Fantasy.Top is on the rise: a content monetization experiment combining fantasy sports with cryptocurrency influencers.

Author: Zen, PANews

Recently, amidst the low market heat, Fantasy.Top on the Ethereum Layer 2 network Blast has driven a surge in trading volume and become one of the most profitable protocols or applications in the entire cryptocurrency field. On May 8th, according to The Block, Fantasy.top ranked sixth among cryptocurrency protocols based on fees and generated revenue; according to the on-chain data analysis platform Parsec, Fantasy.Top has consistently topped the Blast by Gas trend contract list since its launch. As of May 9th, 60,000 card packs (300,000 cards) have been minted, with 224,000 cards traded on the secondary market; treasury receipts amount to $10 million, with nearly 800,000 BlastGold distributed for the first time, of which 292,000 were allocated to players.

Fantasy.Top: A card game combining SocialFi and fantasy sports

Fantasy.Top is a SocialFi collectible card game (TCG) launched on the Blast mainnet by the creator known as Travis Bickle on May 1st. The project initially attracted attention from the crypto community, becoming one of the 47 winning projects of the BIG BANG competition launched by Blast. Blast referred to Fantasy.Top in its announcement as a game that "combines fantasy games and SocialFi, collecting cards of crypto Twitter influencers and rewarding them based on their weekly performance on X."

Similar to the Ethereum fantasy football game Sorare, players need to collect influencer cards through pack openings or market purchases, requiring at least 5 cards to complete a match lineup. By creating their fantasy lineup in tournaments, players will determine the scores of these "heroes" based on their social engagement on the X platform to earn points and rewards. Each card pack contains 5 cards, priced dynamically based on demand, with prices around 0.4 ETH, approximately $1200 as of May 10th.

Based on the Crypto Twitter community, the game features over 100 unique "hero" cards based on well-known traders, investors, analysts, and content creators in the crypto industry, including Blast founder Pacman, trader Ansem, "Brother Ma Ji" Huang Lizheng, and Su Zhu, co-founder of Three Arrows Capital.

The hero cards are categorized as common, rare, epic, and legendary, with a leveling mechanism where owning the same 5 cards allows for fusion and upgrades. Additionally, each card has three scoring indicators, with stars representing their score potential based on last week's performance, and the two numbers below from left to right representing the scores based on various Twitter-related metrics over the past 7 days and current ranking. These reference indicators help players make lineup decisions.

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 of over 31,000 users. As Fantasy.Top's popularity rises, card prices soar. On May 6th, a Pacman Blur card was sold for 18.9 ETH. The seller accidentally upgraded the card from rare to legendary when upgrading from rare to epic, costing only 2.6 ETH, resulting in a profit of 16.3 ETH. The project, with increased revenue, also provided a generous prize pool for the first "main competition," including over $150,000 worth of Ethereum (50 ETH), airdropped distribution of 222,222 Blast Gold, as well as card packs and other in-game rewards.

Alternative monetization of KOL-created content

Fantasy.Top aims 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 monetizes their influence. However, the advantage of Fantasy.Top's reward mechanism lies in its complete reliance on the traditional social media space of TwitterCrypto, where influencers or creators do not need to create additional content on different platforms but only need to interact on the X platform, continuing to do what they have been doing for years.

Notably, on the evening of May 10th, another recently popular Web3 social platform, Friend.Tech, officially announced that all Fantasy.Top users share a total of $3 million worth of Blast Gold, with individual users already earning $2 million worth of ETH, a different approach to building. Subsequently, Fantasy.Top founder Travis Bickle retweeted and replied, "We need to work harder." Currently, Friend.Tech has deleted this tweet.

As the main characters in the game, these "heroes" earn a 1.5% fee from the trading of their cards, and 10% of all card pack sales revenue is allocated to them. In the first week, all heroes collectively received 409 ETH, approximately $1.25 million in bonuses, with 300 ETH from card pack set sales and 109 ETH from the card trading market. On average, each hero also received an additional 7,500 FAN points, which may be used for future airdrops.

In the first week, the highest-earning content creator, Jenn Duong, received 6.7 ETH, approximately $20,500 in rewards, and is also a problematic "hero." Last weekend, Duong noticed unusually high engagement on one of her Twitter videos and voluntarily set her Twitter account to private. She expressed concerns that users were "manipulating" her content or artificially increasing engagement, fearing potential issues for her game.

Due to the presence of automated bots, the total social media engagement of many "heroes" has been manipulated and artificially increased. Therefore, on May 9th, Fantasy.Top prematurely ended the "main competition" and will address such issues by applying anti-bot systems to better identify interactions driven by bots, distinguish replies and main tweets, reduce differences between heroes, and more.

How long can viral spread last?

In the current market cooling trend, Fantasy.Top's sudden rise undoubtedly demonstrates significant growth potential and momentum. From the core game design perspective, its user profile mainly consists of native crypto community members on Twitter. While many crypto-related projects are calling for mass adoption, Fantasy.Top focuses entirely on the crypto community and cleverly leverages the industry influence of crypto KOLs.

However, besides the need for the project to eliminate malicious bot disruptions, whether it can establish a fair competitive system requires long-term observation. The combination of crypto Twitter influencers and NFT games, along with design mechanisms hinting at winner-takes-all, also raises concerns in the community that the project may be just a short-term hype. Some players indicated that upon discovering Fantasy.Top as a whale game, they sold their cards and left the game. After the free and discounted pack activities of Fantasy.Top ended, the high card pack prices deterred casual players, leading to a significant decrease in card minting. Additionally, many players provided feedback that they inexplicably gained or lost cards in the game, suggesting potential frontend issues.

In conclusion, the viral spread of Fantasy.Top has only just begun, and this crypto newcomer still has many issues to address. Will it continue the frenzy or return to calm after the excitement? PANews will continue to monitor its future.