In some ways, Hytopia’s successful node sale for its Arbitrum-based L2 infrastructure Hychain is just another example of growing crypto sentiment.
In total 16,876 node keys were sold to 3,357 unique wallets, raising 2,148 ETH — over $9 million — in the process.
I didn’t partake. Even if I had the technical expertise, I’ve never been a fan of node sales.
Perhaps the reason is that node sales were the foundation on which Gala Games built its incredible success — even now, despite the lack of any decent product and the founders suing each other — GALA remains the second largest gaming crypto by market cap.
Best think of it as a gaming memecoin is my advice!
However, compared to Gala’s vaporware, the emergent of solid Ethereum-based blockchain stacks from the likes of Arbitrum and Optimism mean it’s now much easier for projects to spin up their own networks and tokens, with node owners gaining a cut from every transaction the chain delivers, always assuming their node is being properly operated.
In the case of Hychain, node owners will get 25% of all transactions plus there’s a reward pool of 250 million TOPIA tokens worth $17 million. For the record, Minecraft-inspired UGC platform Hytopia is also about to enter closed beta and has around 700,000 sign-ups for early access, plus Hychain is open for thirdparty developers to use. People are thinking that might add up to lots of future transactions.
What makes this node sale different, however, is the way Hytopia baked community into its process.
As previously mentioned, I came away from my interview with founder ArkDev extremely impressed with his drive and efficiency. He also spoke strongly about how community kept the project going when its original Minecraft-based vision was halted by Microsoft banning blockchain within its open source platform.
Which brings us back to the node sale. Hytopia operated a referral scheme in which people buying nodes could apply a creator code when minting their node keys. As well as generating a 5% discount on the sale, it also rewarded the code’s creator with 10% of the purchase price.
The result was that while Hytopia raised 2,098 ETH ($8 million), it effectively gave away 254 ETH ($1 million) to its community.
Following some data analysis (not by me), the list of creators was released with Adonis being the #1 referral creator, generating 35.5 ETH ($117,836 at time of writing). He’s part of the Whitesands project, which is building games on Hytopia. Whitesands itself generated $42,487 in rewards.
From what I can make out, Metatrust DAO — which generated $46,139 — is a totally separate project, but one that is now embedding TOPIA token rewards into its NFT collection and future activities.
As expected, the cabal of crypto KOLs — Dingaling, Zeneca, Grailding, Cagy etc — who are knee-deep in most such investments also participated. After all, they have the largest degen networks
Some of the top referrers are listed below.
Of course, this node sale isn’t the first in the current cycle.
Gaming L3 Xai sold $15 million-worth of its nodes in December 2023 and had a similar referral model, with KOLs like Dingaling and Zeneca generating higher rewards. Indeed, Zeneca was reported as generating as much as $500,000 in rewards.
But, while KOLs are always part of crypto’s marketing muscle. Hytopia’s sale seems more community-focused to me: at least, two of the top three entities rewarded are directly part of its ecosystem.
And so even accounting for those KOLs, this boils down to another example of how blockchain enables the community and the project to align incentives, in this case for short-term gain, but hopefully for long-term success too.
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Calendar
NFT NYC 2024 — 3rd-5th April
Elixir launches season pass worth $750,000 — 4th April
Mojo token airdrop event starts in GoGo Mojo — 4th April
Deadline for Mocaverse shard crafting — 11th April
Autonomous Anonymous fully onchain game event — 16-18th April
Guild of Guardians’ global launch via app stores — 15th May
Next Project Awakening playtest — 21st May
Chain Migration news
Pixel Vault, the company behind various early NFT collections — now focused on fully onchain game squad RPG BattlePlan (below) — has announced its Reboot infrastructure is migrating to Arbitrum-based gaming L3 Xai. Technically this isn’t a big deal as Reboot (and BattlePlan) are already running on Arbitrum Nova.
The game has currently completed Season One, with around 10,000 players generating over 7.5 million transactions, which demonstrates the need for scalability.
As for Xai, it’s trying to build the usual ecosystem flywheel, signing deals with esports outfit Team Secret and indie promo initiative the MIX, amongst others. As previously stated, it also raised $15 million in December 2023 from its own node sale, with the XAI token performing well, currently ranking as the 254th most valuable crypto.
More Night Crows news
Following yesterday’s discussion of blockchain within Wemade’s Night Crows MMORPG, the website now shows $180,162-worth of CROW tokens were mined in the past 24 hours by 3,448 players, at an average of $52 per player.
This only could happen because the CROW price rose from $0.75 to $0.94 at 3am UTC, allowing mining to occur. The price then immediately fell back to $0.75 and mining stopped as players spent their tokens.
Looks like there’s an interesting economic experiment happening...
Big In Japan news
As a committed player of Nine Chronicles M, I’m happy to see Animoca Brands Japan helping to spread the gospel, which it is doing thanks to a deal with Japanese marketplace Coincheck. This will see 300 Nine Chronicles’ DCC cat avatars sold on Coincheck by Animoca Brands Japan at an expected price of 0.06 ETH (c.$200) compared to a current floor price of 0.07 ETH on the open market.
Ownership of DCC NFTs enables players to change their in-game avatar, as well as staking the NFTs to earn the game’s NCG token and unlocking pets and their related boosts.
Additional Links
OpenSea has adopted Limit Break’s ERC721C standard to enforce creator royalties for NFT trading.
Gold smashes record again as U.S. inflation worries loom.
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