culture is close to metaphysics, but it really exists. Only members within the community can keenly capture emotions and come up with solutions that can resonate with people (whether they are reliable or not is another matter).
However, investors and entrepreneurs seem to prefer the path that successful outsiders, after seeing the potential of the emerging community, feel that this system is very rudimentary, and try to become the dominant force. Therefore, we can see that there are many 3A blockbusters invested in blockchain games. I guess they are likely to come in with arrogance, and will eventually fail because they cannot touch the real community culture of blockchain games.
It is worth mentioning that the founding team of Treasure DAO includes Osmosis’s growth director and token economics/growth strategist, who can be said to be crypto Ponzi scheme experts. Therefore, when it first started, it did not rely on the power of capital, but took off with only a small amount of self-raised funds.
The second is a clear MLP strategy.
MLP stands for Minimum Lovable Product, which can be understood as the minimum lovable product. This strategy, when applied to the blockchain game field, means continuously launching small games that are "somewhat playable but not much", constantly attracting new users and funds. Treasure DAO has achieved the pace of releasing at least one blockchain game every month (in fact, far more than that).
On the other hand, those who come from outside and think that blockchain games are very simple often try to sell a fantastic product story (especially 3A masterpieces). The cost is that it takes a long time to come out, so they need long-term capital transfusions.
Even developers who are native to blockchain games tend to launch their own products, which limits the pace of releases. Treasure DAO, on the other hand, chooses to work directly with external parties while conducting its own research, thus completing the cycle of economic value accumulation.
