Written by Dewaun
TLDR
IF the $CROWN market cap approaches $20M (⅕ of Derace’s $DERC, ½ of Pegaxy’s $PGX) in the first few months we could see prices of $0.40 — $1.00, 4x to 10x what’s implied by current PFP levels. This isn’t a prediction, more an observation, but I’ve provided some tools for you to come to your own conclusion.
- The first is https://lonelyhorses.com/top-crown-per-sol (edit, use https://racersedge.app/crown instead)
- The second is https://bit.ly/StudsFilliesCrownConverter
Intro
$CROWN is an upcoming governance and utility token for the upcoming Photo Finish 2 game, an upcoming NFT Horse Racing game on Solana. The game has a two token model (similar to AXS and SLP in Axie Infinity), $CROWN has a fixed supply, and $DERBY does not (i.e. it’s inflationary).
Since 50% of total $CROWN will be distributed every 4 week game season to holders of the game’s PFP NFTs (Stylish Studs, Marvelous Mares, Spooky Studs) many are asking the question, what will $CROWN be worth? Value is subjective, but in this article, I’ll provide some frameworks to help people come to their own conclusions as well as provide my own opinions.
First off, I’m not affiliated with the Photo Finish 2 team, although I am an “Honorary” (read, unpaid) Moderator in their discord and own a large number of Studs and Fillies. Any views are my own and should not be considered investment or financial advice. I have a background in finance, investing and technology and I enjoy following tech trends, especially, metaverse and blockchain gaming.
This article assumes basic knowledge of Photo Finish 2 and tokenomics:
Summary/Intros (MUST READ)
- Check out this thread by KRTrades for a quick summary of Photo Finish 2
- Check out this thread by zBanks for notes on the positive-sum tokenomics
- Read this article by Cobie on Token Unlocks
- Read the Photo Finish Economy Blog post
Deep Dive (Optional)
- Roadmap Presentation and Video with voiceover
- Discord Project Intro + Announcements
- Discord FAQs
- Third Time Blog: Dev updates
- Photo Finish Youtube: Twitter spaces recordings, game play videos
- Whitepaper
Goal: Share a framework for speculating on $CROWN
The purpose of this article is to provide a framework to estimate the price of $CROWN in USD based on expectations of demand so that, if you wanted, you could buy Studs or Mares and take a long position.
Why now? Well breeding of the Stylish Studs and Fine Fillies PFPs is just about to begin and once it’s over the value of the PFPs will mostly reflect their $CROWN value. (For more on breeding, check out this Breeding Guide https://bit.ly/StylishStudsBreedingGuide)
PFP Value = Breeding Value + $CROWN value + Other (VIP club, aesthetics, clout etc)
Low-Mid Rank Studs:
- They didn’t have much breeding value to begin with, so are good for taking positions in $CROWN right now
High Rank Studs:
- They can breed multiple times, so they’ll hold their breeding value throughout the breeding period (until there are no more Fine Fillies left to breed with). Once breeding is over, high rank studs will no longer have breeding value.
Fine Fillies
- Once bred, Fine Fillies become Marvelous Mares, which cannot breed and so have mostly only $CROWN value. Marvelous Mares are created by the breeding process, so supply will slowly increase throughout the breeding period.
While the focus is on breeding there could be great opportunities to pick up good deals for $CROWN before the attention shifts and it’s more competitive.
In addition, details of the recent investment round are going to be announced soon, and the team has hinted that there’ll be some information around the $CROWN valuation that the investors assessed. When that information comes out, you’ll want to know how to use that information to possibly take a long position.
So you’ll tell me the value of $CROWN?
No, my aim is to help you figure out what the price will be based on an assumed level of demand in USD. You will need to come up with your own assumption of what the demand will be based on your assessment of the economics of the game and the utility of $CROWN. Once you’ve done that, you can come to a view of price and act accordingly. See the section later on buying PFPs for the best rate of $CROWN.
In addition to governance, you need $CROWN to lease racetracks and get a cut of the racing revenue in the game. Potential racing revenue to holders will be affected by a range of factors e.g. number of races, race entry fees, payout per race, marketing, incentives, etc. (But you already know this, because you’ve read the Economy Deep Dive blog post and zBanks’s thread, right?)
However there are still so many unknowns with how these things will play out. We also don’t know who the investors are, what their expectations of $CROWN are, and how the inflationary token $DERBY plays into it all. When more detail comes out I’ll probably do another post if there is interest, but as the details are released, hopefully you’ll be well prepared to take action after reading this.
The framework
$CROWN Airdrop details
Let’s start with the basic details:
- 250M total supply
- 125M (50% !!) allocated to PFP holders over 26 seasons (4 weeks)
- Distribution is based on rarity (see https://bit.ly/StudsFilliesCrownConverter)
- Remaining tokens allocated to Team, investors and other, with various unlocks (this will be important later)
- — Team: 21% (6 month cliff, 2 year vest)
- — Investors: 7% (1 year vest)
- — Not yet allocated: 22%
PFP prices imply $CROWN prices
So a PFP represents an amount of $CROWN and each listed PFP has a price in $SOL. That implies a price of $CROWN in $SOL (and $USD) for that PFP. Different PFPs have different distributions and different prices, obviously you want the most crown for your SOL. (Hence why the community created the page Top 50 Crown/SOL)
So at current prices the best deals imply $0.0969 or roughly 10 cents per $CROWN. That’d make a mid level (rank 7,500) PFP worth about 7 SOL.
Is 10 cents undervalued, fairly valued, over valued? If we multiply by total supply (250M) that gives you a fully diluted value (FDV) of $25M. Is that undervalued, fairly valued, over valued?
Market Comparables
Let’s look at comparable tokens for ballpark figures. DeRace and Pegaxy are other NFT horse racing economy games in various stages of development/release. I won’t comment on the quality or prospects of these games right now, but I strongly encourage you to DYOR as I think you’ll come to the same conclusion I have that Photo Finish 2 will be superior in many, but not necessarily all, aspects.
The main thing is that they both have tokens on the market today:
- Derace’s $DERC has an FDV of $250M, and a Market Cap of $100M
- Pegaxy’s $PGX has an FDV of $775M and a Market Cap of $41M
Note, this assumes that $CROWN captures the economic value in the game and not $DERBY, which has been designed to remain relatively stable vs USD so that it can be used for most in-game transactions.
If you simply compared $CROWN’s $25M FDV you could quickly conclude that there is a lot of upside for $CROWN if it approaches anywhere near the FDVs of the other tokens (10X vs DERC and 30X vs PGX). However, per Cobie’s article, FDV is just the price multiplied by the number of tokens. The price is really driven by demand and available supply (this determines Market Cap). It’d be better to compare $CROWN’s potential market cap vs the $100M and $41M values for $DERC and $PGX respectively.
This is where your own assessment for the game’s economy comes in. As mentioned earlier, that’s not the point of this article (maybe I’ll write a different one for that) so let’s take the low end and assume demand of say $20M. That’s 1/5th of $DERC and ½ of $PGX (many in the Photo Finish discord will believe this is blasphemy but let’s continue). The question is, what will be the available supply?
Available Supply & Token Unlocks
The dev blog tells us how the remaining tokens are being distributed and we can use that information to create a vesting schedule which gives an indication of how many tokens will be available over time. This is just the available supply, and doesn’t mean that all of it will immediately be put on exchanges to be bought and sold. For example, the team has a 6 month cliff which means they don’t get any tokens for 6 months and then get 6 months worth at once. That increases the available supply, but it doesn’t mean that all those tokens hit the market as sell orders.
In the spreadsheet I’ve made a tab to model these unlocks. 22% of the supply is as of yet unallocated, so I’ve assumed that part of it (10% of total supply) is made available immediately (e.g. for liquidity providers) and the rest vests over the remaining 2 year period.
As you can see the available supply appears to be very limited initially at less than 20% of the total supply before month 6. A $20M market cap throughout this period translates to prices of $0.40 to $1.00. That’s 4x to 10x from current levels. You can use the table to see what the price will be with larger market caps.
Supply increases over time, yes but arguably demand increases too if the game continues to do well. In addition, not all of the additional supply hits the market as sell orders. Again check out Cobie’s article for a discussion on the effect of unlocks on trading prices.
So what next?
Figure out your assumptions
Personally I think there’s a lot more upside from here (< $0.10, Feb 7th), but that’s just my opinion, and as I said earlier there’s a lot more detail to come (e.g. investment round information, additional marketing, game launch, race entry fee details etc). Take your own view on demand by reading up on the game and the mechanics of the economy. Re-read the Economy Deep Dive blog post and zBanks’s thread. Look into DeRace and Pegaxy and see what they’re doing differently or the same. Assume a rough time horizon and calculate a target price. Then go shopping, or not!
Buying/Selling for $CROWN
There are two main resources I’d suggest taking a look at.
Lonely Horses
The first is https://lonelyhorses.com/top-crown-per-sol. Here you can see what the best deals are for Crown based on SOL price. Thanks to @kevinoneil in our community for building this website! Send this man some SOL!
Crown Token Unlock Analysis & PFP Convertor
The second is a spreadsheet I put together for analyzing Crown: https://bit.ly/StudsFilliesCrownConverter
You can use it to:
- See what the price of $CROWN would be at different Market Caps and time periods
- See what the price of $CROWN would be at different FDVs
- See what that means for Studs/Fillies of different ranks
- Calculate a SOL listing price for your stud/filly based on $CROWN price, FDV or CPS
- Calculate the $CROWN price, FDV or CPS for a stud/filly based on a price in SOL
Happy hunting!
Thanks for making it this far! There’s a lot of detail to consume and there’s still more to come. If you have any feedback or questions, let me know on Twitter or in the Photo Finish Discord.
