Fantasy Top — Tokenomics
Tokenomics proposal for the team’s consideration from an avid player and multi-chain crypto native power user. I have kept a fair amount of white space in it since I don’t know the team’s constraints. I think this proposal creates a much better long-term vision than anything I’ve seen posted by the team so far or proposed by other players.
Goals of a Token:
There are three major factors to a successful token:
- Ponzinomics — There needs to be some kind of memeable narrative around why the token will go up forever.
- Community — There has to be a hardened set of true believers who will hold no matter what and will go to battle on the protocol’s behalf across the internet. This is usually bolstered by a lot of people making a lot of money early.
- Tech/Utility — This is the intrinsic value, the reason people will hold it for more than speculation. For many projects, the first iteration of this is some way to earn more of the token, which is a surefire way to make it bleed down over time. This has progressed to a “fee switch” narrative, but realistically, almost no tokens have figured this out yet. We’re seeing DeFi dinosaurs try to do this with standard metrics like revenue generation.
Many teams will launch tokens with only one of these and try to pivot into the other two. Meme coins are 100% community theoretically, Sui/Aptos are 100% tech, and older protocols like Ohm/Luna started with 100% Ponzi. However, I can’t think of any that started from 100% Ponzi recently.
Constraints to Operate Within:
There needs to be a fixed token supply. This is critical for the Ponzi narrative. If there’s inflation, there would need to be deflation. Firstly, that makes the mechanism design way more complicated. Secondly, that means there needs to be some occasion to “burn” tokens, which means they have to be used for something of tangible value, and we want the token’s value to be 100% subjective.
The token needs to be used to create its own unique market. Crypto provides us the ability to unleash the raw powers of supply and demand and point it at any problem, letting the market decide.
Buying cards, entering events, and rewards are all done in Eth. The token cannot be used for any of these functions. If it is, then it is functionally competing against Eth for utility, a fight which it will lose.
The token should serve to scale the protocol asymmetrically so that the work of the core devs can expand exponentially as it is adopted widely without needing a corresponding expansion of the team.
Vision:
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I view Fantasy Top as it exists today as the test run for product-market fit. I believe it has achieved this because Blast airdrop farming is over, and I still can’t get into Tactics queues unless I’m lucky. It is currently a prediction market for crypto Twitter personas wrapped in an enticing game design.
The final product should be a way to launch an infinite number of prediction markets for every kind of Twitter community.
Token Design:
The major utility of the token should be to run a league. Anyone can start their own league by “locking” up $fan. This constricts supply (Ponzi), generates community engagement (community), and creates the potential for infinite prediction markets (utility). The league creator curates the heroes in their league, decides rewards distributions, sets the minimum amount of $fan players have to lock up to join their league, entry prices, and maybe all the way down to how hero score weighting factors.
The locking up of tokens to create leagues, combined with players having to lock up to join leagues, creates the base demand for $fan. The assumption is that people want to do this, which I think we have enough data to say there’s product-market fit for the crypto community. Whether or not this can hop genres is yet to be seen, but this model makes it possible to find out in a reasonably scalable way.
For community engagement, AIrev is one of the top players right now. If we play out how an eventual airdrop may go, AIrev gets a ton of tokens and uses a portion of them to start an AI-focused league. This drives engagement and education around a topic AIrev is passionate about and enhances AIrev’s own engagement because he’s running the first prediction market around AI content. This is just one example, but if there was a political market right now, I think it’d be insanely hot. I personally follow basketball and would start/play a Team USA league right now. The idea is that there’s already a hardcore base that would spin off other leagues, given the tools to do so.
One of the common refrains heard from the community currently is the ability to vote on new heroes or vote out old heroes. This design is a much more elegant market-driven approach that offloads the responsibility of game balance from the devs to the community. Some kind of voting mechanism could be integrated into each of the leagues, but I think that’s of secondary concern because most people don’t care enough to vote about anything. Make it a league option chosen by whoever runs the league.
There could be “pauper” leagues with 100k members who have a limit of one tactic entry, private leagues that cost a premium amount of $fan to set up, and no-limit leagues with a proportional amount of entries to how much $fan is locked. All of these could have themes or no themes, really whatever the market decides, that’s the beauty of it.
Summary:
There may be technical hurdles to this vision as I don’t fully understand the backend. I don’t know of any commitments the team has to operate within regarding tokens already promised to other parties, but the market has shown us that the closer to a memecoin-style launch, the better.
Unlocks are bad, low float high FDV is bad. If a bunch of tokens are owed to investors, just give them all out upfront. The core of this design is that no value flows back to token holders, which releases the token price from conventional metrics and will allow it to go infinite with the success of Fantasy based on it’s subjective utility, the community engagement, and limited supply plus locking requirements.
This is one of the great socialfi applications with prediction market crossover, and it’s on Blast, which is criminally underrated. I’d love to see this take off because I genuinely enjoy playing, so I wanted to share my two cents. I think the name of the game is automation right now with this longer-term vision for the token that will let this app scale. Thanks, team!
Low key, Fantasy Top where “top” is short for “topics”.
