A detailed explanation of TreasureDAO behind the phenomenal game The Beacon

This article explains in detail the origin, economic model, community, ecological projects and future development of TreasureDAO.

Written by: Wu Hai

Recently, a game called The Beacon on the Arbitrum chain suddenly became popular, and various communities and social media began to discuss it a lot. According to the data panel on Dune, as of December 6, 20,027 players entered The Beacon, and the number of NFT purchases of the game's founding characters reached 34,394 times (0.031E per founding character).

This is the premise that the game has only been online for 9 days and the official has not carried out any promotional activities. On the contrary, in the current market environment, many blockchain games with financing of more than 10 million US dollars have launched NFTs at the peak of the floor price at the opening. What's more, the limited 10,000 NFT collections have not been sold out after the public sale.

The Beacon was incubated by TreasureDAO. The data panel on Dune shows that the daily active users of the Treasure ecosystem have increased from about 1,500 to about 6,000, and the number of new users has increased by an average of 2,000 per day recently. A series of characters and equipment generated in the game are also priced in TreasureDAO's token MAGIC. The market's confidence and expectations for MAGIC have increased, and TreasureDAO's token MAGIC has also risen by 200% relative to the bottom.

In this article, PANews will explain in detail the origin, economic model, community, ecological projects and future development of TreasureDAO.

Origin of Loot Ecosystem

Many community users should remember that in August 2021, a black background with white text and 8 phrases consisting of an NFT text file for players to play freely swept the cryptocurrency circle. It was called Loot, and it almost occupied all the attention in the market during that time, and the floor price also soared from freemint to 20 ETH. Then a large number of derivative projects and imitations of Loot appeared, but as time went on, most of these projects gradually withdrew from the market due to no development progress or unoptimistic development progress.

But one of the derivative projects, called Treasure, is unique and constantly making new progress. Treasure is a decentralized NFT ecosystem built specifically for metaverse projects. Treasure's goal is to guide the community to build a new, decentralized metaverse.

It was launched by the community in September 2021 in a community-driven, fair launch. Every item in the Treasure ecosystem (Legions NFT, MAGIC tokens, etc.) is distributed free of charge, and other collections on the Treasure market are also distributed free of charge and fairly. Treasure was originally built on the Ethereum mainnet, but later because the Ethereum network gas cost was high at the time, in order to lower the user threshold, Treasure migrated to the L2 Arbitrum chain.

MAGIC is the native token of Treasure and the only currency for Treasure market transactions. 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. Treasure DAO uses the proceeds from the release of MAGIC tokens to develop new projects and continue to support more mature projects.

TreasureDAO is governed by staked MAGIC holders and oversees the project. The DAO votes on which projects to join, MAGIC token allocations, and revenue sharing for the marketplace and protocol.

On December 23, 2021, Treasure DAO voted to approve a strategic partnership with 1kx. Treasure officially announced that it had received $3 million in financing led by 1kx, with participation from blockchain game guilds Merit Circle, blockchain game AcadArena, and Ready Player DAO, as well as Axie Infinity co-founder Jiho.

On September 16, 2022, Treasure DAO launched a proposal to sell $3.5 million of MAGIC, an ecological token. The token sale was led by Digital Strategies Guild, with participation from 1kx, Neon DAO, ID Theory, and other strategic partners such as new participants Arbitrum, IOSG, and Alchemy Ventures. The plan stipulates that participating institutions buy MAGIC at a price of $0.23, which will be released in two years after being locked for one year. The proposal has been voted through by the community.

Community Contributors Build the Team

The vast majority of Treasure’s team members come directly from the community. TreasureDAO establishes a framework through which the community can build alongside the team and be rewarded through MAGIC tokens for developing various key parts of the ecosystem. These incentives promote building a broader ecosystem and incentivize other communities to build on Treasure.

According to the official website of Treasure, there are currently 29 members involved in the construction of Treasure. Among them, there are 17 members responsible for products, and 10 members responsible for brand, marketing, and art. John Patten is the co-founder and CEO, and was the head of growth at Osmosis. Gaarp is the co-founder and is responsible for growth.

It is worth mentioning that on February 23, 2022, one of the community members who participated in the ecological contribution was exposed by the community for initiating or participating in many NFT projects that ran away. The complex backgrounds of community members are inevitable in DAO organizations, but the main affairs of the team are decided by the DAO, and it is difficult to have a serious negative impact on the participating projects themselves. However, as a DAO organization, it is also necessary to do more due diligence when absorbing team members. At the same time, team members can also be made public to allow a wider community to participate in supervision and due diligence.

Economic Model

Treasure's token is MAGIC, with a total supply of about 350 million. Its issuance method mimics Bitcoin's halving, but the halving of MAGIC tokens occurs once a year instead of every four years. 33% of the released tokens are used for Treasure farms, 25% for mining, 17% for incentives for staking and liquidity providers, 15% as an ecological fund, and 10% for team building.

According to the output model of MAGIC, MAGIC tokens will be released within 12 years after launch. According to blockchain browser data, the current circulation of MAGIC tokens is 254 million, and there are 260,000 addresses holding the tokens. Based on the price of $0.5535 at the time of writing, its circulation market value is $140 million, and the total circulation market value is $193 million.

According to the design of the Treasure ecosystem, MAGIC can be understood as the parent currency of all projects in its ecosystem, and each community project can launch its own sub-coin. Users can earn MAGIC tokens by playing games, mining, and participating in Bridgeworld (Bridgeworld is a strategy, trade, and domination game that is the center of the Treasure metaverse. The ecosystem section at the end of the article will introduce it in detail).

Treasure NFTs the liquidity pool in the ecosystem and integrates it into the game, calling it a crystal, holy grail, or other items related to the metaverse. This is why some users don’t even know that the items they are using are actually LP tokens. The advantage of doing this is that it guides users to deeply participate in the ecosystem. Users have invested time and energy in the process of obtaining item incentives, so that the incentive items are not just incentives, but also collectibles with time precipitation.

This mining process creates a virtuous cycle between MAGIC tokens and the Treasure ecosystem, turning the liquidity pool into a PVP game battle. In this process, MAGIC tokens are constantly staked or deposited in the liquidity pool, and the number of tokens in circulation decreases. As liquidity grows, its use cases and consensus continue to strengthen and expand outward, and it can become the basis for building derivatives and financial products, and thus be combined into DeFi products.

At the same time, the governance token of the Treasure ecosystem is no longer MAGIC, but NFT derived from the MAGIC token. According to Treasure's information on the off-chain governance voting platform Snapshot, only MAGIC holders who hold Bridgeworld Atlas Mine, Harvesters, and MAGIC-ETH SLP can use gMAGIC to vote.

The design of the MAGIC mining part creates high returns for users who are willing to lock up MAGIC tokens for a long time. These users play a key role in the liquidity of the protocol, but also put the initial tokens in a high inflation mode. However, according to Treasure’s official information, the high inflation of token release from the beginning is intentional to increase liquidity and create long-term sustainability.

MAGIC tokens are productive assets in the Treasure ecosystem that can capture ecological value. After the initial high inflation, the amount of MAGIC tokens released will decrease. If the Treasure ecosystem develops strongly, narrative expectations continue to increase, and multiple narratives jointly increase its network effect, MAGIC tokens will become increasingly scarce.

It can be seen that the design of Treasure avoids the vicious cycle of crude mining, withdrawal and selling that occurred in the process of DeFi 1.0 and 2.0. According to Coinmarketcap data, as of December 5, the trading volume of MAGIC tokens in the past 24 hours was 7.5 million US dollars, and its main trading markets were the decentralized exchange Sushiswap and the centralized exchange OKX. The current turnover rate and community consensus range are also relatively wide.

Ecological project introduction

The Treasure ecosystem has more than ten game and infrastructure projects. In this article, PANews will introduce you to several of the more important, interesting, and user-consensus-rich projects.

Trove

Trove is an NFT marketplace built for the metaverse within and around the TreasureDAO ecosystem. Trove implements a user-level experience system, where higher-level users can unlock different features and higher levels of product customization, including but not limited to profile or website personalization, decorations, etc.

Trove is tied to projects being built in the TreasureDAO ecosystem (games and infrastructure) and will help attract more attention and interest through intertwined gamification mechanics while rewarding loyalty through badge and achievement systems, leaderboards, EXP, user levels, etc. Trove users who hold Balancer Crystals (gamified MAGIC-ETH LP tokens) will be eligible for in-depth collection-level data including historical trading volume, reserve price changes, collection scores, and more.

The collections in the Trove market are divided into Treasure collections and Generalized collections. Treasure collections include but are not limited to games and metaverse projects, which are denominated in MAGIC. These projects are also integrated with the TreasureDAO ecosystem through integration with MAGIC. Generalized collections can be any form of NFT collections, including but not limited to profile pictures (PFP), Play to Earn (P2E), virtual worlds, access passes, art, photography, music, etc. This part of the collection is currently denominated in ETH, and the part integrated with MAGIC is shallow or almost non-existent.

Generalized collections are currently hand-selected by DAO committee members. According to official plans, Trove will allow unauthorized collections to be listed in the future, and plans to open up a multi-chain ecosystem in the future. The 2.5% handling fee generated by collections on the Trove market belongs to the DAO treasury. According to the blockchain data panel produced by TreasureDAO on Dune, the total transaction volume of the Trove market is 113 million MAGIC so far. That means TreasureDAO's current income is 2.82 million MAGIC.

Magicswap

Magicswap is a decentralized exchange in the Treasure ecosystem. Currently, only two trading pairs are listed: Magic/Gfly and Magic/ELM. Both projects are games supported by Treasure. The Magic/ELM liquidity pool is 548,000 US dollars, and the transaction volume in the past 24 hours is 60,000 US dollars; the Magic/Gfly liquidity pool is 554,000 US dollars, and the transaction volume in the past 24 hours is 63,000 US dollars.

Bridgeworld

Bridgeworld is a strategic business, trade, and domination game that incorporates many DeFi concepts while building a wider metaverse connected by resources and narratives that is at the center of the Treasure metaverse.

Legions, Treasures, and other NFTs native to Bridgeworld play a key role in Bridgeworld Season 1. Players can stake their Legions, Treasures, and consumables to develop characters, build stories, and increase the efficiency of mining MAGIC. Specifically, players can send Legions to summon more Legions, find drops (such as Essences of Starlight, Treasures), use Treasures to make consumables, and mine MAGIC.

Players can create Legions by going to the barracks and using 10 MAGICs. Then they can explore the Bridgeworld world and the Treasure ecosystem, gaining experience and drops during the exploration process. The drops can be used to strengthen Legions. Legions can combine the rewards accumulated through missions into rare and valuable consumables in the Forge, which will help their exploration process. Players can also summon more Legions. It should be noted that Genesis Legions are limited in supply and have multiple levels.

Harvesters search for and consume players' MAGIC in the Bridgeworld world. The Atlas Mine is the main mine in Bridgeworld, where players can deposit MAGIC to mine it. The deposit cycle ranges from two weeks to one year, and the deposit time is proportional to the amount of mining.

Bridgeworld incentivizes social coordination by forming guilds and sub-DAOs to achieve collective strategies around resource accumulation and optimization, including the onboarding of new players.

Incubate multiple games

TreasureDAO has currently incubated more than 10 games, including The Beacon, talesofelleria, toadstoolz, knightsoftheether, Realm, etc.

The most popular one is The Beacon mentioned above. The Beacon is a fantasy action game that incorporates Roughlite elements. Players can obtain characters for free or for a fee, and then enter dungeons for adventures or enter taverns to answer questions. Both types of actions can drop items. The dropped items obtained by the paid character after the adventure can be sold for profit.

According to the tweets of Gavin, a member of TreasureDAO Chinese community, Tales of Elleria is an RPG blockchain game, originally built on BNB chain, and later migrated to Treasure; toadstoolzNFT is a combination of community PFP and web games, with a high threshold for use. Rlmverse is a territory game, where users can explore and acquire new territories; BattleFlyGame is a key incubation project of TreasureDAO, which has raised tens of millions of dollars from the community alone, and the product quality still needs to be polished.

Summarize

In summary, TreasureDAO has designed two routes. One is to become a decentralized game publishing platform. TreasureDAO provides tools and resources for builders with ideas to help them build, publish games, and complete monetization. The second is to become the controller of the economic ecology of games within the ecosystem. All games built in the ecosystem are enabled by MAGIC, using MAGIC as a flywheel to increase the degree of decentralization and develop decentralized cryptoeconomic primitives that can serve as "real world" economic assets.

Currently, data and assets between most platforms are separated. Even though products built on blockchain have the inherent advantage of composability, they still operate independently, competing and playing in the stock. TreasureDAO's model innovation not only opens up the scalability and composability of in-game assets, but also opens up the composability of narratives of various projects because of its bottom-up construction method. When players play in the Treasure ecosystem, they can not only experience the utility of their personal assets that can be used across projects, but also feel the connection between stories.

In addition, TreasureDAO governance is a council composed of community tribes that obtain and own different NFTs, each with its own culture and philosophy. This is a very interesting experiment for the use case of NFTs - using NFTs as a new norm for project governance. This is in line with what PANews once mentioned in an article about how blockchain game projects can develop in the long term, which is to refine governance and allow community users who truly participate in the ecosystem to participate in governance through the NFTization of on-chain data, rather than being completely controlled by capital tycoons.

According to TreasureDAO's plan, it hopes that Treasure can become the mainstay product of the Arbitrum chain. At the same time, it will also regard Arbitrum as a stop on a long and ambitious journey, and therefore consider using the Cosmos SDK to create its own specific application chain one day. At that time, holders of Legions and Treasures can act as verification nodes; most of MAGIC's liquidity will be connected to the AMM-specific chain of the Treasure chain through IBC.

The Treasure ecosystem focuses on games, and the ecosystem and games empower each other, creating a virtuous cycle. In fact, Treasure uses items such as MAGIC to regulate and distribute the economic system cycle within the ecosystem. Isn’t this allocation process itself a game?