Recently, Fantasy.Top on Ethereum's second-layer network Blast has driven a surge in trading volume and has become one of the most profitable protocols or applications in the entire cryptocurrency field, amid a sluggish market. On May 8, The Block reported that Fantasy.top became the sixth-ranked cryptocurrency protocol in terms of fees and revenue generated; according to Parsec, an encrypted chain data analysis platform, Fantasy.Top has always topped the Blast by Gas trending contract list since its launch. As of May 9, 60,000 card packs (300,000 cards) have been minted, and 224,000 cards are traded in the secondary market; the treasury has received $10 million, and nearly 800,000 BlastGolds were obtained in the first distribution, of which 292,000 were distributed to players.
Fantasy.Top: A card game that combines SocialFi with fantasy sports
Fantasy.Top is a SocialFi trading card game (TCG) launched on the Blast mainnet on May 1 by a creator who goes by the pseudonym Travis Bickle. The project first attracted the attention of the crypto community when it became one of the 47 winning projects in the BIG BANG competition launched by Blast. In its announcement, Blast described Fantasy.Top as "a combination of fantasy gaming and SocialFi, collecting cards of crypto Twitter influencers and getting rewarded based on their performance on X each week."
Similar to the gameplay of the Ethereum fantasy football game Sorare, players need to collect influencer cards by opening packs or purchasing them on the market, and at least 5 cards are required to complete the game lineup. By creating their own fantasy lineup in the tournament, players will finally determine the scores of these "heroes" based on the social engagement of the selected "heroes" on the X platform to obtain points and rewards. Each set of card packs has 5 cards, and the price is dynamically determined according to demand. As of May 10, its price is about 0.4 ETH, about $1,200.
Based on the Crypto Twitter community, the game’s more than one hundred unique “hero” cards are based on well-known traders, investors, analysts and content creators in the crypto industry, including Blast founder Pacman, trader Ansem, “Big Brother” Huang Licheng, and Three Arrows Capital co-founder Su Zhu.
Hero cards are divided into four categories: common, rare, epic, and legendary, and have a level mechanism. For example, if you have 5 identical cards, you can fuse them to upgrade. In addition, each card has three scoring indicators. The stars represent their scoring potential based on last week's performance, and the two numbers below represent the scores and current rankings of the "hero" based on various Twitter-related indicators in the past 7 days from left to right. These reference indicators can help players make decisions on arranging 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 number of users exceeding 31,000. As Fantasy.Top's popularity rises, the price of cards has also risen. On May 6, a Pacman Blur card was sold for 18.9ETH. When the seller upgraded the card from rare to epic level, he accidentally upgraded it directly to the highest legendary level, which cost only 2.6ETH and made a profit of 16.3ETH. The project party with a surge in revenue also provided a generous prize pool for the first "Main Competition", including Ethereum (50 ETH) worth more than $150,000, an airdrop distribution of 222,222 Blast Gold, as well as card packs and other in-game rewards.
Alternative monetization of KOL-generated content
Fantasy.Top claims that its goal is 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 enables them to monetize their influence. However, the advantage of Fantasy.Top's reward mechanism is that it completely relies on the traditional social media space of TwitterCrypto. Influencers or creators do not need to create content on different platforms, but only need to interact on platform X and continue to do what they have been doing for many years.
It is worth mentioning that on the evening of May 10, the official X account of another recently popular Web3 social platform Friend.Tech posted a tweet, saying that all Fantasy.Top users shared Blast Gold worth $3 million on paper, and their individual users had earned ETH worth $2 million, with different construction methods. Fantasy.Top founder Travis Bickle then forwarded it and replied: "We need to work harder." At present, Friend.Tech has deleted this tweet.
As the main characters of the game, these "heroes" can earn 1.5% of the fees from the trading of their cards, and 10% of the revenue from all card pack sales will also be distributed to them. In the first week of opening, all heroes received a total of 409 ETH, equivalent to a bonus of approximately US$1.25 million, of which 300 ETH came from the sales of card packs and 109 ETH came from the card trading market. On average, each hero also received 7,500 FAN points, which may be used for airdrops in the future.
Jenn Duong, the highest-earning content creator in the first week, received 6.7 ETH, or about $20,500 in rewards, but also a problematic "hero." Over the weekend, Duong took it upon herself to temporarily set her Twitter account to private after noticing unusually high engagement on one of her Twitter videos. She said users were "manipulating" her content, or artificially boosting engagement, and she was worried about potential problems for her game.
Due to the presence of automated bots, the total number of social media content engagement of many "heroes" was manipulated and abnormally increased. Therefore, Fantasy.Top ended the "Main Contest" event early on May 9 and will address such issues by applying anti-bot systems to better identify interactions driven by bots, distinguish between replies and main tweets, and reduce differences between heroes.
How long can the viral spread last?
In the recent market cooling situation, Fantasy.Top's sudden rise undoubtedly shows great growth potential and momentum. From the core design of the game, its user profile is mainly native to Twitter's crypto community. While crypto-related projects have been shouting slogans for large-scale adoption, Fantasy.Top has completely focused on its own territory in the cryptocurrency circle and cleverly used the influence of crypto KOLs in the industry.
However, in addition to the need for the project to exclude malicious disruption by robots, whether it can establish a fair competition system still needs long-term observation. The combination of crypto Twitter influencers and NFT games, and its design mechanism with a winner-takes-all meaning, also inevitably caused the community to suspect that the project might be just a short-term hype. Some players said that they sold their cards and quit the game after discovering that Fantasy.Top was a whale game. After the free and discounted package activities launched by Fantasy.Top ended, the high price of its card packs also discouraged civilian players, and the casting volume of the game was greatly reduced. In addition, many players reported that they would inexplicably get or lose cards in the game, suspected that there was a problem with the front end of the game.
In short, Fantasy.Top's viral spread has just begun, and this crypto upstart still has many problems to solve. Will it be a carnival to the end, or will it return to calm after the hustle and bustle? What will be its future direction? PANews will continue to pay attention.
