What is the recently popular Loot derivative project Treasure (MAGIC)?

Author: Richard Lee, Chain Catcher
On a black background with white text, eight phrases make up a text file, each file being an NFT that players can freely utilize. This was the brainstorming session sparked by the Loot project in August 2021.

Loot is known for encouraging the community to build a complete content world around a set of NFTs, characterized by composability, bottom-up development, and cross-platform capabilities, which has disrupted the public's imagination of NFTs and games.
For a long time, the Loot and its derivative project communities gradually faded from public view due to their focus on developing new projects. However, recent market enthusiasm indicates that this community experiment seems to have made new progress: the Loot community's derivative project Treasure (MAGIC) recently secured $3 million in funding from venture capital firms like 1kx, with the token price rising over 24 times at its peak.
Treasure was launched in September 2021, not built from Loot elements but inspired by its concept, reintroducing a set of game object NFTs. It currently offers NFT staking, mining, and trading functions, with the core meta-game expected to launch in the first half of this year. According to self-reported, unverified data from the Treasure community, the total trading volume in the Treasure NFT market reached $40.5 million in the past 30 days, which, according to DappRadar rankings, is close to the popular chain game Farmers World ($41.92 million), placing it among the top 20 on the entire network.

Treasure NFT market trading data (unverified)
MAGIC, Treasure, and Legions
Treasure focuses on the financialization of NFTs, supporting users in NFT trading and lending. Players can stake Loot, Treasure, and other NFT assets or AGLD (the derivative token of the Loot community) to earn mining rewards in the form of the MAGIC token. Additionally, the Treasure team airdropped 75% of the "Treasure" NFTs to Loot, AGLD, and xloot holders.
In a later "storytelling" session, the team emphasized their hope to connect the growing metaverse network through open and composable economic resources, with "Treasure" NFTs becoming the "foundation layer" that drives and connects them. Among these, the MAGIC token serves as the core reserve currency in the metaverse, Treasures (NFTs) are a series of objects usable in different games, and Legions (NFTs) represent game characters.
According to the design, as the complexity of the Treasure metaverse's economic system increases, the supply of the MAGIC token will decrease. Players can earn MAGIC by playing games, mining, and participating in Bridgeworld. MAGIC is also the governance token of the Treasure ecosystem.
Treasures (NFT) are a set of resources shared across different metaverse platforms, with each Treasure playing a role in weaving different metaverse stories. Players can use Treasures to craft consumables.

Treasure NFT
Bridgeworld is the core meta-game that TreasureDAO is about to launch, "In Bridgeworld, players are the souls, and Legions are the bodies that have fallen from countless other worlds." According to the setup, players can control Legions while farming, crafting equipment, exploring, and battling. According to the announcement, Bridgeworld will also support LP (providing liquidity), MAGIC mining, and other functions.
Cross-Platform Expansion
Chain Catcher previously reported that the high Gas fees on the Ethereum mainnet are one of the two major challenges for the Loot community's ecological construction. TreasureDAO addresses this issue by migrating the NFT trading market to the Arbitrum L2 network.
In addition, Treasure has established partnerships with multiple project platforms, including the "DeFi 2.0" star project OlympusDAO, as well as metaverse platforms like Smol Brains, Ether Orcs, and Olympus Odyssey. The team also stated that they have established a fully protocol-owned liquidity pool on Olympus Pro, setting a precedent for NFT projects.
"Partnerships are Treasure's way of understanding other metaverses and spreading our resource model within them," said TreasureDAO.
1kx Investment, Axie Infinity Co-Founder Participates
While a bottom-up construction approach can inspire creativity, many remain skeptical. However, the round of institutional funding that Treasure received at the end of December opened up a precedent for "grassroots projects."
On December 23, Treasure announced it had secured $3 million in funding led by 1kx, with participation from well-known chain game guild Merit Circle, NFT quantitative hedge fund BlackPool, chain game AcadArena, as well as Neon DAO, Ready Player DAO, and other institutions. Notably, Jiho, the co-founder of the leading chain game Axie Infinity, also extended an olive branch to them.
In an article titled "The P2E Economy Will Become the Foundation Layer Protocol for Games," Peter Pan, a member of the investment team at 1kx, explained why the institution is optimistic about Treasure.
The article's title may seem like a cliché, but Peter Pan first offers a fresh definition of "P2E." "The largest P2E ecosystem will first be the community." He believes that the so-called "P2E ecosystem" should not be viewed as an independent game or "application," but rather as a "virtual nation" economy that community members can trust, operate together, own, and build collaboratively, which can sustain itself.
"The core vision behind Play to Earn (P2E) is to address these issues by providing real player ownership of in-game assets and their surrounding worlds, ultimately creating greater user stickiness and community retention."
Although Axie Infinity has been continuously popular since the summer of 2021, Peter Pan believes it still falls under the category of "Web 2.5 games"—the teams behind Web 2.5 games aim to build a highly refined but closed ecosystem, where the entire player experience is centrally controlled by a single organization, meaning that the promises made by chain game project teams regarding the openness of game NFTs have not been fulfilled.
The construction method of "Web 2.5" is "insufficient to prevent value extraction from the community," as its ecological construction still heavily relies on a single entity. In contrast, viewing the P2E economy as a virtual nation is more appropriate. Therefore, all aspects of the economy need to be built in an open environment.
Currently, Treasure, which has been prioritized by 1kx, belongs to this type of plan. In addition to the meta-game Bridgeworld, Treasure also plans to launch an open-source, universal NFT marketplace MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and player legion auto-battlers in the coming months.
Nevertheless, Treasure is still in a "pie-in-the-sky" state and has not yet launched any real game products built around its NFTs. The outcome of this experiment remains to be seen.
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