Treasure: the Web3 Game Console

“I feel that today, video games are closer to literature than anything else. I don’t like playing video games myself, but I can feel the similarity between it and literature. When I write, sometimes I feel like a designer of video games and a gamer at the same time. I made up this game program, and now I am in the game.” Haruki Murakami

Treasure is pursuing a unique vision for web3. We are a collective of artists, technologists, and game builders creating a vast network of interconnected game worlds. MAGIC is the currency that unites these worlds. Characters use MAGIC as a money and also a substance to sprinkle on the world and bring it to life. The larger the network, the more vital MAGIC becomes as a resource. Eventually, Treasure will start to resemble a decentralized game console, with the game worlds and organizations building these games both powered by MAGIC in a very real sense.

Unlike Nintendo, we are not a company relying on proprietary IP to establish network effect. We are a decentralized community, using uncopyrighted NFTs to create an open-source universe of stories and characters with which anyone can interact. The NFT is an unprecedented mechanism for distributing a concept to a global audience. On-chain gaming in particular is an unmatchable medium for empowering unseen artists. In the real world, I was a failed writer. In web3, I have found my medium. I get to work alongside some of the world’s best artists to build a collectively-created art form. I will work tirelessly to promote this technology as a medium, not merely a mechanism for distribution or provenance.

On-chain gaming allows for experiences that can exist solely because of smart contracts. The only digital art that justifies the NFT to this extent are pieces that change through smart contract interaction. Web3 can be absolutely essential to the art form, or it can be as vacuous a use of technology as tracking a pallet of watermelons on a blockchain. (In this way, I expect PFPs and most digital art to go the way of “watermelons on the blockchain” in the next few years.)

Treasure uses NFTs in a way that intrinsically validates the NFT as form. Game worlds are brought to life through smart contracts, allowing for experiences unachievable by any other medium. Web3 creates completely new kinds of imagineering.

I will start by explaining TreasureDAO at a high level, followed by a reflection on our early failures and how we will overcome them.

I have never been more confident in what we are building. The PFP era for NFTs has ended. The vast majority of NFT projects are hurtling towards certain death, like utility coins in 2017. Treasure is one of the very few NFT projects that can avoid this fate and emerge stronger one, five, even ten years from now.

We are not a generative art project. We are web3’s decentralized video game publisher.

Decentralized Nintendo

Treasure is the first web3 game publisher. The DAO is building a network of fictional worlds in which the characters all utilize MAGIC. They transact in it. They scatter it on their worlds, possessions, even themselves to bring these things to life. MAGIC is the thread connecting the network of game worlds. Any web3 builder can acquire it and use it to scaffold their game. We are creating a permissionless, base layer economy that makes it easy for new and existing game builders to contribute to a bigger story simply by incorporating MAGIC into their world. The value of the Treasure network is composability, network resiliency, access to larger communities… Everything offered by a smart contract platform, but through a network of fictional worlds.

Once two or three popular games are built on top of Treasure, it will be obvious that Treasure is so much more than an economy. It is a gaming platform. But unlike Nintendo, we aren’t gatekeeping who can become one of Treasure’s popular titles. The DAO should, of course, curate the marketplace to censor hateful and pornographic content. Perhaps the DAO will sometimes go too far and start filtering out benign games that seem to hurt the Treasure brand. Even then, the DAO cannot prevent builders from participating in the underlying economy. Treasure is permissionless. MAGIC is a resource that can power anyone’s imagination.

To really concretize this vision, we would like to develop our own blockchain one day. MAGIC as a network staking token makes perfect sense as the final confirmation of the underlying thesis. Crypto-monies are almost always the native token of the blockchain. Well-intentioned currencies like OHM and Temple failed to become monies, whereas Dogecoin somehow managed to achieve this quality.

Even without the Treasure chain, MAGIC functions as one of the first kinds of crypto-money not used to secure the blockchain. (It secures the network of games.) We are creeping into an era of history where memes are more than viral online trends. They are capable of becoming ownable assets sliceable into discrete units. Assetized memes will soon be thought of as hard a money as Bitcoin, perhaps harder.

If memes can be money, what about joy and imagination? Same thing. We can use crypto-tokens as a container to basket the dreams of creatives. MAGIC is a distributable asset to spread, share, and power imagination. In this way, it functions like real money. I hope to see MAGIC dispersed across multiple game worlds. With 50+ titles made by community builders in less than a year, I’m very confident that this vision will bear out.

The amazing thing about Treasure to me is the blurriness. It is unclear where one world stops and another begins. The line between creator and community is similarly obfuscated. This erasure of boundaries is exactly what decentralization should look like in practice.

People ask why someone would not create their own MAGIC token. I’m sure some will. We don’t need everyone to participate in Treasure. It’s a permissionless game economy that people can interact with if they want. But once we have two or three core titles, our legacy will be enduring. Slowly at first, then all at once.

With a network effect in place, and an organizational structure that protects artists and writers, builders will flock to Treasure to access the huge community forming around it. They will prefer this distribution network to existing console-makers.

MAGIC will work. We will use a single token to anchor a decentralized gaming network and thereby unseat the monopolistic publishers exploiting artists and game creators. This vision will require the community to engage in the imaginative world building that gives MAGIC a purpose. Stakeholders need to push core builders toward strategies that advance Treasure as one of the world’s largest video game publishers.

Thanks to a blossoming, global community, I believe that Treasure will achieve the level of imagination needed to construct the cross-game economy on which countless titles can be built.

To recap:

• TreasureDAO is an organization that uses its treasury to produce games, NFTs, and other kinds of media.
• The DAO governs the emissions of MAGIC, deciding which builders to subsidize and which worlds receive emissions.
• MAGIC functions as in-game currency and also a deflationary “utility token,” letting characters activate various items by using MAGIC.
• Other game builders can use MAGIC as well, even asking the DAO to direct emissions into their games.
• A cross-game currency is valuable because games become stronger by participating in a network. Builders have access to a much larger community, deeper liquidity for their in-game currency, and immediate access to pre-existing lore and infrastructure simply by hooking into Treasure’s world.
• We do not expect everyone to participate in Treasure. There will be other networks like ours. The value of Treasure is the quality of builders and community currently banding around this vision to bring it to life.
• With two or three popular titles, we will start to amass the network effect of a traditional video game publisher. Builders will flock to these web3 organizations, just as developers hope to be part of the Nintendo brand.

Reflecting on Past Failures

Despite existing less than a year, Treasure has sometimes veered off course and lost sight of its purpose. We were a free mint project that reached valuations of heavily hyped ICOs. I was not prepared for this level of attention. I did not have enough belief in Treasure’s vision or myself at that time to ignore bad advice from influential people.

We made mistakes as an organization. Our treasury grew to an enormous size, yet we passed on exponential growth opportunities and decided to delay launches due to not appreciating the ephemerality of success in an attention-driven industry.

Each additional layer of organizational scaling made it that much harder for me to communicate across the organization what we were trying to accomplish. Bewildered by rapid growth, I struggled to steer the ship and learn necessary leadership skills at the same time.

As one of the first projects trying to create L2 adoption, we ran into friction that could not be resolved quickly. We were building an infrastructure and metaverse layer while trying to grow adoption for both. Our marketing trailed far behind our building, allowing cunning marketers to take our innovations and repackage them in a shinier wrapping. We barreled forward as fast as possible, rarely stopping to think about how to communicate what we are doing. Thanks to the addition of Karel, Sambino, Derrick, Zak, Max, and others, our marketing is now impeccable. The joy and wonder that shaped Treasure’s story is captured by our new design.

Anger by the community at these problems clouded my judgment even more and caused me to become distracted by whatever passing trend was capturing NFT traders’ attention at the time, resulting in a sometimes unfocused roadmap. MAGIC is a very simple concept at its core, but as the organization was struggling to scale, the mission of Treasure looked messy and confusing to newcomers.

Worst of all, my enthusiasm for web3 started to evaporate as I became disillusioned and burnt out with an industry overrun with greed and a philistine level of appreciation for art itself. Some of the best builders I know will never come back to this space simply because their communities were insufferable in their demands to achieve the impossible and somehow raise the floor price. Personally, I was too busy and overwhelmed with this rollercoaster experience to self-reflect on my growing dissatisfaction with web3. I see now how my frustration translated into an outwardly pessimistic, uninspiring persona for a founder, hurting Treasure’s growth as a brand.

After meeting many community and team members in person at NFT NYC, I have reclaimed that joy and positive vision for NFTs and am ready — as a leader and builder — to take Treasure to the heights it was always capable of achieving. We are building something no one else in web3 seems to be attempting. For the first time, we have a team capable of turning the dream of Treasure into a reality.

The beautiful part of these early failures is that MAGIC survived unscathed. MAGIC is an enduring substance sitting underneath our game worlds. Not even organizational tumult could endanger its survival. Smart contracts outlive their engineers. I genuinely hope MAGIC — as a currency, a story — will endure in peoples’ imaginations for a long time. I believe Treasure can be the platform on which misfit creatives like myself finally find a medium.

*****

I have decided to spend more time writing long-form pieces to explain the vision behind Treasure. I have a very specific idea of where the organization should go, but it is surely incomplete and wrong in some regards. (In a nutshell, my view is that the DAO should keep the emission curve of MAGIC but increasingly distribute it to new games like Smolville to see what model is most effective for the long-term growth of Treasure. After enough experimentation, it will be clear what direction should be taken, and the DAO can slowly remove upgradability of Treasure’s game worlds to turn them into natural worlds, governed not by the DAO but immutable laws of nature set by the smart contracts.)

These pieces are not meant as dictates for the DAO. I am trying to do the opposite: differentiating my personal vision of Treasure from what TreasureDAO actually is at an organizational and mechanism level.

In future pieces, I will break down the DAO’s three core products: Bridgeworld, Smols, and the marketplace. Each utilize MAGIC in a different way, but together they create an integrated, holistic experience for users and serve as the foundation for a decentralized video game publisher.