6 points: A Thesis for TreasureDAO
The makings of a Web3.0 videogame conglomerate
Introduction
TreasureDAO began as a derivative of the Loot project, and first launched with a 10K NFT drop in August 2021, As the community began to grow and a hierarchy of contributors began to form, TreasureDAO introduced the $MAGIC token in September and began developing its roadmap for the future.
One can think of TreasureDAO using two mental models: First, as a decentralized game publishing platform whereby the Treasure ecosystem provides the tools and resources for developers to build, launch, and monetize games in web3.0 form. Second, as a base economic control layer for other games to build on so they may outsource the drudgery of economic management to TreasureDAO. The project began on Ethereum but is now home to Arbitrum after migrating in October last year.
Let’s think about TreasureDAO from first-principles, and what role it fits in the future of Web3.0 gaming
Driven by token incentives, some form of interoperability at the gameplay level will inevitably emerge over the next few years, and a central coordinating body like TreasureDAO is needed for this to happen.
The concept of digital convergence, where media assets and in-game tooling are shared across development teams working on the same sort of fictional universe has been a key business target, but never took off in practice because of differences in the tech stack used by different game studios designing games under the same “universe”, and the lack of a unifying incentive to do so.
Because the Treasure Ecosystem is built bottom-up, and forms around the single $MAGIC token, developers build with composability in mind, the same way smart contracts are built atop each other like legos in DeFi.
Studios can harness each others’ work, say internal tooling programmes for designing skins, algorithms for NPCs, or backpacking off another game’s lore.
Interoperability advances from the code implementation layer to the gaming layer itself. This takes the form of
Narrative overlap
Media & rich content sharing
Similarities in gameplay
Asset utility transferability
Noticeably, because the gaming layer is not written in code, composability cannot be guaranteed computationally, but guaranteed by a central entity like TreasureDAO that pushes this narrative forward
Underpinning this interoperability is the need for a Web3.0 native game distributor that specializes in managing the economic layer of a game, a need that can be filled by Treasure.
A traditional game retailer like Microsoft Store/GOG takes around 30% of the sales revenue from a game studio, simply for hosting data on servers and providing a platform to connect games to players.
Small teams and self-start developers are most in need of distributorship agreements – more than 55% of games published on Steam are indie games. The heavy-lifting of managing a token economy and on-off ramping players into crypto will likely be serviced by a Web3.0 distributor
With TreasureDAO’s management, game developers don’t need to worry about capital outflow, excessive rent-seeking, transaction token exchange rate depreciation, or the optimizing of interest rate parameters, and can focus on world/community-building instead.
Multiple games integrating MAGIC are already in development: Life (MMO), BattleFly (PVP), Peek-A-Boo! (Battleship game w/ their own token).
This capture puts TreasureDAO in a front-runner position to become a storefront for Web3.0 games, akin to Steam or Nintendo.
TreasureDAO does not gamify finance, but is a game of finance itself, a one-of-a-kind premise.
While there have been games that gamify the process of interacting with DeFi (See DeFiland), or governance and contributorship (i.e do tasks or vote to advance in a game), no game has yet been able to properly gamify the distribution of liquidity and yield itself. Bridgeworld, Treasure’s main game, is essentially designed to make participants, or groups of participants (guilds) to fight to “win” over protocol emissions of $MAGIC.
This is different from how people are rewarded via earning returns when you complete a daily quest in a PvE context, or winning in-game items in a PvP context. In Treasure, fighting for control for the $MAGIC emissions, like protocols fighting over Curve emissions, is the game itself.
Much of the narrative of Treasure surrounds that idea, and its founder has suggested using liquidity as an input to influence game weather or game time, and using liquidity as a means to spatial exploration (pool tokens to unlock maps).
The concept has proven to be engaging, with over 23,000 discord members and at least 7 guilds in active development on TreasureDAO.
Community-driven game development is a key flywheel for growth, and TreasureDAO can harness this better than other projects.
Working alongside communities, game designers can consistently iterate over to find what is fun, engaging, or appealing to the community at a lower release cost.
This was clearly reflected in TreasureDAO’s recent Pilgrimage update, which changed the visuals of the Genesis Legions (the rarest item in game, can no longer be minted). Many complained they preferred the earlier visuals, and the floor price fell from around 14,000 $MAGIC to 11,500 $MAGIC. The team worked to switch the visuals within a few days. The floor of a Genesis Legion is now 19000 $MAGIC.
This positive feedback loop can only be harnessed if there is a central coordinating team driving the project forward. The Loot project, in contrast, lacks a central vision, token, and leadership to unify community members. There are interesting projects like Rings, but most are fragmented and building in different directions.
The difference in development speed and player growth is stark: Treasure launched shortly after Loot August 2021, and there are already 10 games building on the Treasure Ecosystem. Loot’s development activity so far has been limited to JPEG derivatives and visualizations. There is no live quest (ie game) yet.
TreasureDAO owns/develops a suite of NFT/DeFi products and services ensure that they can rapidly pivot in alternative business directions.
Treasure’s marketplace did around 110 Mil USD in volume in the around January, higher than 79.2 Mil on OpenSea Polygon.
At a take rate of 2.5% for TreasureDAO, that amounts to 33 Mil USD revenue per year, which is conservative estimate.
The Treasure team is ready to launch Trove, a generic marketplace where NFTs paired in ETH and not MAGIC, in a few weeks time. With sufficiently strong branding and mind-capture in the NFT community, it is not unlikely Treasure becomes the dominant marketplace on Arbitrum, and this growth should be priced in.
With proper treasury management, Treasure is well-positioned to develop a venture capital financing arm or act as a SPAC to acquire other games and their in-game assets.
TreasureDAO’s final state could be a credibly neutral metaverse that presides over the economics of other games. It becomes, in a sense, the “god-layer” for games that build upon it, where it, via a combination of hardcoded algorithms or community input, determines weather conditions, the allocation of resources (drops) to players, and the pseudo-randomness of enemy strength and its attacks.
Amazing Analysis, truly shows how vast and wide the treasure ecosystem can become.