GameFi emerged in 2017 and gained significant momentum in 2021. With the advancement of DeFi infrastructure and the rapid rise of NFTs, it has experienced rapid growth over the past two years. Notably, Axie Infinity became the world’s first widely recognized blockchain game.

However, the play-to-earn model often leads projects into a downward spiral, resulting in a steep decline of over 99% for many blockchain gaming projects in 2022, leaving the market in a state of despair. Despite this challenging environment, Treasure DAO emerged and gained popularity last year, continuing its development into this year. What factors enabled Treasure DAO to defy the trend and establish itself as a leading blockchain gaming project?

What is Treasure DAO？

（Treasure Official Website）

The core of TreasureDAO is a decentralized game publishing platform that provides tools and resources for developers to build, release, and tokenize Web3 games. It is hailed as the “Nintendo” of the blockchain gaming industry.

As the controller of the economic ecology of the game within the ecosystem, all games built within the ecosystem are empowered by MAGIC, using MAGIC as a flywheel to increase decentralization. Other project parties may outsource token management to TreasureDAO for operation.

BridgeWorld is the game launched by TreasureDAO, with the distribution of MAGIC tokens as its core. In addition, TreasureDAO has built game-related infrastructure.

Firstly, there is TroveMarket, a trading market that offers market transaction services for NFT assets in various games or metaverse projects within the Treasure ecosystem.

Currently deployed on the Arbitrum, Arbitrum Nova, and Ethereum chains, this market was launched in June 2022 and evolved from Treasure Marketplace, which was launched by Treasure DAO in November 2021.

（Treasure Official Website）

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In the past six months, the number of weekly active users has remained above 1,000 and is expected to reach its peak at the end of 2022 or the beginning of 2023.

（Treasure Official Website）

Second, there is MagicSwap, which facilitates the trading of all assets issued in TreasureDAO. It is a decentralized exchange (DEX) that provides liquidity for in-game assets within the Treasure ecosystem. This protocol charges a fee of 0.5% for transactions conducted on the MagicSwap pool. Over the past six months, the number of weekly active users has remained around 200.

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Introduction of Well-Known Games in Treasure DAO

（Treasure Official Website）

According to the official website (https://treasure.lol/games), TreasureDAO has incubated 12 games. Some of the well-known games include The Beacon, BridgeWorld, Tales of Elleria, BattleFly, and Realm. Although the popularity of the games has decreased, TreasureDAO continues to launch new games to attract new users.

（Treasure Official Website）

The Beacon

The Beacon is a fast-paced, action-packed fantasy Roguelite RPG that combines social gaming and NFTs, similar to MMOs. It exploded in popularity in December 2022. The Beacon is the first diamond-level (highest level) partner of the Treasure DAO GBP program. Players traverse increasingly challenging dungeons, hone their reflexes, slay monster enemies, explore the world with friends, and participate in the economy with their NFT treasures.

Players who own the founding characters can fully experience the game and receive additional benefits, such as the ability to drop special loot in partner events, obtain special PFPs, earn Lux Shards (a currency obtained by completing dungeons and challenges, coming soon), and other quality of life perks.

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In the past six months, The Beacon has remained a well-performing game in the Treasure ecosystem. The number of weekly active users and new users has exceeded one hundred. However, compared to its peak when there were over ten thousand weekly active users, the project’s popularity has significantly decreased.

BridgeWorld

（Treasure Official Website）

Bridgeworld is a game that requires proficient social coordination and strategic resource management. Players must work together to accumulate and optimize their resources using legions, treasures, and other items found in the entire treasure ecosystem.

Bridgeworld is an upgraded version of the original blockchain game Legions, and it is a strategic business, trade, and governance game launched by the Treasure DAO team. Bridgeworld combines multiple gameplay elements, allowing players to purchase legions to complete tasks and earn various NFT rewards. These NFT rewards can be sold for the native token MAGIC or used to synthesize more complex NFTs for mining.

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In the past six months, Bridgeworld has remained the top-performing game regarding weekly active users within Treasure’s ecosystem. However, there has been a significant decline in the number of new users in recent weeks, with figures in the single digits. Moving forward, continuous innovation in gameplay will be necessary.

BattleFly

BattleFly is a competitive PvP game, where the core is to strategically decorate BattleFly NFTs with the correct module combinations and have a chance to win $MAGIC in each battle. The game consists of two scenes: The Garden, where users acquire weapon equipment, and the Hyperdome, an arena for battles.

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In the past six months, the weekly active data has remained stable at over a hundred. However, there has been a limited number of new users.

Treasure DAO Team and Investors

（Treasure Official Website）

Most of Treasure’s team members are directly from the community. Treasure comprises developers, product managers, artists, brand builders, marketers, economists, and gamers from around the world, all supported by a close-knit and vibrant network of DAO contributors and enthusiastic community members. According to the official website (https://treasure.lol/team), Treasure’s Co-Founders Are John Patten and Karel Vuong. Among them, John Patten is the Co-Founder and CEO, and he was previously the Head of Growth at Osmosis.

（Chainbroker）

On December 23, 2021, Treasure DAO approved a strategic partnership with 1kx. Treasure officially announced receiving a $3 million investment led by 1kx, with participation from Merit Circle, AcadArena, and Ready Player DAO, among others. Jiho, the co-founder of Axie Infinity, also participated in the investment.

On September 16, 2022, Treasure DAO started a proposal to sell $3.5 million worth of ecosystem Token MAGIC. This Token sale is being led by Digital Strategies Guild, with participation from 1kx, Neon DAO, ID Theory, and new contributors including Arbitrum, IOSG, and Alchemy Ventures. According to the proposal, participating organizations will buy MAGIC at a price of $0.23 and release it in two phases after a one-year lock-up period. The community has approved the proposal through a vote.

MAGIC Tokenomics

（Treasure Official Document）

(Organized from official documents and research reports)

Tokens are used for:

1. Staking to earn MAGIC;
2. Summoning legions and synthesizing NFTs in Bridgeworld;
3. Serving as the settlement currency for TroveMarket;
4. Used in other scenarios in game projects, such as BattleFly’s combat staking currency;
5. Participating in project governance, such as ecological funds or distribution of treasury income in the game.

As the ecosystem continues to develop, the use cases for the MAGIC token will continue to expand.

MAGIC is released through an initial high circulation followed by halving the output every year. Currently, 69% of the tokens are in circulation. According to the original release curve, the later-stage inflation is relatively moderate. In the future, MAGIC tokens will no longer be released through staking, but through other gamified methods to better connect and interact with the entire ecosystem.

Development History of Treasure DAO

Treasure DAO originated from the experimental NFT project Loot in August 2021. At that time, the NFT market was booming, with NFTs multiplying in value. Loot is a series consisting of 8,000 NFTs, where each NFT is a TXT file composed of 8 phrases. Each phrase represents a randomly generated attribute such as weapon, armor, helmet, necklace, ring, etc., with different levels of rarity. Due to the simplicity of creating this type of NFT, Loot holders were free to interpret and use them in any way they wanted. As a result, it quickly gained popularity and numerous copycat projects emerged, with Treasure being one of them. As a derivative project of Loot, Treasure’s NFTs also follow the gothic and mysterious dark style. At this stage, Treasure was no different from other Loot imitations, which led to a dead end quickly.

This time, the project team made a change and quickly issued MAGIC tokens to save the situation, and customized a DeFi project called MAGIC Farm for MAGIC. Users deposit their NFTs from Treasure and earn MAGIC tokens. Essentially, the project team still wants to save the NFT ecosystem and create a chain game called Legions specifically for Treasure NFTs to increase their use cases. Unfortunately, this series of NFTs ultimately failed, but more users became increasingly interested in MAGIC tokens.

As more and more users continue to stake and lock up their MAGIC rewards, the project team finally responded to the community and began to focus on building an ecosystem around MAGIC.

On October 6th, MAGIC Farm migrated from Ethereum to Arbitrum, and the Treasure team launched a special incentive program. Users who stake 10,000 MAGIC and own 1 Treasure NFT in the Legions game will receive a regular legion, as well as airdropped game items and heroes. Unfortunately, the game did not go online smoothly, and the project team’s cooperation with other games also failed.

However, thanks to the successful community operation and strong consensus on the token price, MAGIC managed to survive the crisis and officially launched Treasure DAO in November. The team transferred their power to this DAO, which includes the distribution plan for MAGIC, incubation of projects within the ecosystem, and designated the DAO as the sole recipient of MAGIC incentives. The DAO is managed through voting by holders who stake MAGIC.

Since then, in 2022, Treasure DAO has maintained a consistent monthly release rhythm for successful mini-games. This has helped attract new users and funds, while keeping the positive momentum of MAGIC running.

Is Treasure DAO a good investment?

TreasureDAO emerged during the GameFi boom and gained fame during the deep bear market of 2022. While there are many blockchain projects in the gaming space, only a few can truly withstand a bear market.TreasureDAO is undoubtedly one of the projects worth paying attention to. With its well-designed economic model, TreasureDAO connects the entire gaming ecosystem through the MAGIC token and continuously launches new games to empower MAGIC, increasing its use cases. This allows participating users to consistently follow the project’s development. Additionally, TreasureDAO excels in community management and accurately captures user needs, allowing it to continuously accumulate and retain users. These factors contribute to TreasureDAO’s strong competitive advantage. However, GameFi still faces the challenge of the “death spiral” as individual game lifecycles are extremely limited. TreasureDAO needs to release more exciting games to achieve long-term success.