Will Magic be the next Nintendo?

13 min readMar 24

Recently, the airdrop of Arbitrum has gained attention from many cryptocurrency investors, and sparked curiosity about the Arbitrum ecosystem. This article will introduce TreasureDAO, one of the most important GameFi and NFT markets in the Arbitrum ecosystem.

If you have been involved in the GameFi or NFT market for some time, you may know about The Beacon, a game that became popular in December of last year. Despite having no official promotion at the time, the game attracted over 20,000 players in just 9 days, and the purchase of the game’s genesis character NFTs was close to 35,000 times (each genesis character priced at 0.031E). This contrasted sharply with the market environment at the time, where the prices of NFTs released by many chain games with financing of over tens of millions of dollars opened at their peak, and some public sales did not even sell all of their limited 10,000 NFT collections. Since The Beacon was incubated by TreasureDAO, the daily active users of Treasure’s ecosystem have continued to grow. The various characters and equipment in the game are priced in TreasureDAO’s token, MAGIC, and the market has gained information and expectations about MAGIC, driving its price to rise.

This article will take you through the origin, economic model, community, ecological projects, and future development of TreasureDAO.

Origin: The Loot Ecosystem

Many early adopters of GameFi or NFT projects may remember the launch of Don Hoffman’s Loot project in August 2021. A black and white NFT text file with 8 phrases that players could freely interpret, swept through the cryptocurrency market and captured most of the attention in the NFT market at the time. This was the first free minting NFT project that adopted a bottom-up world-building approach, inspiring many NFT projects such as More Loot, AGLD, Realms, Quests, LootMart, and others. However, over time, most of these projects gradually faded from the market view due to a lack of development progress or pessimistic development prospects.

September 2021: Officially launched with a focus on serving the gaming ecosystem and community

Treasure is one of these projects, initiated by John Patten and Yuta in September 2021, with a core theme of community-centricity. It provides the community with free minting of Genesis NFT Treasure Cards and distributed some to the Loot community. Within a month of its release, Treasure created its first revenue protocol “Magic Farm” and added Legions NFT to its incentive program. Unlike other projects, Treasure iterates faster than any other Loot project, and every item (Legions NFT, MAGIC token, etc.) in the Treasure ecosystem is distributed for free. Other collectibles on the Treasure market are also distributed for free and fairly. It sets a long-term goal of creating a place with a loyal community where game developers can build on top of it.

November 2021: Migrated to Arbitrum and launched the first NFT market

Treasure was originally built on the Ethereum mainnet, but later migrated to L2 layer Arbitrum chain because the Ethereum network gas costs were too high at the time. This was also when the team realized that if they wanted to influence the gaming community in their unique bottom-up way, they had to do so. Aribitrum became the new home of the TreasureDao ecosystem. Treasure officially transitioned to Arbitrum in October 2021 and launched the first NFT market on Arbitrum, the Treasure Market (later renamed Trove), in November 2021. Treasure incentivized this transition with Legions NFT as a reward.

February 2022: The first flagship game, Bridgeworld

Bridgeworld reflects Treasure’s early game concept. It is a strategy game that revolves around mining, farming, summoning, exploration, and more gamified DeFi actions. Atlas Mine is the staking protocol in Bridgeworld that rewards $MAGIC based on quantity, time, and NFT boosts (such as Legions and Treasures). It builds an interconnected economy on top of $MAGIC, Legions NFT, and Treasure NFT, aiming to guide the Treasure ecosystem.

April 2022: Key improvement of introducing external partners instead of relying solely on core contributors

Soon, the Treasure team realized that building a finance-centered ecosystem alone was not enough. Players themselves are the key. To achieve the vision of becoming a decentralized gaming hub, Treasure began to focus on building physical games and introducing experienced game developers. In April 2022, it announced a collaboration with Strider, a team of seasoned professionals in the gaming industry, to build games in Treasureverse. It was also at this time that Treasure decided to extend the Treasure system to collaborative projects, rather than relying solely on core contributors.

June 2022: Rebranding

In order to enhance the ability of builders, Treasure has determined 3 key layers, namely magazine layer (the game and Materverses project), community layer (Treasure’s sub community and community connection) and infrastructure layer, which shows that Treasure is confident enough to build the first decentralized gaming platform and reform the next-gen games. Take the market of Trove for example, previously, Treasure had once planned to divide the two markets separately by applying the market of Trove into the overall trading activities of Arbitrum NFT denominated in $ETH and the market of Treasure into that of Treasureverse denominated in $MAGIC only. However, at this stage, the team is more confident that the market of Trove will become the core market on Arbitrum and L2. Hence, the team has decided to combine the two markets into one and provide a unified trading experience without differentiating between Treasure ecosystem and external ecosystem.

ABOUT TREASURE

The decentralized ‘Nintendo’

Treasure is building the decentralized gaming ecosystem to transform game publishing.

Games: Games built from the ground up by Treasure and seasoned builders, all connected by MAGIC.
Community: Composite of many smaller communities, connected through lore, guilds, resources, and MAGIC.
Infrastructure: The shared economic engine, tooling and resources that powers the ecosystem and empowers builders.

All connected by a dual resource model:

$Magic Powers everything
NFTs as composable resources

Games

Bridge world

Bridgeworld is known as a strategic game that involves business, trading and governance. By integrating many DeFi concepts, the game has also built a broader metaverse connected by resources and storytelling, which is known as the center of Treasure metaverse.

Legions, Treasures and other native NFTs of Bridgeworld have played crucial roles in the first season of Bridgeworld. The players may stake their Legions Treasures and consumables to nurture their roles, construct their stories and improve the efficiency of mining MAGIC. In detail, the players may send their Legions to summon more Legions, search for dropped items (such as Essences of Starlight, Treasures), use Treasures to produce consumables and mine MAGIC.

By building Legions in the camp with 10 MAGIC, the players may explore the world of Bridgeworld and Treasure ecosystem. Through the process of exploration, the players may obtain rewards for experience and dropped items, and the dropped items may be used to consolidate Legions. Legions can be combined and converted into rare and valuable consumables through the combinations of rewards by accumulating tasks in Forge, which will be helpful for players to explore further, and that the players may summon further Legions as well. Please note that the number of genesis Legions are limited, and that genesis Legions are divided into many levels as well.

The Harvesters searches and consumes the MAGIC of players in the world of Bridgeworld. Atlas mining field is known as the major mining field of Bridgeworld, in which the players may deposit their MAGIC and start mining more MAGIC, with the period of deposit ranging from two weeks to one year, and that the length of the period of deposit is in proportion to the number of MAGIC mined.

By creating trade union and sub-DAO, Bridgeworld manages to encourage community adjustments and realize the collective strategies regarding resource accumulation and optimization, including the entry of new players.

Smolverse

Smolverse is known as an interesting and dynamic NFT project and community built on Arbitrum L2. Known as the flagship product of Smolverse, Smol Brains has attracted many holders including Gary Vee and Mario Goetze. Since the free minting event started on October 2021, Smolverse has already developed into a cultural movement with great potentials of intellectual property rights and branding and attracted many artists, architects, storytellers, meme creators and hardcore fans. Within only 10 months, Smolverse has already realized approximately USD$ 73 million worth of market trading volume on L2 and accumulated 45,000 Twitter fans and 16,000 Discord members. Smol team plans to continue bringing these interesting and attractive on-chain activities for Smol community while bringing functionality and rewards for Smol holders. The prospect of Smol team is to make Smol become an interesting product of a super brand that expands beyond the boundary of cryptocurrency and into the mainstream world. Recently, by collaborating with Strider (former AAA gaming company), Smol team will establish the Hi-Fi game Smolville on Smolverse.

Until recently, TreasureDAO has incubated more than 10 games such as The Beacon, talesofelleria, toadstoolz, knightsoftheether and Realm, with The Beacon being the most popular games among all. Known as an action/fantasy game that integrated Roughlite element, the players may obtain the role either for free or by paying fees, then enter the underground city for adventure or enter the pub and answer questions, with both activities mentioned above trigger dropped items. By obtaining dropped items through adventure, the paying users may sell such items.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Trove Marketplace

Trove is the NFT marketplace that personalizes and gamifies your experience as a collector, gamer, and trader. Built for the universe in and around the TreasureDAO ecosystem.

Denominated in both ETH and $MAGIC (the native token of the TreasureDAO ecosystem), Trove will offer:

Personalization and gamification as the new meta: Trove will be a pseudo game that sits atop an NFT marketplace with connections into the rest of what is being built within the TreasureDAO ecosystem (games and infrastructure). These interwoven gamification mechanics will help capture attention and interest while rewarding loyalty through a badge and achievement system, leaderboards, EXP, user levels, and more.
Tools to empower good and active participants: Tied to the elements of gamification, upstanding participants within the ecosystem (collectors and collection owners) will be able to tap into analytics, rarity, and other useful tools that will be deeply integrated directly into the marketplace.
Strong communities and economies of scale: Projects and collections on Trove will be able to tap into a loyal and highly engaged community from day one through TreasureDAO. User acquisition will be supported by TreasureDAO as a whole to help drive interest to collections listed on Trove.

Like its predecessor, the Treasure Marketplace, the $MAGIC-denominated section of Trove will continue to be curated and reserved for deeply integrated projects that undergo the Ecosystem Integration Framework. The generalized ETH-denominated section of Trove is initially curated by members of the DAO council.

MagicSwap(AMM)

MagicSwap V2 may be the game changer for the next stage of Treasure economy, as it not only applies to ERC20 tokens, but also allows projects to create and use ERC-1155 as the pool of basic transaction pairs, which resembles Sudoswap. What’s more, apart from creating NFT for better liquidity solutions, the game developers may also create interesting trading rules by using MagicSwap without providing direct exchanging paths for users.

MagicSwap strives to create a more balanced and dynamic financial system and provide NFT transactions with frictionless experience. By adopting $MAGIC as governance and fee token, MagicSwap protocol will charge 0.5% of transaction fee for all transactions conducted in MagicSwap pool. Please refer to the picture below for the status of the two liquidity pools of the latest game:

Top Magicswap Pools by 24h Transaction | GeckoTerminal

Source：https://twitter.com/jpatten__/status/1618354732678144006?s=20&t=3iY2HxApqNpjIUGu5CxEUQ

TreasureTags

TreasureTag (User Tag) is a free and soul-bound (nontransferable) player code that will serve as the foundation of player’s information, identity and reputation in the whole Treasure gaming ecosystem, with further interoperable functions regarding user cohesiveness and loyalty to be launched in the future for the purpose of strengthening the connections among the game, the community and players, such as points system, badges and achievements etc. The social graph may activate all gaming activities in the ecosystem through recommendations or finishing tasks etc. Until recently, only after two weeks of its launch, the system had already accumulated more than 46,000 registered user tags.

Treasure Create

Treasure Create is known as a plan that aims at nurturing the top video content creators in Treasure ecosystem, the plan can be summarized as below in detail:

Treasure Create

Treasure Create is known as a plan that aims at nurturing the top video content creators in Treasure ecosystem, the plan can be summarized as below in detail:

1. The plan is known as an elite plan that aims at recognizing the top video content creators in Treasure ecosystem.

2. As an official Treasure Creator, the content creators may utilize Treasure’s large user group of 150,000+ players and games for more opportunities of exposure and obtain their exclusive allowlists, objects in the game, early opportunities of testing the games and collaborating with other creators.

3. The aim of the plan is to officially recognize the fully talented and passionate video content creators of Treasure community, establish tight connections between Treasure game and active content creators, encourage the cooperation among members of of Treasure Create community and provide unique opportunities of participation in the entire ecosystem.

4. The bonuses provided for content creators include: obtaining designated objects of the game and rewards, early opportunities of testing games, promoting through official Treasure channels, unique Trove Creator badges (based on blockchain), unique Discord Creator Role and gain access to the private creators’ channels in Treasure Partners Discord for establishing connections with other creators.

What is $MAGIC?

MAGIC is known as the token of Treasure, with the total supply of 350,000,000 MAGIC. MAGIC’s issuing method resembles that of Bitcoin’s halving method, but the halving of MAGIC tokens occurs once every year instead of once every four years. Among all released MAGIC tokens, 33% of which will be used for Treasure farm, 25% for mining purpose, 17% for staking incentives and liquidity providers, 15% for the fund of ecosystem, and 10% will be allocated to team development.

Future MAGIC emissions will be distributed at the following ratios:

MAGIC emission mimics Bitcoin’s halving, but this event occurs every year as opposed to every four years. The total supply will be ~350,000,000 tokens.

TreasureDAO is a NFT gaming ecosystem. Since the launch of TreasureDAO, its founders has been focusing on liquidity and tokenomics. The founders of TreasureDAO designs $MAGIC in the form of a type of resource token which resembles ETH instead of governance tokens without any actual uses, and the users must stake $MAGIC to obtain incomes from the ecosystem, which is a very creative design. Apart from that, by using NFT as underlying assets, TreasureDAO has also designed the economy model of dual-resource, and that in order to obtain new gaming tools, the users must stake two NFT and $MAGIC at the same time, which also laid the foundation for Bridgeworld in its early stage.

Known as the only token that can be applied to the entire TreasureDAO ecosystem, $MAGIC undertakes the functions of governance and fee tokens and serves as the core resource for connecting various gaming communities. TreasureDAO encourages game developers to build their own economy systems and provides ecosystem-level support without restricting them to issue their own tokens. The competition for underlying assets (such as Harvester Takeovers) involves the use of $MAGIC, as it provides opportunities for all games to compete for obtaining more user traffic and further resources. Harvester may also be the only channel that generates $MAGIC. Apart from that, $MAGIC can also be used as grant or incentive assets for early stage investments to promote the development of the games.

As the proposal of TIP23 has already been approved by the voting system, the redistribution of tokens will be triggered, and the era of obtaining tokens through passive staking will be terminated. TreasureDAO will launch further incentive plans for game development and provide rewards for contributors of its ecosystem and excellent game developers. By marching towards the sustainable and game-oriented pattern of growth, TreasureDAO is set to become the leader and trailblazer that shift from over-financialized NFT-Fi games into Web3 games, which is also an important milestone for TreasureDAO to attract further famous game studios and AA game developers to participate in its team.

Summary

TreasureDAO is currently known as one of the top 3 projects among all gaming platforms (IMX, GALA, MAGIC) that enjoys a certain reputation in Arbitrum ecosystem and popularity among players’ communities. Trove’s supporting industry has also gained the attention of a certain number of users on MagicSwap, with further games to be launched online in the future as well. Overall, at least until our observation recently, TreasureDAO is one of the very promising projects. However, there are still many existing problems in the projects of gaming section that require long-term observations and in-depth investigations.

Currently, TreasureDAO has taken the lead in Arbitrum ecosystem and established a players’ community with quite a large number of users. However, their advantages over other projects are not really overwhelming. In case that there are more successful games in the future, the advantageous position of TreasureDAO may face challenges.

Nevertheless, the field of GameFi is still the mainstream trend for the future, and that the products of gaming and social communication are also tend to be the popular products of Web3. Currently, Arbitrum is the first choice for L2, as it possesses a powerful ecosystem, community and TVL. By publishing games on Arbitrum, teams and individuals may obtain further attention and user participation, or even greater opportunities of success.

Overall, TreasureDAO currently enjoys a very advantageous position. However, their destiny is determined by the question of whether they can launch successful products, which we will keep an eye on in the future.

Where To Buy MAGIC?

MAGIC can be purchased through several popular exchanges including Hotbit. Purchasing MAGIC through Hotbit is a comparatively rapid process which includes only several simple steps. The first step is to register a Hotbit account (in case you don’t have one). After finishing the registration, you may continue to trade through the transaction pair of the spot trading function of MAGIC/USDT.

Hotbit Register

MAGIC/USDT | Hotbit