Blankos: My Thesis

Running some early numbers

I’ve always been long on Mythical Games’ Blankos Block Party.

The founding team is very experienced, having worked on some of the most successful games ever. It’s well capitalised: its recent $75 million raise takes its total to $120 million.

Also, Blankos can be viewed as Mythical’s Trojan Horse.

It’s building its own complete blockchain gaming stack for other developers to use — hence the funding’s scale. In that context, Blankos is it ‘eating its own dog food’.

And for that reason, Mythical has a strong incentive to make Blankos Block Party a success.

But this is merely the foundational rationale.

Player-first

Equally important, Blankos is the first game using blockchain with the possibility of mass appeal by which I mean more than a million real players.

Partly this a byproduct of Mythical’s funding and experience. For example, Blankos is the only blockchain game marketed through traditional channels as its appearance in the official E3 Twitch stream this week demonstrates.

In terms of its users, it also pretty much ignores any mention of ‘blockchain’, although it was interesting to hear Mythical talking specifically about the environmental chops of its particular tech. Clearly it believes ‘blockchain’ now has some negative connotations for its target audience in terms of energy usage etc.

More generally, however, the talk is of the opportunity for player-led economies.

Indeed, Mythical airdropped a free NFT Blankos character via the E3 livestream that’s been claimed by over 2,500 players and is currently selling for $110 on the Alpha version of the marketplace.

That takes the total number of unique Blankos NFTs currently available to 40, with many more to come as announced partnerships with Burberry, deadmau5, Michael Lua, Quiccs, El Grand Chamaco, Thomas Han and The Marathon Clothing demonstrates.

But some numbers…

A conservative calculation suggests Blankos already has a minimum market capitalisation of over $30 million, with individual NFT prices ranging from $20 to highly speculative six-digit asks for some of the rarer examples.

(The total supply of each Blankos NFT is fixed, ranging from 1 to 5,000 per character: currently there are just under 100,000 NFTs minted in total.)

The minimum price/issuance distribution is as below.

And if you’re really interested, I take a deep dive into the price distribution for some individual Blankos in this video. (Note the marketplace is currently over-supplied/under-demanded; hence the weird pricing.)

Of course, nothing is certain and this is not investment advice.

But having experienced the rise of projects such as NBA Top Shot ($620 million GMV) CryptoPunks ($353 million), Axie Infinity ($92 million), etc with a certain amount of in-game skin, I feel Blankos has the potential to follow a similar trajectory.

Indeed, you could argue it already is.

For example, you’d invested in the four Founders Packs launched in October 2020 (total cost $325), in nominal terms, you’d be up over 500% if you’d spent all the in-game currency that was part of the bundle buying additional NFTs.

I think it’s hard to argue such price velocity won’t continue as the game and marketplace scales.

Blankos Block Party is free-to-play and in early access for PC. You can also access the shop online via browser. The marketplace is in Alpha testing but currently invite only.