*If you haven’t yet, please read Part 1 of this series as it’s necessary to get the whole picture I am trying to paint here!
Additionally, be aware that by the time you read this the metagame mechanics of BW might have completely changed.
To stay informed and get my opinion on all TreasureDAO news give me a follow on Twitter, subscribe to my Mirror here, and reach out if you’d like to connect and talk more.**
In Bridgeworld, All Roads Lead to MAGIC
After Loot launched, little tribes had begun to sprout up over certain adventure gear (Divine Robe for instance) and were forming small guilds or mini-DAOs around them with the NFT as governance, so to speak. This is not at all unlike the concept of groups of stakeholders forming over the variables of an LP like in Osmosis.
What John Patten and the other co-founders noticed though, was that these many disparate groups trying to build off shared ideas from these Loot constructs were severely lacking in coordination. As a result, it became clear that to remove resistance as metaverses expanded, there was going to be a sincere need for fungibility, even for NFTs, so that social coordination could be supremely flexible.
In other words: if they were going to prime the conditions for a whole galaxy of interconnected gaming systems to spin out into existence, there needed to be an eternal star burning at the center to hold the gravity for all.
Patten, Gaarp, karel, and Co. (so many others I am missing sorry!) were quickly bringing into focus a vision for the future which included massive DAOs making decentralized products, enabling vast webs of communal storytelling, and empowering creatives. They understood this crypto-centric universe unequivocally needed its own currency to pivot from. And that this token was only going to be as solid as the meaningful game loops built around it, and the communities who championed it.
If they could link these gathering pockets of anons via a common crypto substratum, worlds would blossom and the economic activity in these fictitious realms would allow fantasy assets to spur actual economies. Therefore, what was needed was not just a token per se, but a commodity--an eternal resource that would enable this social coordination to take place; a native reserve of energy of this multiverse that powers on the assets therein and denominates all trade.
Treasure is a decentralized network of games and communities built around a single token. That token is MAGIC and it is the lifeblood of Bridgeworld, the foundation metaverse that all worlds built on TreasureDAO plug into.
MAGIC is the harbinger; the root substance; the crease upon which different worlds fold and stitch together. It is what harkens the Harvesters forth; what gathers Legions; what perpetuates the Atlas Mine and carries energy to the realm. It is borderless. It is ethereal. It is unwavering; primordial. It is what you always wish you had more of; the current along which every project on TreasureDAO rides. The eternal source of EEEEeee. It is backed by the imagination of those who steward it, and as limitless as the same vast ocean of spirit and creativity it pours from.
The thesis for MAGIC as the reserve currency of the metaverse revolves around a concept of ‘Metaversal Proof-of-Work’, where Treasures (semi-fungible NFTs) are sought and needed to abstract additional levels of value (APY) from the game mechanics now known as Bridgeworld (BW). And moreover, that MAGIC + time is needed to buy, enable, and transmute these and other BW NFTs into productive assets.
”The cost of farming is the price of the initial assets (the mining equipment) and the time it takes to perform these actions.The goal is to create an economy of assets by which the rarest assets are earned through labor. An actual proof of work economy.”
Where other metaverse currencies have failed to this point, is that there is little to no value being built on top of their tokens or propping them up. AGLD, SAND, APE (yes, you read that correctly it’s my article), etc. were always going to trend towards zero because there was nothing working synergistically with them except the loyalty of the people to whom it was airdropped, which we know is nil in this space. It’s always the same old Crypto Prisoner’s Dilemma: dump or be dumped on.
Two weeks after Treasure cards minted, you could unravel your cards into individual Treasures and stake them for MAGIC emissions in the Genesis Mine. This would end up as the blueprint for what we now call the Atlas Mine, which is quite literally the monetary heart of the TreasureDAO ecosystem. Self-proclaimed “Treasure Hunters” at this time could also stake Loot cards, AGLD, and MAGIC-WETH LP tokens to farm MAGIC as well.
This is around when Gaarp came in and simultaneously completely overhauled the MAGIC tokenomics and created the first iteration of the DAO’s now crucial Ecosystem Fund. This fund’s purpose is to keep the door open for others to come build with Treasure in perpetuity by allowing the DAO to vote on new projects to back and support with targeted MAGIC emissions, marketing, guidance, and other areas.
To this day, the Ecosystem Fund continues to allow the team to leverage the Treasure brand in an efficient way, much like they do with the MAGIC token itself through different economic game loops, and by engaging community discussion and stimulating participation. The Ecosystem Fund powers a sponsorship program from TreasureDAO itself and projects must meet the criteria of their Ecosystem Integration Framework. This is different than just deciding to incorporate MAGIC into your project, which anyone is free to do--MAGIC is a decentralized currency.
I believe taking the BTC Halving Model and repurposing it for faster-paced upfront distribution was pretty sharp. It created a rope hold for many to latch on to, and reinforced the metaversal proof-of-work and mining metaphors outlined by Patten. Likewise, it was familiar to OGs, easy enough to grasp for newcomers, and based because everyone was starting on the same foot ($0 MAGIC), including the team. But as you probably know all too well anon solid tokenomics are just one part of it.
To create a lasting store-of-value in the metaverse, you need continued stimuli for global activity to keep the walls afloat; something to serve as an engine humming along in the background to encourage other economies of scale to grow; an axel upon which a wheel of worlds may turn.
Steered in vision by End and others, Bridgeworld is the metagame that creates value and demand around MAGIC and Treasures through a strategic variety of opt-in P2E loops and levers. Bridgeworld is a massive social coordination and strategy ‘tabletop’ game that determines the economics of the Treasure gigaverse and thus, the MAGIC emissions upon which the worlds within it survive and thrive off of.
The chad known as pieta is responsible for the greater outline, intricacies, and finer milieu of this giant monetary experiment. Mans is a legitimate giga-brain with a PhD in game theory and economics, and a perfect example of the sort of talent Treasure was attracting in the early days just by means of pushing a profound dialogue forward amongst community members.
As I mentioned above, the heart of Treasure is by and large the Atlas Mine, where players go to stake their MAGIC. However, this isn’t some simple staking contract. For the Atlas Mine to crank emissions at full capacity at least 60% of all MAGIC needs to be staked in order to ‘power it on.’
Long term MAGIC believers and those who want to partake in governance have the option to lock their MAGIC in the Atlas Mine for varying lengths of time to get boosted emissions, starting at a 2 week minimum with rewards available immediately upon unlock → up to a full year with a 45 day vesting schedule.
This has proven to be extremely key as a token sink in conjunction with the tokenomics design to distribute the bulk of the supply up front. In my view, it takes the best parts of veTokenomics and uses them as another tool in game design.
Players can also boost yield further by staking Treasures (stackable up to 20) and Legions (up to 3) as modifiers alongside their MAGIC in the mine, of which there are different classes and tiers for each. Pragmatically, the more rare, the higher the yield boost.
I Am Legion, For We Are MAGIC
Genesis Legions were rewarded to early MAGIC stakers who locked up large amounts of MAGIC in the Genesis Mine prior to the move from mainnet to L2. They have changed A LOT since inception, in design and utility, but the original premise upon which they were created remains the same: Legions are the workhorse characters of Bridgeworld.
There are two types, Auxiliary (Aux) and Genesis (Gen), with Gen Legions (GLs) being the most exalted and most valuable from a yield perspective. However, rarity is definitely not static in this realm, and there are many ways to stay competitive through play. Consequently, I am of the opinion that Legions are probably the most versatile, productive, and least understood NFT collection on the planet, next to Treasures.
Of the 3,278 Genesis Legions that will ever exist, there are varying subclasses as the chart above denotes. The highest rarity are the five Origin Legions who are the most overpowered NFTs (600% boost) in the Bridgeworld metagame. Guilds have already sprung up around them, to compete in the eternal warfare for the Harvesters and draw others in alliance to their cause, the first of which was the eponymously named ClocksnatcherDAO.
Sometime this year though ClocksnatcherDAO caved their 1/1 grail to BattleFly, one of the first flagship games built on TreasureDAO and pioneered by early community member Ben Beath, (frt someone get Ben a smol plz). BattleFly is also in control of the Fallen Origin Legion after their purchase this past March. A benevolent actor, the BattleFlyDAO recently switched gears with the launch of their governance token gFLY.
Before if you had a Smol Brain or any of the v1 or v2 BattleFly Founders NFTs, you could stake MAGIC and receive boosted Atlas Mine yield with their 1/1 Legions and other T1 Treasures. Now, since token launch and the addition of Harvesters into the yield meta, they have opened up their staking service to all Treasure players looking to get boosted yield from the Atlas Mine.
Smart move, as they will likely draw in many green players looking for a home in the beginning of their Treasure journey between this and their masses-tailored BattleFly game. If you want the max available APY from Harvester yield on top of that you’ll have to stake gFLY and participate in their Flywheel program. They stand to be one of the most competitive guilds for a while, especially after the Clocksnatcher cop.
Magic Dragon DAO is a community-built yield aggregator similar to Convex for willing MAGIC holders who want instant liquidity for their emissions and the best yield possible. MDD holds two 1/1 Legions (Bombmaker and Dreamwinder), as well as other high level rarity GLs (All-Class) and the max amount of Grins (5) and Honeycombs(15) possible to offer a boost that stacks right up with Battlefly.
There are downsides to this, as the model includes a wrapped token drMAGIC that is backed one-for-one with MAGIC+yield so that you can access locked MAGIC immediately. This allows them to stake in the Atlas Mine for the longest amount of time possible. Their own token introduces new smart contract tail risk or possibility for bad actors on the multi-sig, however unlikely.. MDD’s assets make them default one of the most competitive player DAOs, next to BattleFly, and alongside LifeVerse and Realm.
Lastly afaik, there is no publicly known alias for the owner of the last unaccounted for Origin Legion, the Warlock. It has been staked in the Atlas Mine for almost a full year now. This tells me whoever has it likely is waiting for their MAGIC to come unlocked and there is a smol possibility for fireworks soon. You can view the status and level of any Legion here.
Part of me can see a future where the boosts and overpowered-ness of these 1/1 NFTs might possibly have to change if/ when Treasure hits critical mass of players as they are a highly centralizing force, but thats a net positive at the moment and as planned. Fractionalizing these 1/1 Legions down the stretch, or even if the players are all voiced up to vote and add additional 1/1 Legions seems plausible, yet still extremely unlikely, on any time horizon. But it’s not impossible. It’s called TreasureDAO for a reason.
And this is all just conjecture to demonstrate that it is still pre-innings as far as Bridgeworld is concerned. There are legit endless ways to balance out power imbalances, current and TBD, that allow other bands of players to compete through sweat and critical thinking. The amount of different knobs and dials to tweak are as numerous as those on the dashboard of your favorite metaversal spaceship.
More to the point, the Origin Legions serve as a surface level example that illustrate the elaborate type of token sinks and services that can be set up around this unique NFT staking model by anyone willing. Here, a total of 5 NFTs have managed to create an entire diplomatic and resource-driven subgame within the metagame of yield that is Bridgeworld. Few.
Up until very recently, Genesis Legions could ‘Summon’ new Auxiliary Legions via the Summoning Circle ad infinitum. These Aux Legions have different character traits, classes, and rarities than GLs, but share the same functionalities, minus the special staking returns and unlimited summoning.
Aux Legions once created can Summon as well, but only once and for a price of 500 MAGIC paid to the DAO. Summoning takes 10 days and after a successful Summon your legion experiences ‘Fatigue’ meaning it can’t Summon another legion for 7 days after. There is also a chance your Summon can fail, where your legion then enters ‘Stasis’ and must wait 2 days before attempting to Summon again.
GL’s used to be able to Summon forever but were required to post collateral in the form of 10 Balancer Crystals after their fifth Summon to continue doing so. Up until recently also, they were needed to auto-quest your legions, but the team has since decided to stop that to move from passive → active earning. These Balancer Crystals also used to be wrapped SLP tokens of MAGIC-WETH until governance proposal TIP-18 passed that switched the LP requirement to GMX’s GLP instead.
Balancer Crystals are one-way. They cannot be unwrapped after transformation. They are one of the most chad exemplifications of creating demand for an in-game item that enables the DAO to generate protocol-owned liquidity (POL), earn income, and diversify its treasury.
At present, there are currently 18,184 Auxiliary Legions in existence. If you can imagine in the early days when MAGIC was ripping face, there was serious profitability in cranking out an army of Aux Legions and reselling them on the marketplace or hunting Treasures daily. The macro has caught up this year though as the bear has bitten many.
For the foreseeable future, all summoning has been paused due to low activity and many not being willing to lock up capital in the wake of SBF is my guess. Also as Bridgeworld gets a facelift and v2 loads, pausing the game so that you don’t have to engineer a moving target is a very sensible strategy.
Alas, if Legions aren’t summoning fellow comrades or adding their might to the Atlas Mine alongside your MAGIC, they can also be set out to quest at the Ivory Tower.
Questing has changed quite a bit since the beginning and has become even more involved. Now, there are three regions you can quest in vs. the general questing in v1, and varying lengths of time to quest that increase risk of failure and reward. A mini-game called ‘Treasure Triad’ has now been incorporated vs. the original dice roll loop you used to encounter which basically entailed a lot of praying for Tier 3 or higher Treasures, and then selling these at a premium.
The more you quest, the more XP you gain. Aux Legions can only quest for Treasure Fragments, while Genesis Legions are able to scoop full Treasures, and the chance of snagging a rarer Treasure/Fragment depends on the type and skill level of the Legion in question.
Remember: Treasures are unique in their genus properties and what they can be used for, but fungible in that more can be discovered each day, save for the primordial Grin and Honeycomb. The initial supply for these Treasures was hardcapped from the Creation Event (original mainnet Treasure Cards) will be all that ever exists for eternity (COUGH).
In addition to Legions being the only faucet for more Treasures to come into existence, they are also the only source of Essence of Starlight and Prism Shards, which they also find as they quest. Prism shards can be crafted into a variety of larger consumable Prisms by Legions. Prisms can be consumed to reduce Fatigue from Summoning.
Essence of Starlight (EOS) is a liquid form of MAGIC that legions use to tattoo Bridgeworld Constellations (Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Dark, Light) to their skin via ancient technology at the Starlight Temple. These Constellations give them special skills, of which the most applicable at the moment is to reduce their risk of ‘Stasis’ (becoming immobilized) as they quest longer. In the future, these Constellations will allow them to imbue certain Harvester Consumables with different qualities (I think) and factor into the metagame in a very specific way.
At The Forge, Legions can take tier specific Treasure Fragments and Prism Shards to craft complete Treasures at no cost, and in doing so increase their Crafting XP level. The higher the level, the more difficult (valuable) items you can craft, like Large Prisms.
Furthermore, Legions are the ONLY way to craft full Treasures into Harvester Parts according to different types of crafting recipes and skills, like Arcana and Leatherworking. They are the only route to craft said Harvester Parts into Extractors which are then staked in Harvesters to temporary boost yield. Importantly, any MAGIC expenses or other fees in Bridgeworld, including the 5 MAGIC it takes for Legions to craft consumables, are all circled back to the DAO.
But what are Harvesters?
Harvesters are roving, ancient, MAGIC-yielding, machinelike beasts that player guilds and DAOs of all sizes compete for control over in order to gain increased MAGIC emissions for a short time. I like to think of them as mini-Atlas Mines.
The Harvester Parts are needed to grant legion holders access to the Harvester and each one staked allows a wallet an additional 30k MAGIC deposit capacity. This is a bit egregious in my opinion, and should be tightened as price increases in a similar mechanism to the Atlas Mine, but in reverse. A maximum of 10 Extractors can be staked into a Harvester at once (should also scale) and there is a cap on Harvester AUM of $10m (USD).
We are currently in a transition phase from the first awakening of the Harvesters to the second season, called Corruption. This v2 release will add a freeze component that players must work together to fix or MAGIC will cease to flow throughout the metaverse.
Pause.
If your head is spinning rn, then you are in good company fren.
This is just an intro to the array of complex loops and intricate game architecture the Treasure team has come up with to create a fountain of liquidity sinks for MAGIC and demand for Treasures. To continue to expound upon all of the nitty-gritty is:
A) a waste of time because the Bridgeworld and Harvester documentation has it covered in extensive detail and
B) is not the point of this exposé.
One of the main points of this essay series is to make you understand just how deep the Treasure rabbit hole goes and the extensive design and intentionality behind it.
I hope by exploring a bit of this grandiosity too that it continues to help you form a succinct mental model for what an interconnected metaverse requires to thrive.
If the idea of diving further into all of this incites a bodily feeling similar to learning a whole new profession, it’s because we are quite likely embarking on a whole new theory of labor.
Needless to say, Legions are THE peak of NFT utility in my mind and it’s not even a competition.
If you want to be a competitive player in Bridgeworld in the coming years, then you need at minimum to be grinding an Aux Legion to feel content. The apex bet is obviously doing whatever you can to cop a GL as they are finite, OP’d, and potentially hella productive assets. The gamble is that the future of BW is less set in stone and not crazy fun at the moment. But this is where the opportunity lies, as I’ll discuss a bit more in Part 3.
Still, I am of the opinion there is no greater asymmetrical bet you can make on TreasureDAO succeeding long term than snagging a Genesis Legion and leveling it the F up to Beast Mode, even though current market prices disagree (sigh).
Aux Legions, especially Rare ones, are great looks as well, and specializing them for certain game routes after you’ve spent enough time DYOR-ing is a pretty +EV bet over the mid-term from where I’m standing.
Now that Summoning has stopped and dialing in the Harvester metagame is being prioritized, every item in Bridgeworld just got more valuable: Prisms, EOS, Harvester Parts, and most importantly Treasures. Genesis Legions can quest for full Treasures. Everything you craft for the metagame requires Treasures.
Extra Life, Universal Locks, Azurite Dust, Extractors, these are all worth your investigation with MAGIC at depressed prices and worth forming your own assumptions about. Balancer Crystals aren’t being used for anything rn which means you can essentially scoop LP tokens for something that will be imperative to the future of BW, for likely cheaper than what it’ll cost to wrap more GLP after it opens up again.
There are 342 Honeycombs (HC). 347 Grins. The other Tier 1 Items and quantities (at time of writing, will vary slightly): Cap of Invisibility (838), Ancient Relic (672), Bottomless Elixir (656), Castle (867). Honeycombs and Grins floor is 2950 MAGIC. Other Tier 1 Treasures floor (again at time of this writing) is 219 MAGIC. They still provide over 7% staking boost, are increasingly rare, and are mispriced considering the many other ways you’ll likely be able to swindle your way into boosting yield in BW. If you are hoarding T1 Treasures, you’re betting on Harvester games taking off.
But ser, what if I’m broke?
No stress lad. Remember those SoulBound Recruits from my Part 1?
Well they cost 10 MAGIC and make Bridgeworld playable for just about anyone of any financial background.
Players can level from Recruit → Cadet → Apprentice → and then once you have gathered enough XP, you may pay 150 MAGIC to attempt Ascension to an Auxiliary Legion (your MAGIC is refunded if the attempt fails don’t sweat it). At the moment, this is the only way to create new Auxiliary Legions and imo will be the only way to do so a long time unless Treasure player demand is pushing over 1-10m DAU. Quick example:
You take 10 MAGIC and grind a Recruit up to an Apprentice. You’ve been gathering EOS, Prism Shards, and Tier 5 Treasure Fragments and flipping them on the marketplace to get 150 MAGIC liquid. You Ascend to an Auxiliary Legion and start questing relentlessly. You flip a few Tier 4 and Tier 3 Treasures until you can scoop another Aux. The army grows and your skills become more sought after. You have an inventory of Prisms at your disposal. The Harvesters are in desperate need of high level Craftooors for Extractor parts. You flip both your Auxiliary Legions into a Gen Legion or Tier 1 Treasures ready to flip. Whoever has the patience to do this will seep in a load of idiosyncratic knowledge about BW which rn is the ultimate MAGIC edge.
It’s incredibly sharp of the team to provide a path for anyone to go from rags to riches (literally) if they try and want to be competitive. This is a continuation of the free mint ethos that empowers individuals and community. It’s what creates brand loyalty. It’s like the psychology of interest rates. It’s why turmoil follows sustained high inflation rates in fiat monetary schema because the Populus feels there is no way to “win” and the odds are stacked against them. There needs to be a path to go from 0 to a 100 in any game; it’s an abstraction of the American Dream.
53. That’s the number of times I’ve used the word MAGIC so far in this paper. Probably nothing.
January 24th, 2022 was the first massive token unlock from the Genesis Mine/ OG Magic Farm and subsequently when Bridgeworld went live. Many players parked MAGIC in the Atlas Mine for a full year in search of the highest yield possible at this time and the weeks after, as price worked its way up over $6. I am expecting some potential sell pressure through the month of January and early February when a series of bigger unlocks are slated to occur. It’s been a rough year. You can check when tokens come unlocked from the Atlas Mine here.
Don’t get it twisted though. There are so many catalysts in the pipeline expecting some massive sell off is a bit too mid-curve. It is just something to be aware of. As the number of other games building on Treasure continues to grow → the more robust Bridgeworld becomes→ the more valuable MAGIC becomes → the more valuable Treasures and Legions become, et cetera, etc. If you haven’t noticed by now, the Treasure team is pretty good at thinking ahead.
As referenced, MAGIC follows the BTC halving model only on an annual basis, not a quadrennial one. Total supply is 350m, with about 207m circulating in existence, of which 49% are currently locked up in the Atlas Mine. Remember from above, the emissions decrease the less coins are staked and vice versa. As you can see in the chart the allotted supply for the Atlas Mine tapers off in Y4 and constitutes the bulk of new supply being introduced.
After this bootstrapping phase, much of the income the DAO generates will likely be diverted to growing the ecosystem even further and deepening the complexity of yield games in Bridgeworld, ie, continued solidification of a sustainable business model. Whenever the tipping point happens, all BW NFTs and items will flip a switch from afterthought to I-gotta-have-it. Patience.
In addition to this, MAGIC-WETH LP rewards on Sushi will be decreasing over the new year from 650k per month gradually down to 200k by September 2023 which will be creating less sell pressure. To me, whereas the Coinbase, Binance, etc. listing is generally an obvious top for most, for a coin like MAGIC that you need to access a suite of games and worlds, this crucial fiat on-ramp should drastically reduce friction for actual players, not just give whales an excuse to dump, though chicanery is always to be expected. Working a multi-year position around an LP in an uncertain macro environment is my preferred method to capture volatility, particularly this next year as the incentives will never be this good again. But that can always change too.
gFLY is probably undervalued along with their staking Flywheel model for boosted MAGIC yield but the market will remain ignorant of this probably until MAGIC is well back in dollarland. They will be the most competitive guild in the Harvester games. The BattleFly game will eventually catch up to Beacon in players and create a new dynamic in Bridgeworld that guilds will have to think about. If BF succeeds, and gFLY is crushing, then BF Founders NFTs are basically like All-Class Legions for the yield boost they currently give you in the BF Staking Flywheel. Again, probably undervalued, with a big emphasis on probably.
Smol Brains are the flagship characters of the burgeoning powerhouse that is the Smolverse brand. From a pure speculation standpoint, you want to hold Smol Brains not Smol Bodies, even though they are super fun. Patten himself said recently the market chose Smols not Swols as the lead collection. This doesn’t mean Swols are forgotten or not going to be incorporated, but just that Smol Brains are the chosen face of the Smolverse brand. Smol Bodies will likely run at some point and have their own revitalized hype. But think about it like BAYC and MAYC.
Here in Bridgeworld, Treasures can break, MAGIC can be squandered, and the loyalty of Legions can be sold to the highest bidder. There will eventually be a land component to this metagame, where Harvesters can be moved to different regions, and different projects that are Powered by Treasure will be integrated as well. Smols can come to the rescue of embattled DAOs, BattleFlies can be hired to provide desperately needed defense or divert attention, and citizens of LifeVerse can take up arms alongside Legions.
It is through the complexities of gamified MAGIC token emissions, and carefully chosen Treasure integrations in this common economic Layer 0, that TreasureDAO intends to stretch and smear the concept of interoperability between DeFi, NFTs, Gaming, DAOs and--most importantly--fun. But fun requires a portal. It also requires frictionless and reliable UX.
This begs the answer to the most popular question newcomers ask:
Why can’t MAGIC just be ETH?
Arbitrum = A Fresh Start
If your remember correctly, TreasureForLoot originally launched on mainnet at a time when paying gas on Ethereum was so exorbitant, it was temporarily in-vogue to create tokens with distribution models based around how rekt you got on gas (fees.wtf, GAS, EVMOS Rektdrop). I personally was altering my sleep schedule on the weekends so I could get up early Saturday mornings and do whatever I needed to do on ETH.
If you were unravelling Treasures, staking them, and claiming MAGIC rewards everyday--or just doing anything with any frequency on mainnet at this time--your inner dialogue was close to breaking because we were pressing the seams of the simulation as far as ridiculousness. Spending $500 a day to flip pictures of your favorite cartoon animal while people barely get by on a few dollars a week in remote regions of the world is a tad absurd, if not outright gross. “What are signs of euphoria?” for $1000 please.
For TreasureDAO and MAGIC, this would actually turn out to be a huge blessing in disguise.
For one, if you were interacting with Treasure at this time you had to really have an interest in the project. Unravelling each of the eight individual Treasures on the OG cards, and creating a new ERC-721 NFT every time, was definitely a bank-breaker. However, this essentially created a moat for early community to cross.
If you weren’t jazzed about what was happening on the other side, you weren’t going to participate. And since the project was free to mint, you weren’t losing out if you didn’t roll the dice either because finding a new ‘hype’ NFT collection to YOLO at this time was not a problem.
In short, there was no penalty for not participating and no clear incentive for why you should. You just had to check in with the dialogue, with your gut, and walk across the coals in hopes that the Treasures and MAGIC would turn out better than the other Loot derivatives.
Secondly, and most importantly, because of how quickly the team was shipping and things were snowballing, it forced them to stop and take serious stock of the big picture. If players were going to be interacting with smart contracts potentially hundreds of times a day, there was just no way ETH mainnet was going to cut it. At this time, EIP-1559 effects hadn’t taken hold, The Merge was still a meme, and the L2 landscape was still very nascent.
Obviously, Cosmos was the perennial option to consider with John having been at Osmosis prior to this moment. The Cosmos vision of IBC is a universe of app-specific chains that talk and interact with each other seamlessly (sound familiar?). It’s very quick, developer friendly, and can be customized down to the consensus level, where any token can be used for validator staking, including LP tokens and NFTs. Berachain (just a meme, definitely don’t search it on Twitter) is a prime example of people running with this toolbox. Secret Network is an ATOM chain too that brings privacy to the smart contract level. Another excellent but more painful example of Cosmos IBC vision is Terra but I’ll stop it there. The main point to take away and that this highlights is the aspirations of TreasureDAO were always very large, even early on.
From what I gather though, there was still some details in flux about IBC/ ATOM 2.0 at this time, bridges/ liquidity were meh, and the Loot/Treasure tribe lived on Ethereum, along with the majority of NFT fanatics and volume. As a result, the team was absolutely unwilling to sacrifice security or ETH composability. Likewise, they needed somewhere they could build and experiment uninhibited. They needed the freedom to bootstrap the infra behind MAGIC and Treasures without competition, philosophically and economically.
In one great interview Patten remarks:
“Ethereum is a general purpose blockchain; a mechanism without a context.”
Anyone can build anything they want on ETH with the tools that are available, an ethos Loot adapted, and by extension Treasure. A smart computer for humanity and base layer for a new web of dApps, financial primitives, and services to be built upon. ETH is meant to be the bridge between all ledgers, digital and physical.
Arbitrum’s choice to not have a native token and emphasize the projects building on it will probably be looked back on as one of the most successful business strategies of this decade. It created an incubator for amazing teams to build in isolation but also cooperation; for deep community to be built on chain without proselytizing the chain itself; and created a springboard for the projects growing there to come to life with the release of Nitro, while still being a bastion of reliability and security in the meantime.
Arbitrum, in every sense, is a true abstraction of ETH because it still to this day doesn’t have its own token!
“The first thing to remember is that we consider ourselves a DeFi project from the beginning and infrastructure play for whatever the metaverse would be; and a lot of DeFi projects were moving to Arbitrum at that time for this reason.”
TreasureDAO’s ambition for an immersive and symbiotic assembly of communities interacting with one another demanded frictionless trade, ie, low fees, of which Arbitrum was a natural and secure choice.
If you remember the vibe I Bob Ross’d us in the first part of this series about the prevailing sentiment at this time, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that when Arbitrum launched a couple weeks before the first version of Treasure as we know it today took shape, that no one really cared too terribly much. Luna, Polygon, and especially Solana were all having their own NFT bull runs and Arbitrum didn’t even have a marketplace. Another L2? Ok. Sweet. Just tell me what to buy.
If the Arbitrum team was purely money motivated, the incentives to launch a token at this time were astronomically high.
Given the actual structural quality of the chain and the marvel of blockchain tech that is their interactive fraud proofs, if the Arbi team had decided to launch a token in give or take the most bullish macro environment in history, it would have 100p been shenanigans. Shenanigans, albeit with a likely outcome. Predatory farmers of all forms come, they dump, they move on. Although I do think if Arbi ever does launch a token the initial distribution model will be innovative and fair, the lack of token provokes a relatively simple question but radically profound in its scope:
Why does any chain launch a token without a vibrant ecosystem already on it?
There is a real romanticism in starting from scratch. One of the purest ways to build is to cut yourself off from distraction, and Arbitrum allowed this. Many incredibly innovative DeFi protocols like Dopex, GMX (Gambit), and Umami (z20hm) realized they could build under the radar with support from a team of based devs who shared their bigger picture thinking. By not launching a token, Arbitrum threw up the bat signal to let real ones know it was down to build and as such, allow the projects that decided to call it home be the main act, not some governance token, which is part of the reason why I think Optimism forfeited the lead so badly.
The OP airdrop and subsequent convo around it has overshadowed much of what is being built there. FWIW too, I think Optimism is just as much an abstraction of ETH and that the Optimism DAO is the correct approach for the chain in the long term. Moreover, I think the way they did the drop for the token is actually one of the best retroactive drops we’ve seen to date in its trying to reward actual Optimism users. It sets a good precedent.
Albeit, launching the token at a premature time in the rollups growth, before the Optimistic Fraud Proofs that the chain is named for had even been fully implemented, was a mistake and characteristic of much of crypto: here’s a token and the reason for it will be here Soon™.
Not entirely the case here, and I know similar to Treasure that Optimism has it’s own OP Ecosystem Fund, but the vibe wasn’t solidified yet. Timing is important. In this way, the OP launch actually insulated its early community from attracting more supporters, aka forced some to be traders when they just wanted to be investors.
Don’t blink though because the competition between these two ETH scaling solutions will be extremely +EV for both chains and Ethereum over the next decade, as they both push forward ETH’s modular future.
The OP token launch shines a light for us on another crucial point though: who initially gets the native token is critical to the success of the project, whether it’s a metaverse, DAO, rollup, or a blockchain.
ETH has its own power dynamics; early stakeholders, whales, and adversaries could have easily impacted the early metagame TreasureDAO was planning in a very negative way. There is a whole preconceived vision for ETH as money that doesn’t gel with MAGIC’s aim. Just like the Treasure team saw the isolation of Arbitrum as a feature, so too was the sequestering of MAGIC from ETH, which as I again mentioned in the first essay, is tethered to a physical reality; a different dream.
If Arbitrum launched an initial token without a solid foundation of projects building there, it would have also likely suffered huge selling pressure for the more desirable ETH. Today, after a solid year of building, that would likely not be the case. With some 60% of all Ethereum transactions now originating on Arbitrum, the game is different.
Arbitrum needed the spotlight on ETH in the beginning so that it could build it’s on-chain volume without the pressure of holders breathing down its neck. Arbitrum subsequently abstracted this feat in kind to TreasureDAO and all the teams building there, acting as a sort of buffer. If you were betting on Arbitrum’s success, you were betting on ETH. And if you wanted to really put your money where your mouth was, the only way to do so was by investing in the projects being built on top of it.
Philosophically, Arbitrum and TreasureDAO’s approaches are almost identical, only one layer removed: provide builders with a secure, frictionless, flexible, reliable architecture and get out the way. In these ways, the Arbitrum devs and Treasure team share many zero-day similarities and principles, coinciding also with the fact they launched within three days of each other (Arbitrum on 08/31 and Treasure 09/02). It was a very organic partnership. Fast forward a little over a year later and I think it’s safe to say things are going about the best they possibly could. The two teams meet and talk shop once a week to this day.
Outside of shared vision, it’s about scale too. Few blockchains have as far-reaching a roadmap as Ethereum in its goal to truly be able to handle billions of DAUs. Arbitrum is now a critical pillar in the scalability of Ethereum. While BTC maxis do their very best to taint BTC’s true PMF as a SOV, or dress it up to make it look more like Ethereum -- but not ya know? -- it’s evident to me that every other monolithic L1 chain is toast (yes, Solana, you too). The future is modular. Blockspace is the only scarce resource. Money is an antiquated and inadequate term for what is being built.
To untether from ETH’s reality, that narrative, that community, but parallel the best parts of its decentralized ethos, MAGIC needed to happen (pun intended, you’re lucky you haven’t gotten more).
Serendipity
One of the biggest headwinds facing TreasureDAO’s vision of Bridgeworld, MAGIC, and Treasures in the beginning was that the tech simply didn’t exist on Arbitrum for what they were building.
When Treasure moved to L2, there wasn’t even an ERC-1155 viewer on Arbitrum; they had to build one from scratch so that they could make these NFTs function, fold, combust, combine, and so forth how they were envisioning. ERC-1155 tokens are the Multi-Token Standard on Ethereum. They can represent and control any number of tokens, allowing them all the same functions and capabilities of ERC-20s and ERC-721s without taking up so much bytecode on mainnet. They are an incredible leap forward in smart contract design and will continue to unlock novel uses, same as the EIP-4626 Vault Standard is doing for DeFi.
Most pertinently and critically for MAGIC, whose success is integrally tied to the composability and interoperability of Treasures, Legions, and other NFTs: there was no native NFT marketplace on Arbitrum to compete with what Treasure was doing at this time.
The first Treasure Marketplace, which has now evolved into a more generalized NFT market and gamer hub called Trove, is a bedrock of the ecosystem and the portal through which many people first experience anything on TreasureDAO. The proto-marketplace was completely built from scratch, open source, and every collection was priced in MAGIC, as every project was linked with it in some way.
With the release of Trove on June 13, 2022, v1 of the TreasureDAO original vision was complete. Trove currently supports mainnet and Arbitrum collections, and was built with the long term vision to incorporate other chains as the DAO sees fit. The most recent addition and obvious of which was Arbitrum Nova. For general collections on the marketplace (collections that aren’t explicitly partnered with Treasure or incorporate MAGIC) the listings are denominated in ETH, with stablecoin options possible in the future. For the foreseeable path, permissionless listing is not supported and selected generalized collections are at the curation discretion of DAO council members. Contrary to its predecessor, Trove is not open source either. As I’ll explain, these are features not bugs.
For any project building on Treasure and/or powered by MAGIC that fits their Ecosystem Integration Framework, the collections are priced in MAGIC and 2.5% royalties are embedded that go directly to TreasureDAO. For all Bridgeworld and Smolverse NFTs though this royalty is 5%, with no creator fees. As I’ve mentioned, the proceeds from all DAO royalties are then ideally used to push the world forward via other grants and partnership support by way of the versatile Ecosystem Fund. However, all expenditures must originate, be proposed, voted upon, and ratified by the DAO.
If the Atlas Mine is one pillar, then Trove is the next.
Trove is the cardinal port of entry to the array of metaverses built on MAGIC. It is meant to be the homepage for any games built on Treasure.
It completes the package for builders and makes Treasure an extremely desirable launchpad for those wondering where they should start. It turns out, when you rally a community around a common tokenized banner (MAGIC) the majority are happy paying royalties to the DAO because most mints are free or reasonable. Holders know the tokens are going to further the benefit of the ecosystem, and therefore, the very token the NFT is denominated in. You can flip guiltlessly.
Again, the bulk of emissions from the Atlas Mine originate from the initial marked supply until Y4 where it tapers off until the 10 year plan is concluded. Eventually, all additional yield to support the Mine and the Harvester games will come solely from revenue gathered from business operations like Trove royalties, MAGIC token sinks such as game item purchases, and fees from protocol-owned liquidity, to only name a few. This positive reflexivity is baked into the infrastructure, so that as the games who are #PoweredByTreasure succeed, more buying and selling of the items on the marketplace occur, and more revenue is generated for the DAO. You ain’t ever seen #RealYield like this mate.
Trove and the Ecosystem Fund serve as a necessary testing ground to see who really wants to build with MAGIC and who is just grifting. Misaligned actors at this stage in the process can create negative ripple effects that are near impossible to recover from. The curation of Trove from DAO council members provides a necessary layer of trust and review while it bootstraps an inter-connected metaverse off the ground.
If you are buying anything from Trove, you can rest assured that it has been vetted and the team talked to and explored. Generalized collections who make the cut then get an unspoken Treasure seal-of-approval of sorts that is much needed in a dodgy environment where projects bail on ambitiously outlined roadmaps all the time. And for those who wish to integrate MAGIC fundamentally into their game and be a partner, the DAO process awaits, takes significant time, and requires a significant amount of dialogue between the project in question and the core Treasure team.
These recent milestones has always been in the pipeline for Trove’s vision and will give TreasureDAO and its partners additional avenues to empower their most active and supportive players via badges, perks, extra rewards, and more. These marketplace add-ons give projects crucial data on how they can best creatively continue to pivot their games in a positive manner.
Trove creates a metagame out of player and trader activity; hereby, the team can direct the flow of attention to certain elements of the greater metaverse that are out of balance. It creates a completely new lever to influence specific Bridgeworld dynamics and other MAGIC-fueled cogs, which furthers illustrates another beautiful answer to the question, “Why not ETH though?”
A decentralized economic machine is just like any other global monetary network and as such, requires its own harmonizing. Much like the FED trying to psychologically maneuver the public by tightening and loosening the fiscal belt of interest rates, TreasureDAO ensures the viability and longevity of MAGIC, Bridgeworld, and every game around it with a variety of influential levers, flywheels, and opt-in loops.
There needs to be the indirect ability to flex, pause, push, dilute, reduce, and magnify metaverse dynamics so that TreasureDAO can fulfill its complete vision and become steward of this gigaverse in time, not the supreme ruler forever. Trove is another fulcrum to do this.
For example let’s look at LifeVerse.
Originally called Life, it was meant to be one of Treasure’s flagship games but poor timing, tooling, semi-chaotic vision and lack of player demand have hampered it for much of the its existence. Things seem to be on the right track now, but the optics are a bit shot.
If you build alone, changing this is extremely hard and costs you in more direct ways. Maybe you have to introduce a token you didn’t plan on, or give up on an awesome development to double down on marketing resources--could be anything. Building with Treasure gives access to Trove metadata so the team can tap the social capital of other games to support another.
In this case, we’ll say the team leverages BW guilds and decides to offer temporary Harvester access to any Seed of Life holder, along with some other game item you can only get by playing LifeVerse. If you do this, your player profile earns a new badge as well and you are that much closer to a Treasure Premiere Player NFT--or something like that. There is no limit on the creative loops you can implement, actively or retroactively.
Another potential development with Trove that has been thrown around for a while now that I find super interesting is the concept of an NFT Graveyard. Here users would be able to recycle no longer valuable NFTs, from mainnet or L2.
We all made awful decisions this past bull market. What if you could recycle 10 of those awful decisions into productive assets like a Treasure? What if you could dust your NFTs into MAGIC from a pool formed out of POL fees voted on by the DAO? The second order effects (dumping) are tricky, but these are the sort of ideas in the conversation.
Without a native token or NFT marketplace, or integration into any of the most popular existing ones like OpenSea or LooksRare, there was no competition for MAGIC becoming the de facto base currency for the majority of NFT volume on Arbitrum.
If you were flipping Legions, or Toadstoolz, or SamuRise you were thinking in MAGIC, not ETH. The psychological value this added to MAGIC’s mission to be the reserve currency of the metaverse cannot be understated. If you were an early Arbitrum user and wanted to swoop the blue chip NFT collection known as Smol Brains, you had to swoop some MAGIC. Don’t believe me that Smol Brains are the OG NFT of Arbitrum? Check the chain anon.
With (A)ETH as the gas token for the network, with its own established co-opted Ethereum scaling narratives to nurture, there wasn’t an uphill battle from the start for MAGIC to really fly. With new chains, especially at this time in the bull, people would just flock en masse and treat every NFT as a leveraged bet on that chains token doing well. Buy coin A -- on chain B -- to get more SOL/ MATIC/ XTZ--whatever it is. Then sell that for ETH or BTC.
In effect, TreasureDAO was able to function as an L1 in practice the way it was meant to and enamor newcomers with its vision. If you wanted to stock some dry powder to buy the NFT dip on Arbitrum, you were bookmarking the MAGIC chart.
They were as John has said, “creating an inventory from scratch; we wanted to be on an island.”
Another granularity, is that while Arbitrum was attracting users from L1 to L2, to get back to mainnet at this time was not as fluid and effortless as it is now by a long shot.
The Arbitrum One bridge functions like most other EVM compatible canonical bridges, and requires a 7-day waiting period (more or less) to go back from L2 to L1 because that’s how long the consensus is that a censorship attack could last. It also allows a window for anyone to challenge the validity of the data from the rollup being incorporated into the Ethereum blockchain. So for Arbitrum at this time, you could pay to get in the club but you’re there for 7 days minimum. And you had to pay to leave, at a time when gas was astronomical. Therefore, if you were moving money to Arbitrum, you were likely planning on leaving it there for a while.
In this vein, as a founder when you look to the future, you need to plan on vertical accumulation of demand as well. At some point, if you have a wildly successful metaverse or busting at the seams perp DEX, and the chain is congested with non-native protocol txs that are affecting UX, then the most sensible course of action is to have your own app-specific blockchain. It simply will just make little sense if you have a thriving ecosystem of games with a community of players embracing a universal game token (MAGIC) to forfeit customization (more levers) and UX. Notice the pre-requisites here→ volume, users, PMF → then chain.
How things are currently trending, it’s pretty clear to me most L1 NFT volume will struggle to survive. The future of NFTs is on L2 and it is not going to look like an abundance of lending markets or floor perps. DeFi is not going to look like traditional finance and NFTs are not going to look like DeFi. They will all be wrapped up in this DeFi 3.0 hydra called GameFi.
That’s why, if you’ve noticed that up until now I haven’t even used the most popular saying to describe TreasureDAO as the “Decentralized Nintendo” because as much as believe it to be true! I also find it woefully understates what is being built here.
If successful, on the top layer, summarizing TreasureDAO as a decentralized game console will be the perfect comparison. But under the hood, MAGIC, Treasures, Legions, Bridgeworld, Trove, and as of most recently, MagicSwap, a MAGIC-based DEX (did someone say more DAO revenue?) for in-game tokens, all come together to create a very intricate, vertically-integrated and well-thought out DeFi colossus.
If you are betting on TreasureDAO, you are betting on infrastructure. If you are holding MAGIC, you are holding an L1 token.
Most people mid curve the absolute hell out of MAGIC because of how complex the flywheel is and sum up the whole project under the P2E narrative. Their loss. I legit only mentioned the bare complexities of Bridgeworld in this piece and basically completely ignored all the other projects who integrate MAGIC into their native design as well. The beauty of this complexity, is that one can make the whole wheel spin, and another can make it go faster, but no single broken spoke may stop the wheel because what holds it in place is a community and team of incredible humans. And when it comes to TreasureDAO, I’d say that this is its deepest strength.
No matter which way you cut it, every great growth story has some key elements to it: serendipity; divine intervention; pristine vision; economic alignment; solid hardware; organizational prowess; giga-brain high-EQ team; and the most vital ingredient as it pertains to our story with TreasureDAO that I will explore next and more--a cornerstone of fervent, delusional, 10-billion-or-bust believers who are ready to weather any hurdles along the way.
If you’ve stuck with me this far, thank you.
Writing this series has been a giant experiment for me and a leap of faith. I really hope it’s a foundation set of information that newcomers will find helpful over the coming years. In Part 3, I’ll look at what I think the key component to TreasureDAO’s value prop is and why it’s rare in crypto while trying to stay as unbiased as I can. On that note though, I would like to restate:
I own MAGIC. It is my biggest bet. I am extremely biased.
ANYONE who owns an asset, directly or indirectly, and would be benefited by the price appreciation of said asset, IS BIASED. I am speaking directly to you Michael Saylor.
When you encounter research, the question of whether the author has ulterior motives for writing said information should always be present, particularly on CT. In a sea of blue checks, the perception of credibility is more easy to fabricate than it ever has been thanks to our shortening attention span and advancement of AI. Meanwhile, most of us must also trust centralized entities if we want to maneuver through life with some grace because that’s how this societal racket is set up.
Once more I return to the meta for this series--the message is the medium.
It is how and where we eat our data that acts as our Achilles heel in this day and age, more so than what we decide to digest. Subconsciously anon, Twitter has conditioned us to reduce most of our investigation to a surface level feed, like a goldfish awaiting freeze-dried sustenance from the gods on the surface; to conform our thoughts and trades to the iron fist of the algorithms, that force us to pray to what is most controversial vs. what is most noteworthy; and in the process, we further distort the true reality of all being--which is endless, timeless, infinite love--via these vacillating portals of consciousness that numb our egos down to a single clickable heart.
We collectively gaslight ourselves in real-time. FOMO is a completely contemporary psychological phenomena. You used to believe in God or just be grateful to be alive. You weren’t surrounded by a thousand mirrors. This births a paradox with Twitter more than other social media, evident most in the microcosm of CT where we are constantly five years ahead and have also completely lost the plot simultaneously, all the time. Crypto is the future. It’s also a scam. This perceived duality is enough to make anyone insane. Then you throw in the market. But I digress.
If you are new to crypto, I hope these essays give you a glimpse at the depth of thought that goes into making a high conviction bet. Sure you can just bet on number go up. There is alpha in the left curve.
But nothing will grant you undisturbed sleep more than doing your homework and constantly evolving a mental model of the future. This is why HODL exists. It’s a memetic representation of the logos beneath Bitcoin. Unlike BTC though, and because the future is perpetually not here, every outlook is subject to change. The point of doing your due diligence is so that you know at what points the bet does change, what is noise, and when you must pivot.