GameFi
Football.fun: The Hottest Crypto Game.
What if football and crypto had a baby?
Enter Football.fun. It’s a new football/soccer fantasy game on Base.
There’ll be tokens representing the top 100 football players. You can create a team by buying their tokens from the market. If your players perform well, you’ll win rewards.
There are two ways to make money:
- Trade the “player tokens”.
- Play the game and win rewards.
You can get started with the above explanation. But the actual mechanics of the game are much more complex. You can learn the detailed game mechanics here.
It had an insane roller-coaster ride this weekend. On Friday, “total player Market Cap” was <$20M. It reached $158M by Sunday. As of writing, it has fallen to ~$65M.
While the pattern might resemble a failed memecoin launch, it still has solid metrics. Within two weeks of launching, it got
- $16.6M in total deposits.
- It has earned >$2M in fees alone
- Cumulative volume has crossed >31M.
- ~12k wallets have deposited into the game.
- Football.fun (FDF) still has ~$10M in net deposits.
Unlike the majority of projects in crypto, these aren’t manipulated metrics. FDF built a fun game that people wanted to play. And the current crash to $60M is better seen as an accumulation opportunity rather than the end of another Ponzi.
Two FUDs might’ve also contributed to the weekend crash.
- Legality of using player names in the game. The team has assured they’re safu on that front.
- High fees on transactions. All transactions will have 5% fee. And during times of volatility, it can go up to 25% to stabilize the market.
While many people saw high fees as a reason to fade the project, it looked like a smart mechanism to stabilize the FDF economy.
Imo, there are many reasons to be bullish on FDF.
- It’s better than traditional fantasy games – transparent scoring, tradable player shares, and incentives that actually align with performance.
- Fantasy Premier League, a similar non-crypto game, has >11M users. FDF offers higher rewards and a differentiated gameplay experience. So it’ll attract a non-crypto audience as well.
- It’s the rare crypto consumer app that’s actually fun with potential mainstream adoption. It’s not another Ponzi; the game actually looks sustainable.
If you have the ball knowledge, this is a game you should definitely check out.
And even if you think it should be called soccer, you can check it out. Right now, FDF only has ~10M in net deposits. Even Friend.tech had ~$50M in TVL. If you think FDF is a more sustainable game, you can expect it to cross ~$50M in net deposits soon enough.
The total “player market cap” can be modelled as a multiplier of “net deposits” into FDF. (To understand my rationale, learn about the game economy here.) So many player tokens are undervalued right now.
If you want to trade “player tokens”, here are some tools to help you.
If you don’t know much about football, just leaving a small moonbag on a few top players like Yamal and Mbappe is an option.
Successful consumer apps are rare in crypto. This one has the potential to be one.
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- Gas-based: Only execute when gas fees are low.
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HeyAnon HUD is its next product. It’s a Chrome extension that overlays the relevant information, like onchain metrics & technical analysis, on the platforms that you already use.
These can boost your crypto research.
Announcement
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Protocol Wars
The Governance Theater: LayerZero, Stargate, and Wormhole
A public battle between LayerZero and Wormhole exposed “token governance”.
LayerZero is a “cross-chain interoperability” solution. Different chains are like different islands; they cannot easily communicate with each other. LayerZero allows projects to communicate between different blockchains.
Aka, it’s a communication infrastructure between different chains. But that isn’t enough. Normal users wanted to easily move assets between chains.
Stargate is the consumer application built using LayerZero. It lets users easily bridge assets across chains. It has processed >$70B across 80+ blockchains. In the last month alone, it did >$600M in volume.
While both projects were basically built by the same team, it was positioned as different projects. And they issued two tokens as well: $ZRO & $STG with $1.9B & $163M in market cap, respectively.
Everything looked fine. But then came the plot twist.
LayerZero wanted to buy out Stargate. It proposed to swap all circulating STG for ZRO at a ratio of 1 STG: 0.08634 ZRO. The deal was worth $110M at the proposal time.
It made sense for LayerZero:
- Stargate will be able to more deeply integrate with the ecosystem.
- Without the merger, the two projects might have to compete in overlapping areas.
- Two tokens dilute the inflow and reduce the pump. Generally, one token > two tokens.
- LayerZero is a pure infra play rn. The current trend favors user-facing products. Stargate can be that consumer-facing product.
- Since both projects were built basically by the same team, the merger will simplify the value accrual for both projects.
- Vertical integration is the general trend. There might be more synergies emerging from this.
But some $STG weren’t happy with the offer. L0 was only offering a small premium on the assets ($ETH & stables) held by Stargate in their treasury, that also in $ZRO tokens. So they invited L0 competitors to put forward their bids.
Wormhole took up on the offer and promised $120M in USDC. This was a much better offer than $110M in $ZRO by LayerZero. (There were more details on rewards for veSTG stakers, but Wormhole had a better offer on that front as well.)
Other leading interoperability projects, Across & Axelar, also said they’ll make formal bids if the sale process is slowed. So in an ideal world, $STG holders would have done a new auction.
But the voting on the original LayerZero proposal was already live. By August 24th, it had passed with ~95% support. So the majority of veSTG holders went with LayerZero.
Now, the “$STG to $ZRO conversion” portal is already live.
The deal was really good for LayerZero. They will be able to exchange ~5% of their token supply for $95M in liquid assets and Stargate’s other assets, like branding and network effects.
If this episode teaches us anything, it’s that token governance in DeFi is largely a theater performance. The real decisions are made by the team and a few whales behind closed doors.
🚀 DeFi Catalysts
Kanye West launched his memecoin $YZY. After immediately rising to >$400M market cap, it has fallen to ~$70M.
Venice AI introduced $DIEM, the token that represents perpetual tokenized inference. Each Diem provides $1 per day of API credit, forever.
Plasma, the upcoming stablecoin chain, is partnering with Binance Earn to create a “fully onchain yield product” on the Binance platform.
Aave v3 went live on Aptos. Aave is the largest DeFi protocol, and Aptos is v3’s first non-EVM deployment.
World Liberty Financial, the Trump-linked DeFi project, will unlock 20% of allocations on $WLFI on September 1st.
VanEck proposed the JitoSOL ETF. It’ll be the first Solana ETF that’ll be 100% backed by a Liquid Staking Token
Fluid is discussing a token buyback program. If approved, buybacks begin Oct 1st, with a 6-month evaluation period.
Euler Finance has expanded to Linea. Right now, it has high efficiency $ETH collateral, 4 isolated ETH markets, & LST/LRT looping.
OpenEden is a Real-world asset (RWA) tokenisation platform. It introduced $EDEN as their ecosystem token.
Circle introduced Circle Gateway, a new primitive that enables access to instant cross-chain USDC liquidity. It’ll help onramps, PSPs, exchanges, and more.
📰 Industry News
Chamath Palihapitiya is creating a SPAC called American Exceptionalism Acquisition Corp. that’ll target DeFi, AI, defense, and energy production.
MetaMask is issuing a new stablecoin, $mUSD, in partnership with M0, a platform for application-specific stablecoins.
Jump Crypto introduced Dual Flow Batch Auctions as a new mechanism for onchain exchange. It claims to solve issues of CLOBs.
🐦⬛ X Hits
- Overview of crypto cards.
- Productization of intelligence.
- Prediction Markets market map.
- Summary of Fed chair Powell’s speech.
- Weekly analysis of tokenized stocks.
😂 Meme
Until next time,
Edgy
Today’s email was written by Edgy and Yayya.
DISCLAIMER: I’m NOT a financial advisor. This content is for education and information purposes only. Crypto and DeFi are risky and speculative. Please do your research before investing.
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