1. What is Treasure

Treasure DAO (Treasure for short) is a native metaverse gaming ecosystem on Arbitrum that aims to bring games and players together through its ecosystem token MAGIC. Treasure started out as an NFT project on the Loot ecosystem and later became an independent decentralized gaming ecosystem that shares resources, communities, and infrastructure.

The platform integrates applications such as NFT, DeFi and GameFi, aiming to support NFT and Metaverse projects to build their own ecosystems on the platform and achieve integration between projects.

We can understand Treasure from two perspectives. First, TreasureDAO is a decentralized game publishing platform. The Treasure ecosystem provides developers with tools and resources to build, publish, and tokenize Web3.0 games.

Secondly, as the basic economic control layer of other games, other project parties may outsource token management to TreasureDAO for operation.

2. Team Building and Financing

1. Team

The vast majority of Treasure’s team members come directly from the community. Treasure is comprised of a globally distributed team of developers, product managers, artists, brand builders, marketers, economists, and gamers, all supported by a close and vibrant network of DAO contributors and passionate community members.

TreasureDAO establishes a framework through which the community can build alongside the team and be rewarded with MAGIC tokens for developing key parts of the ecosystem. These incentives can contribute to building the broader ecosystem and incentivize other communities to build on the Treasure platform.

According to the official website (https://treasure.lol/team), Treasure's Co-Founders are John Patten and Karel Vuong. John Patten is the co-founder and CEO and was previously the head of growth at Osmosis.

2. Financing

On September 16, 2022, Treasure DAO launched a proposal to sell $3.5 million of its ecosystem token MAGIC. The token sale was led by Digital Strategies Guild, with participation from 1kx, Neon DAO and ID Theory, as well as new participants Arbitrum, Skycatcher Crypto, IOSG, Alchemy Ventures, IndiGG, StreamingFast and other strategic partners.

3. The Origin of TreasureDAO

Let’s review the origin and development of the TreasureDAO project to help us understand the original intention of the TreasureDAO project.

2021.9: Officially launched with the goal of serving the gaming ecosystem and community first

Loot is a project initiated by Don Hoffman in August 2021. It uses a bottom-up construction method to mint NFTs for free. Treasure is one of the projects affected by this construction method. It was initiated by John Patten in September 2021, and its core theme is also community first.

Treasure offered free minting of Genesis NFT Treasure Cards to the community and distributed some to the Loot community, and within a month of launch, Treasure created its first yield protocol, “Magic Farm”.

From the beginning, Treasure has iterated faster than any other Loot project and has set a long-term goal of creating a place with a loyal community that game developers can build on.

John Patten even proposed a new concept, “Proof of Imagination: Joy as a Form of Collateral”, which was a core principle in the early development of the Treasure ecosystem.

2021.11: Transition to Arbitrum and launch of the first NFT marketplace

Treasure started out running on Ethereum Layer 1. A month later, the team realized that if they wanted to influence the gaming community through a unique bottom-up approach, it would not be enough to be on Ethereum Layer 1 alone. So Treasure officially transitioned to Arbitrum in October 2021 and launched the first NFT market on Arbitrum, Treasure Marketplace, in November 2021.

2022.2: First flagship game, Bridgeworld

Bridgeworld is a strategy game centered around mining, farming, summoning, exploration, and more gamified DeFi actions.

Atlas Mine is a staking protocol in Bridgeworld that rewards MAGIC based on quantity, time, and NFT upgrades such as Legions and Treasures. It builds an interconnected economy on top of MAGIC, Legions NFTs, and Treasure NFTs to bootstrap the Treasure ecosystem.

2022.4: Key improvements to bring in external partners instead of relying solely on core contributors

To realize its vision of becoming a decentralized gaming hub, the Treasure team realized that building a finance-centric ecosystem alone was not enough, and began to shift its focus to building physical games and bringing in experienced game developers.

In April 2022, Treasure announced a partnership with Strider, a team of gaming industry veterans to build games in the Treasureverse, and it was at this time that Treasure decided to expand the Treasure system to collaborative projects rather than relying solely on core contributors.

2022.6: Rebranding, the ambitious TreasureDAO

Treasure has identified 3 key layers: the ammunition library (games and materverses projects), the community (Treasure's sub-communities and community connections), and the infrastructure (sharing economy engine, tools and resources to empower builders).

This shows that Treasure has enough confidence to build the first decentralized gaming platform and reshape the next generation of games. Take the Trove market as an example. Previously, Treasure planned to separate the two markets: Trove for the entire Arbitrum NFT transaction denominated in ETH, and Treasureverse, a Treasure market denominated only in MAGIC. But later, the team was more confident that Trove would become the core market on Arbitrum and L2, so they decided to merge the two into one, no longer distinguishing between the Treasure ecosystem and the external ecosystem, and providing an integrated trading experience.

4. Main Products

TreasureDAO's current products mainly include Trove Market, BridgeWorld and MagicSwap, and they have become the infrastructure in the Treasure ecosystem.

1、Trove Marketplace

TroveMarket provides market trading services for NFT assets in various games or metaverse projects within the Treasure ecosystem.

Trove Marketplace was officially launched in June 2022. It evolved from Treasure Marketplace, which was launched in November 2021. The original idea was to provide an NFT trading market for ecological projects on Treasure. It is also the leading NFT trading market on Arbitrum.

To date, the market has seen total transaction volume of over $270 million.

2、BridgeWorld

A game launched by TreasureDAO that focuses on distributing MAGIC tokens.

Bridgeworld is a strategic business, trade, and domination game upgraded from the original blockchain game Legions, and is also the core game launched by the Treasure DAO team.

Bridgeworld integrates a variety of gameplay. Players can purchase legions to complete missions and obtain various NFT rewards during the missions. NFT rewards can be sold in exchange for the native token MAGIC, or they can be synthesized into more complex NFTs for mining.

3、MagicSwap

MagicSwap is a DEX that provides liquidity for game assets within the Treasure ecosystem.

MagicSwap is committed to creating a more balanced and dynamic financial system that provides a frictionless experience for NFT transactions. Using MAGIC as a governance and fee token, the protocol will charge a 0.5% fee on transactions conducted in the MagicSwap pool.

V. Governance

Treasure DAO is a relatively mature decentralized governance organization for NFT projects on the market. Treasure DAO consists of two parts: Forum for project proposal discussions and Snapshot for proposal voting.

Any community member has the right to propose proposals and improvements regarding Treasure governance, and publicly post them on the Forum for at least one day to collect opinions and discussions. After the public notice, the proposals will be voted on in Snapshot.

After reviewing and voting on the proposal, community members holding governance tokens will pass if the proposal receives more than 66% of the votes in favor. The voting rights are related to the number of governance tokens held. The more tokens you hold, the greater your voting weight. Of course, the longer the tokens are staked, the greater your voting weight.

Through decentralized governance, members of the Treasure community jointly decide on important topics such as the retention of the project, the development of the organization, and project updates. It can be said that Treasure DAO is an important example of decentralized governance practice.

6. Token Economy

The total supply of MAGIC tokens is 347,714,007, and the current circulation is 222,275,433, accounting for 63.92% of the total supply of MAGIC tokens.

The distribution plan of MAGIC tokens is as follows:

Treasure Farm：33%；

Mining: 25%;

Staking: 17%;

Ecological construction fund: 15%;

Team: 10% (this portion will be gradually released over 12 years)

MAGIC uses the method of high circulation in the early stage + subsequent output halving every year to release tokens.

As the native token of the Treasure platform, MAGIC has the following main uses:

1) Earn MAGIC by staking;

2) Used to summon legions in Bridgeworld and synthesize NFTs;

3) As the settlement digital currency of TroveMarket;

4) Used in other scenarios in game projects, such as battle pledge currency in BattleFly;

5) Participate in project governance, such as in-game ecological funds or distribution of treasury income.

As the ecosystem continues to develop, the use cases for MAGIC tokens will increase.

7. Operational Data

1. Active users

According to statistics from the dune platform, there are 1,474 active users per week.

From the above chart, we can see that

1) In the first half of 2022, there are relatively many active users. This is because the launch of a series of new products such as BridgeWorld, Smolverse game system and NFT trading platform has gradually put the Treasure ecosystem development on the right track, so there are relatively many active users.

2) November to December 2022 is another peak period for active users, because during this period the pixel-style Free 2 Play action role-playing game The Beacon once again set off a Treasure ecosystem craze. The game mechanism is very simple, mainly completing levels, answering questions, buying and selling props, etc.

3) In January this year, Treasure DAO launched a game creator program supported by Arbitrum. At the same time, due to the expected Arbitrum airdrop, Treasure once again ushered in a small climax of active users on the chain.

Overall, the number of active users in the Treasure ecosystem is currently declining, which is consistent with the overall downward trend of the current GameFi track.

TroveMarket, as the NFT trading service market in Treasure, and the BridgeWorld game ecosystem are core active places for users, with relatively more active users.

Magicswap has relatively few active users.

2. NFT Trading Volume

According to data from the Dune Analytics platform, Trove's current monthly NFT transaction volume on Arbitrum is around 1.08 million MAGIC (worth approximately $800,000 in total), while in January 2022 the transaction volume exceeded 42 million MAGIC, reaching an all-time high. Then the monthly NFT transaction volume continued to decline, and the current (July) monthly transaction volume is only about 2% of the peak. Of course, the decline in NFT transaction volume is mainly affected by the current sluggish NFT market.

As can be seen from the above chart, the Collection with the largest NFT transaction volume is Legions, accounting for 33.8%, followed by Smol Brains, accounting for 21.9%, and Treasures accounting for 11.9%.

Let’s look at the data for the past 90 days.

In the past 90 days, the largest transaction volume was Consumables, reaching 800,000 MAGIC, followed by Treasures, reaching 570,000 MAGIC, and Smol Brains ranked third, reaching 410,000 MAGIC.

3. Social Media

Looking at the performance on social media, as of August 13, 2023, Treasure DAO's official Twitter account has 144,000 followers, and the number of discord members is 32,004.

4. Incubation games

According to statistics from the official website (https://treasure.lol/games), TreasureDAO has currently incubated 11 games, including The Beacon, Tales of Elleria, Kuroro, Knights of the Ether, Realm, etc.

5. MAGIC Token Performance

At present, MAGIC tokens have been listed on Binance, Coinbase, OKX, bitget, Huobi, gate and other exchanges. Mainstream exchanges have basically launched MAGIC tokens. The market value of MAGIC is 130 million US dollars. According to Coinmarketcap, the current market value ranks 168th, and the fully diluted market value is 206 million US dollars.

The historical lowest price of the MAGIC token is 0.1837 USDT, and the historical highest is 6.32 USDT. The current price has fallen 90.6% from the highest point. The current MAGIC price is only more than 3 times the historical lowest price.

8. Conclusion

In short, the reason why TreasureDAO stands out among many GameFi projects is due to its excellent token economic design, community operation and accurate grasp of market demand.

TreasureDAO provides an aggregated gaming platform for Web3 game players, while providing game developers or game publishers with the infrastructure needed to develop games. Ultimately, TreasureDAO becomes a bridge between players and Web3 games.

TreasureDAO already has an active and loyal community, where all parties can play games together, participate in ecosystem governance, stake tokens, etc. TreasureDAO has developed into a decentralized game ecosystem driven by a passionate community of players and builders. Therefore, players are more deeply bound to the TreasureDAO platform. This is also one of the important factors for TreasureDAO's success.

MAGIC tokens serve as the fuel circulating in the TreasureDAO ecosystem, and Treasure is built around giving MAGIC tokens more capabilities.

Each community in the Treasure ecosystem builds its own story around the MAGIC token, connecting the narrative and the economic ecosystem through MAGIC. In this way, MAGIC also acts as a reserve currency connecting the entire Treasure ecosystem.

Of course, TreasureDAO’s daily activity and transaction volume have declined, which is also affected by the sluggish overall crypto market. With the recovery of the crypto market and the influx of more users in the Web3.0 track, TreasureDAO’s advantages will become more and more obvious.

HotairballoonCN will continue to pay attention to the developments of Treasure and share them with everyone in a timely manner. Everyone is welcome to follow.