The world of crypto has a new gaming phenomenon on its hands – Fantasy Top, an innovative NFT trading card game that puts a blockchain twist on fantasy sports. Since launching just two weeks ago on the Ethereum layer-2 network Blast, Fantasy Top has taken the digital asset space by storm, becoming one of crypto’s most profitable apps after generating over $9 million in fees and revenue.
The game’s wild popularity emerges from its innovative concept of transforming prominent crypto Twitter personalities into tradable NFT cards called “heroes.” Players buy these cards on the Fantasy Top’s marketplace, build lineups, and earn rewards based on the real-world Twitter engagement metrics of their curated roster of influencers.
With a surging user base approaching 34,000 traders who have swapped over $24 million worth of cards in the opening week, Fantasy Top represents a first-of-its-kind intersection of social media dynamics, NFT collectibles, and fantasy-style gaming.
It should be no surprise that many of crypto’s top influencers have competed. It has distributed over $1.25 million in earnings to the influencers who have been turned into heroes as they have be instrumental in fueling the game’s viral growth.
In regards to the game’s prospects, the meta-pioneering meme coin influencer Ansem said: “Fantasy Top [is] one of the crypto apps that could onboard a lot of Web2 creators.”
$18k in earnings for first week not too shabby@fantasy_top_ one of the crypto apps that could onboard a lot of web2 creators also since it requires nothing else other than their existing engagement on other social media apps https://t.co/IEWDFIx20i
— Ansem 🐂🀄️ (@blknoiz06) May 7, 2024
He claimed to have earned $18,700 as one of the featured heroes in just the opening week, an amount that immediately placed it among the game’s top earners along with Jenn Duong, a content creator, and the founder of Blast, a character known as Pacman.
How Does Fantasy Top Work?
Fantasy Top combines elements of fantasy sports and trading cards with blockchain technology. The game features over 120 “heroes” (thus far) modeled after real crypto celebrities and personalities including influencers, analysts, founders, and traders.
These heroes are minted into tradable Ethereum NFTs on the Blast network and are assigned rarity levels like Common, Rare, Legendary, and more that impact their scoring power within the game.
Players purchase packs of randomized hero cards or individual cards on the secondary NFT marketplace to build their lineups.
Every week, players set a roster of 5 of the hero cards they own to enter certain Fantasy Top tournaments and competitions.
Their lineup’s cumulative score is then calculated based on the real-world Twitter engagement metrics of each influencer hero over that period. These metrics include likes, retweets, replies, and more.
The rarest hero cards have multipliers that amplify their engagement-based scoring. Hence, acquiring or minting a Legendary version of a prolific voice of the so-called “crypto Twitter” sphere could yield bigger dividends than a Common card of the same persona.
This introduces an element of strategy when assembling lineups and pursuing specific hero cards.
Players’ final tournament standings determine their share of the prize pool paid out in Ether (ETH) tokens as well as Blast Gold points that can be redeemed for the network’s upcoming BLAST token airdrop. Those finishing atop of the leaderboards earn the biggest rewards.
The fantasy scoring cycle repeats each week to keep players engaged. The Fantasy Top platform also incorporates new tournament structures, heroes, purchasable card packs, and rewards periodically to maintain and foster interest.
Since the game directly incorporates real-world social media activity, the influencers who have been selected to become heroes also have a huge incentive to promote the game and generate engagement and virality as they benefit from the fees they collect from their cards’ trading volumes.
Influencers Earn Over $1.25M in Trading Fees and Millions More in Blast Gold Points
A key driver behind the ascent of Fantasy Top’s is how it monetizes crypto Twitter’s most prominent personalities by turning them into NFT assets and stakeholders of the game’s growth strategy.
Any influencer, trader, investor, or creator turned into an in-game hero NFT earns a percentage of the revenue generated from the ownership and trading of their card. They receive 1.5% of all trading fees accrued on their hero NFT sales plus 10% of the proceeds from all new pack sales.
This model ensures that the influencers featured as heroes have significant skin in the game, as they will earn more money if Fantasy Top continues to succeed and grows its user base.
The model has been a smash hit so far and it’s likely that the top influencers aren’t going anywhere because the earnings have been substantial already. According to the Fantasy Top team, over $1.25 million in ETH and millions more in Blast Gold points have been distributed to top heroes like Duong and Ansem.
Although this figure pales in comparison to the billions of dollars handed over by top social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok to its creators, it indicates the growing interest of both influencers and the crypto community to engage in experiences that involve their favorite content creators.
Fantasy Top’s Most Pressing Issue: Bots Entering the Scene to Manipulate Scores
The rising popularity of Fantasy Top has come with its fair share of controversy as the game’s economics, which involves the use of real-world statistics from social media platforms like X, can reportedly be manipulated through the use of bots.
https://twitter.com/fantasy_top_/status/1788246840397193664
The team announced that they had to prematurely end the first major “Main Competition” that kicked off last Monday due to evidence that automated bots were artificially inflating some heroes’ Twitter stats to affect the tournament’s results.
On 11 May, they published the rewards that they distributed based on the tournament’s results, which included 50 ETH tokens and over 222,000 Blast GOLD.
Despite these hiccups, the game’s design vision and initial reception have impressed the Crypto Twitter community.
With $9.3 million in fees already generated during its opening week plus nearly 34,000 traders buying and selling over $24 million worth of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Fantasy Top has demonstrated that it can rapidly generate significant revenue, user growth, and engagement.
Scoring protections and safeguards against the manipulation of social media stats will be crucial to maintaining the game’s credibility and perceived transparency. The Fantasy Top team highlighted that plans are already in place to strengthen the protocol’s anti-botting capabilities for future competitions.
Fantasy Top also intends to roll out additional gameplay modes and features to maintain fresh engagement including “sub-competitions” and the ability for influencers to directly share earnings with the owners of their hero NFTs.
Although it’s just been a few weeks since its launch, Fantasy Top is definitely off to a roaring start. As long as the economics and mechanics remain fair and transparent, attracting further personalities from the crypto world should not be an issue for this new protocol.