A new joiner walks into discord and asks an old-timer “What is Treasure?”, to which the vet responds as “SO many things, BUT SIMPLY $MAGIC!”. I say, spill secret sauce ser!
In this 3-installment series, Tempest would like to explain the key proposition of Treasure to gamers and how everything fits into the ecosystem. The “What” is the most common question of all.
Before we go on, Tempest thinks fun > P2E, so don’t ask me about tokenomics, you can find that in the Whitepaper! There is no financial advice here, this is the author’s take on Treasure only! Wrong place to make money or P2E!
Note: For moonboiz & $MAGIC vets, some simplification is involved below!
What is Treasure?
Treasure started on Sep 2nd, 2021, and migrated to the Arbitrum blockchain when ETH gas reached new heights of insanity.
During the bull when everyone was aping, Treasure was hype and seemed ubiquitous to many, but hard to define. Including yours truly.
Having delved in for the past year, here’s the take from this gamer’s perspective:
- Treasure is essentially a web3 gaming infrastructure. A platform meant to offer many games/genres, where game credits are priced in $MAGIC.
- Think of it like Nintendo Switch, or Playstation but with the added benefit of trading them back out:
- Load up store credits ($MAGIC)
- Buy a game cartridge (Trove Marketplace)
- Play the game cartridge
- Add value to your NFT as you play (hopefully) / power-up with in-game tokens (MagicSwap)
- Trade / switch games (Trove Marketplace – can’t do this in web2 bruv!)
- Repeat step 2 & enjoy another game!
- Below is a rough illustration (home-baked art pasta)
Secret Sauce is Infrastructure
This is worth a repeat IMHO: Treasure is web3 gaming infrastructure.
Gaming infra is unique on web3 and what Treasure does is already one step ahead of Polygon or even other gaming networks by offering a bit of everything to everyone:
Appeal for Gamers
- Better accessibility than others: Whilst L2s have eliminated the gas “friction” challenges, the reality is user friction continues to exist in the form of an ecosystem, on-ramp, distribution, and game-specific token utility. (You thought finding L2 games was an easy task without discord + trying to understand which bridge goes to Solana or Polygon or Binance for DOTA players?)
- Solution – Enter the “Gam3Station” of web3: Everything you need is packed nicely into Treasure to help the player ease into a dedicated gaming platform…which really is all about infra!
- A curated store-front just for games: Want to browse games and NFTs that all work on Arbitrum? Hit up Trove and browse games that have some due diligence already by TreasureDAO (still DYOR tho!). Yes, OS works too but it’s not a dedicated gaming platform.
- That offers a more secure way to game: In fact, just go play the game in the Trove sub-browser after purchase! Less risk than hitting a rando-website with “Approval for Alls” (Yes, security is still a major thing in web3! Unless you want 20 pages of bookmarks.)
- With the ability to trade in/out games: This is a big thing. We are all guilty of leaving our games gathering digital dust on Steam or Smartphone as a “Sunk cost”… Enter MagicSwap! Trade your tokens, and in-game NFTs for $MAGIC to others that may be interested in this game instead!
Appeal for Developers
- Live / Die by one token is an urban myth? Should you be a game dev, you should already know only one “Token resource” is insufficient to create complex game loops or strategic depth let alone the commingling of monetary incentives. Single-token LPs are notoriously difficult to keep alive (we have seen many of those).
- MagicSwap is a boon for both the gamers and devs: A dedicated AMM that bootstraps in-game tokens to $MAGIC – into a community for gamers. Want to power-boost in Tales of Elleria? Let them buy $ELM! Saw another Treasure NFT you want? Swap into $MAGIC for it! Wen PARTICLE?
- Publisher facilitates marketing instead of the developer: Let’s face it, web3 marketing is hard. Not only is it an attention/like/tweet grab-fest between art and gaming NFTs (amongst other things!). Giving away WL + retweets for followers and having excel to keep winner addies? Why not let a publisher improve your game and give you more exposure to gamer communities?
Wait…There’s MOAR??
In case you had thought everything was done already in Treasure, there are actually more improvements coming for MagicSwap and Trove to even accelerate further infra progression for gamers! Something we will cover in the next article!
Before you hyper-ventilate on “where Treasure NFT, and where BridgeWorld?!” those are for the next installments too ser!
