“If Treasure is successful it will scale beyond Axie and DFK”, John Patten talks Bridgeworld, $MAGIC, and GameFi with AdventureNFT
I set out to follow up to my piece on Attention and Belonging by writing about how the $MAGIC/Treasure ecosystem is becoming a flywheel at an earlier stage than anything I have seen since Ethereum. Founded in September, Treasure has caught the attention of major investors and the GameFi community at large because of its fair-launch start, the fact that it is on L2 (Arbitrum), and most recently because of its runaway hit “Smol Brains”. In the midst of writing, it occurred to me it would be useful if I could find and ask a member of the Treasure team a question about their signature game, called Bridgeworld, which they plan to release end of Jan 2022.
I hoped to get a quote or two, a few thoughts around game structure, and then craft my narrative a little more precisely. After a few messages in the Treasure discord I got not just a team member, but the Co-Founder of the entire ecosystem, John Patten, who gave me a lot more than a quick answer or two. Humility and accessibility, two traits almost never found in Crypto, are John’s hallmarks, and are certainly part of the reason that so many people have aligned themselves with Treasure. As you might imagine, I’ll therefore save some of the stuff I was originally going to write for the next piece, and this one will be a QA with John.
This is the first tweet I wrote on my Twitter account:
“It simply exists. It always has. It springs from the well. A traveler finds it. This time @jpatten_. They don’t’ care at first. A few of us do. We try to explain. We shout from the rooftops. They look, and they laugh. Then, they fight wars for it. It is, $MAGIC.”
I was trying to express my feeling about finding the Genesis mine for $MAGIC. I felt like I had discovered something that was emitting a very precious element. I felt I was looking at the first oil well, and that $MAGIC was something people would one day be desperate to have, at any price. I can’t explain why I felt that way, but I did. I am quite sure John Patten did not see that tweet(few did lol), and yet some of the answers he gives here around $MAGIC as a natural resource…around why the team is doing what they are doing feel…Cosmic.
Without further ado, on behalf of ClocksnatcherDAO, I present my QA with John Patten.
AdventureNFT [AD]:First, tell me a bit about yourself. How did you get into the NFT space and Crypto?
John Patten [JP]: I’m John. I have been in the space for several years, getting my start as a DeFi writer. Today I work in growth at Osmosis and co-founded Treasure in September.
AD: Bridgeworld purports to be an NFT based game incorporating the concepts of Mining, Time, and Questing, how did you come up with these ideas and what have you based this game on?
JP: Well, the entire metaverse was community-built. The only thing the founders contributed was the initial germ of thought back in September. We saw Loot and found it interesting. Here came this project that, like Ethereum, presents a mechanism for decentralized building but without any context or purpose for the mechanism.
Coming from DeFi, we had spent years thinking about building blocks. The secret to DeFi is that it’s not actually about finance. Composable financial primitives are mechanisms for social coordination, empowering people to quickly bootstrap new organizations and invent new structures for decentralized world building. Loot lacked any such social coordination tool, which is why for now the experiment has stalled out.
“The idea behind Treasure [is], to use Loot-like constructs to create imagined financial systems on which an entirely new type of creator economy can be built.”
It occurred to us to release “fantasy monies” and seeing what could be built with them. The basic thesis is that a decentralized metaverse becomes real by having a native money. It’s possible to build an imaginary system of finance where the incentive structure between participants adds up to a coherent economic system on which real value can be built. Moreover, you can use these building blocks to create financially-sustainable DAOs to propel decentralization in the space and start building out the tools needed to facilitate the decentralized creator economy. That was the idea behind Treasure, to use Loot-like constructs to create imagined financial systems on which an entirely new type of creator economy can be built. I am convinced that this is the next wave of crypto-assets, and thanks to the amazing community, it looks like Treasure might get to play a role in it!
AD: Whilst developing Bridgeworld were you trying to build it as DeFi wrapped in a game or as a game wrapped in DeFi?
JP: Treasure isn’t really about gaming in my opinion. Treasure is essentially saying, let’s make building blocks on which new types of organizations can be built, but native to the metaverse. Financial primitives are the most generic building blocks, is what I’ve learned from observing DeFi and DAOs the last few years.
We’re focused on community above all else. Treasure produces simple mechanisms/organizational structures that other builders can adopt. So far, it’s working. The community has been unbelievable. There have been at least two dozen contributors to Treasure that have made significant contributions to the project. Everything from the tokenomics, token logo, art, lore, and game design was made by the community. I am humbled and grateful by all of this. I don’t really understand it, but I feel very blessed and wake up really excited every day to build.
AD: Do you view Bridgeworld as simply a fun way to earn MAGIC or will it stand completely on its own as a game over time?
JP: If Treasure succeeds, then Bridgeworld will stand the test of time not as a game but an economic system that can be used as a foundation for anything someone wants to build in the metaverse. We worked hard with the community to create a narrative that combines game theory and qualitative value (community, joy, storytelling) to produce a world that could function as an actual financial market.
AD: Do you view this game as Play to Earn? Is it a direct comp to something like Axie or DFK or do you look at it differently?
JP: Play to earn, play to create, play to belong. The value of the metaverse is bigger than the earning structure. It’s also about the community. That’s partly why I think people building inside DeFi-only or NFT-only silos will have a hard time building something that stands the test of time because combining these mechanisms will yield the best designs.
If Treasure is successful, it will scale beyond Axie or DFK because the DAO uses MAGIC as a tool to bootstrap new metaverses. Most metaverses’ monies are actually payment tokens. They have utility in the network but don’t really have any function outside the walls of the metaverse except perhaps to speculators. We are building financial primitives that will hopefully form the piping beneath many metaverses. MAGIC is a currency in which debt, wealth, etc can be denominated in the entire metaverse space. Since MAGIC is weaved into the narrative of the metaverses, it functions like an actual resource. Whatever value people assign to that network of metaverses (community, entertainment, etc.), MAGIC is backed by that value. MAGIC also powers the DAO that uses its treasury to support decentralized builders in the space. ETH already plays this role, but as we mentioned before, money is the “on switch” for decentralized metaverses. We want to help NFT metaverses become economic systems that are as “real” as any other financial market.
“If Treasure is successful, it will scale beyond Axie or DFK because the DAO uses MAGIC as a tool to bootstrap new metaverses.”
To understand why MAGIC matters, look at what happened with AGLD. Loot needed a social coordination tool. AGLD was a lazy attempt to solve this, but its distribution didn’t make sense. Airdropping it to the holders with no future emissions? What economic activity is going to form around a resource that’s been fully distributed and has no utility to the metaverse? Because AGLD had no value as a social coordination tool or financial primitive, there was nothing powering Loot.
AD: The team has talked a lot about composability, a key element in DeFi, being a major part of BridgeWorld. The word “composable” is used a lot on twitter, many times incorrectly, so help the audience understand what exactly you guys mean by that in the context of BW.
JP: Composability just means the ability to quickly spin up new things using open-source code. Fast iteration is the dream of composability. Treasure produces building blocks for decentralized building. MAGIC and Treasures are a resource economy on which new protocols and metaverses can be built. The DAO itself has produced a product vertical in which new developers, designers, writers, artists, and others can tap into and start building almost immediately.
Composable code is easier to understand than what composability will look like for DAOs and metaverses, but the basic idea is the same. Iteration becomes faster. Builders collaborate not by communicating, but by borrowing building blocks from each other.
AD: It’s clear these games will serve as a flywheel for the ecosystem where one game’s network builds on the next and eventually the system gains so much momentum the growth starts to happen by itself. With the initial games though, there is that thing where you must *push* to get the rock moving down the hill. Of all things did you expect that Smols would what really sent the rock tumbling down?
JP: Never expected it. Smol Brains was an idea that made me laugh thinking about it, and when I told some friends, they also laughed so I figured it could work. In retrospect, though, Smols doing well confirms the larger Treasure thesis. We have been pursuing a sort of unpopular thesis, which is that the metaverse is a story that communities write together rather anything about gaming or graphics. These projects that are handing down these glitzy, 3D video games to their communities… I don’t agree with that strategy. A decentralized metaverse gains value because people put work into producing it, not because they pay for it. It’s probably unwise to judge metaverses on their composition currently. I think you have to look at how involved the community is in producing these worlds and whether there are sufficient tools for reaching decentralized consensus on where to go next or what this world even is. I disagree with most everything I’ve seen written about the metaverse to be honest haha.
AD: $MAGIC is a scarce resource, within Bridgeworld but also within the real world. Economies that center around scarce resources have certain characteristics. How do you view $MAGIC conceptually, and how do you see its distribution playing out over time, in BW but also IRL.
JP: That’s a cool question. In my dream world, there would be all of these metaverses sharing $MAGIC emissions, which is semi-randomly distributed across their worlds just as nature casually distributes resources in a not-perfectly-equitable way. Then we’d see the MAGIC council be less about creating rules for emissions, but rules for harvesting. I’m not sure it’s possible to make a purely natural resource like this, but in theory it’s possible. That would be the dream scenario for me. Let MAGIC be this resource that all metaverses need, but its emission is governed by the capriciousness of nature rather than the capriciousness of its holders.
In a real-world sense, if TreasureDAO is a success, then MAGIC will be a share in an organization that owns an entire vertical of NFT and gaming products. A decentralized Nintendo basically.
AD: What does proof of imagination mean to you?
JP: Constructing a system where all of the constituent parts are imaginary, but the system itself is so structurally coherent and beloved by a community that it constitutes a real financial system on which lasting organizations and dependable systems of value can be built.
AD: Can I get a piece of alpha to end with?
My focus has turned to decreasing the ability of the Treasure team to have alpha. What mechanisms exist to let a community reach decentralized consensus on the lore of the world? Not just lore, but also the comparable utility of items. This is a hard one. It probably involves standardization of metadata across these metaverse, sort of how IBC standardizes the format of transactions in a way that lets relayers sit between Cosmos chains and mediate them. I don’t really know how this will work, but my hunch is that whoever figures it out will have invented a kind of governance mechanism that has utility across crypto, not just NFTs or metaverses.
If you want to learn more about Treasure and the ClocksnatcherDAO, you can follow us on Twitter. We will provide more content in the future about Treasure and their innovative, cutting-edge products.
Author: adventureNFT, co-founder of ClocksnatcherDAO.
