Disclaimer

This post was written from my personal perspective as a crypto founder. Nothing should be construed as financial advice. This post and our products are not intended for U.S. audiences.

TL;DR

We’re launching a token in the coming weeks. We’re going to pioneer a new playbook that returns community back to its rightful place at the forefront. With ambitious innovation, we will spearhead a new frontier for play.

Planning > Plans

Building in crypto since 2021, we have internalized firsthand what immense wisdom is contained in the above quote when applied to our industry. Compared to Web2, trends in crypto shift 10x faster: liquidity often rises, crashes, and recedes as quickly and violently as tidal waves against sandy shores. As builders we’ve learned the hard way that any roadmap is useless if the underlying territory is constantly changing. Success in Web3 is predicated not on plans, but planning: constant reevaluation of assumptions based on market conditions, and rapid adaptation to avoid irrelevance.

We released Farm Frens first on Telegram two months ago, and the early reception we received was enormous as our game has already attracted 500,000+ players. At the time that we shipped Farm Frens, there were very few noteworthy Telegram-related tokens in circulation: only Notcoin’s $NOT and Pixelverse’s $PIXFI had launched, and the latter not even on TON. Catizen’s $CATI and Hamster Kombat’s $HMSTR completed their TGEs soon after, but their tokens have also generally performed poorly since then:

Public > Private

As mentioned in last month’s post, this isn’t a new problem specific to TON, Telegram, or Web3 gaming. It’s a macro problem pervasive across the entire crypto industry, and IMO the best thing to read that explains this issue is this blog post by OG crypto influencer Cobie, excerpted below:

The majority of upside for new tokens is now being captured privately

In the modern era, virtually the entirety of the asset’s “price discovery” has occurred off-market, being captured privately before the token even exists. And a lot of this price discovery is actually inflated due to private market dynamics.

It is funny to reflect that by 2024 people would be yearning for ICOs once again. It is hard to disagree with them when you take a look at the difference in opportunity between now and then: in certain ways, the ICO era seems significantly fairer than the current dynamic of the market.

Returning to first principles, no matter the vertical, what drives success for any cryptocurrency is a diehard community that rallies behind it. Unfortunately, because of a hostile regulatory landscape for many years, Web3 founders could no longer bootstrap directly from their community anymore, and instead resorted to venture capital.

Moving to private funding

After enforcement from major global regulators against ICOs, crypto token issuers stopped raising money from the public and instead moved towards private funding from VCs.

After running the fundraising circuit several times now myself as a founder, it’s become painfully apparent to me how poor judges VCs are when it comes to consumer content, especially games and entertainment.

So what happens as a result is that many founders are able to manipulate VCs into overfunding their NGMI products at overinflated private valuations.

This “private price discovery” takes place in a rigged market and the resulting valuation is deceptive

The issues people have with “low-float” or “high FDV” is in fact actually because the price discovery has taken place in a private market that is either rigged, delusional or both.

This “phantom market” that happens pre-token is a delusion. It is not discovering the natural price based on the dynamics of supply and demand. It is simply finding the absolute highest price that a VC investor is willing to pay. This dynamic pushes valuations to prices that the market is unable to bear, evidenced by the graveyard of tokens from 2020-2022 that are trading significantly below their private market valuations.

When [a VC-backed] token reaches Binance or Coinbase, the phantom market does not stop but evolves a little.

Centralized exchanges have also historically not been effective tastemakers and judges of consumer content. In the past, for example, they over-indexed on approving listings of projects based on vanity metrics like number of Twitter/X followers, which thus led many teams to “rehypothecate” inauthentic user numbers via bots, SocialFi campaigns, etc.

So VC-backed projects would convince CEXs (often with the assistance of large financial incentives) to list their tokens at “delusional” high FDVs, and private insiders would profit at the expense of the public community getting dumped on.

Again, to reiterate, this behavior is completely antithetical to the original ethos of what makes the most successful tokens great: rewarding early community members and enabling them to be your greatest evangelists. VCs and CEXs make poor substitutes for a strong grassroots community of true fans, so it should be no surprise what direction the price chart trends when an artificially hyped and priced token goes to market this way. 📉

(Thankfully, a pullback from “delusion” is beginning to manifest among certain CEX teams. Binance, for example, publicized a new set of project evaluation criteria for potential token listings in May, and just this month also surprise listed several memecoins.)

Passion > Pageantry

Though our team has also raised money from VCs, we refuse to run the same busted playbook that fools our most loyal fans into becoming exit liquidity. Our vision at Amihan Entertainment has, is, and will always be to equalize opportunity for all through play. We remain devoted to our fans, not to our financiers.

Since beginning our builder arc in crypto years ago, we never once stopped trying to delight our community with various forms of entertainment, ranging from games, animation, and physical and digital collectibles. Through these efforts, we’ve reached millions of fans across our games and social media channels.

As the dawn of a new golden age for crypto is now upon us, it’s time for us to finally take the plunge and reward our community with a well deserved token of friendship.

Play > Players

Within the next few weeks, we’ll be launching a token. How we launch it and what happens afterwards will be different from anything else crypto has ever seen. The token will not be constrained to represent any singular game or product. Instead, its intent is to become a symbol of crypto’s new cultural evolution as we embrace “degeneracy” with dignity. Crypto is already a great game, so let’s play ball on its home field. Batter up.

✍️ Kaizen

TL;DR

We’re launching a token in the coming weeks. We’re going to pioneer a new playbook that returns community back to its rightful place at the forefront. With ambitious innovation, we will spearhead a new frontier for play.