TON, tokens and deeper incentives
Weekly roundup
I started the week looking at the $20 million strategic partnership between Mocaverse and the TON Foundation, with the aim of making Mocaverse’s Realm Network available as a blockchain-wide identity and reputation layer for Telegram and TON’s growing numbers of hypercasual games.
And certainly as the week has progressed, there have been plenty of new potential partner games announced.
As well as Animoca’s own Crazy Rush Heroes, Delabs has launched Giga Chad Bat, while Spielworks has announced it will start the wider reboot of monster collection game Chainmonster with Telegraph-based Tapmonsters.
On a personal level, I’ve even been trying to play Catizen, which now claims 26 million users and $16 million in revenue, but I really can’t see the appeal of such simple experiences.
If nothing else, the monetization is borderline spammy and the only incentive is short term taps to get a token. That’s great for viral marketing now but we all know what happens when people get such airdrops. They sell and move on.
Tuesday was a dive into the way Boomland is airdropped Season 1 rewards to Hunters On-Chain players; something that’s made difficult because the game’s BOOM token is not yet live on the Immutable zkEVM blockchain.
Boomland’s cunning solution is to airdrop NFTs, which can be immediately sold or which users can hold onto and burn for the underlining tokens after BOOM’s TGE later in the year.
On Wednesday, it was time to have a look at what’s happening with NFL Rivals, which despite being in its formal off-season, is still seeing decent amounts of NFT trading. Indeed, the game has now broken $7 million in terms of lifetime volume.
Also worth noting was the level of selling to buying wallets, which suggests that players are slowly getting the hang of trading their in-game assets.
The game that I’ve really gotten into this week, however, is Blocklords Dynasty, which is a browser companion game to PC strategy game Blocklords.
It actually went live on 4th July so I’m late to the party. Indeed, one of the key elements of the game — minting 100 of the most valuable Orb NFTs — has already been completed. The Orbs part of the game is related to Blocklords’ LRDS token, which also went live on exchanges this week.
Dynasty is the third airdrop campaign for LRDS, with the previous two happening within the PC game. In Dynasty, players complete missions to collect Renown points, which can be spent to unlock gacha chests, which contain items, including Orbs.
At the end of the campaign, holders will be able to burn their Orbs for LRDS, with a fixed allocation for each rarity of Orbs, each of which has a fixed total supply.
So, with LRDS now actively priced on exchanges, the floor price for Orbs provides an arbitrage opportunity, albeit one that according to my calculations is currently being perfectly matched.
Aside from Orbs, activity in Blocklords Dynasty also links into the main battlepass for Blocklords, plus the top participants in its duelling system share an allocation of LRDS.
In terms of the token itself, it’s been trading pretty steadily between $1.70 and $1.90, at a fully diluted value of around $170 million.
As is the case with many blockchain games now, developer MetaKing is strongly encouraging holders to stake their tokens. Significantly doing so doesn’t get you any more tokens. Instead it emits in-game Influence, which is used to buy in-game assets.
If nothing else, all these interlinked incentive loops go to demonstrate how deeply developers need to think about their rewards, especially once they have a live token providing exit liquidity.
I’m not sure many Telegram/TON game devs have got that far in their thinking yet!
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Weekly News roundup
Studio 369 unveils idle mech battler MetalCore Arena.
Animoca launches TOWER ecosystem mini-game Crazy Rush Heroes on TON.
Spielworks rekindles Chainmonsters with Telegram app Tapmonsters.
Onchain Arcade launches with mintable Asteroids game, Breakout to follow.
Axie Infinity’s audience up 200% thanks to Coinbase and Bounty Boards.
Synergy Land migrates from Polygon to Treasure Chain.
Forge launches Season 2 alongside self-service dev tools.
Officially unrelated to the Olympics!, TapNation launches Athletics Rush on Tezos.
As discussed below:
What’s Jon Been Playing This Week?
First Play of Blocklords Dynasty. [YT]
Getting into Blocklords Dynasty’s grind. [YT]
How am I pricing NFTs in Blocklords Dynasty? [YT]
What NFTs did I get in Champions Tactics? [YT]
Crazy Rush Heroes is now live on Telegram. [YT]
How am I doing in Season 1 of Hunters On-Chain? [YT]
Additional Links
Lamina1’s LL1 token airdrop now live to claim.
Immutable claims 2 million signups for its Passport wallet.
Hunters On-Chain had 68,012 players for Season 1.
Mojo Melee’s Samurai Mojo costume NFTs going on sale in Japan.
Check out the Big Blockchain Game Report Q2 2024 👀 here.