Ethereum
What is Fantasy Top? Ethereum Gaming on Blast Turns Crypto Twitter Into a Fantasy Sport
We have seen mixtures of fantasy sports and trading cards NFT, but what about something with a more crypto-native topic? Enter Fantasy Top.
Built on Ethereum layer 2 network Blast, Fantasy Top takes the premise of fantasy football and other fantasy sports games, but replaces professional athletes with crypto influencers. It’s like Crypto Twitter: The Game, and it’s more than just a superficial riff on the social media sphere.
Fantasy Top a I started with an electric startdominating industry discussions while driving increased trading volume and becoming one of the most profitable protocols or applications throughout cryptography. Curious how to get started? Here’s what you need to know.
What is Fantasy Top?
Crypto Twitter often feels like a spectator sport, so it makes sense that someone has made a fantasy game out of it. Fantasy Top takes the basic principle of fantasy football, soccer or baseball and exchanges between 120 (and counting) crypto influencers, traders, content creators and personalities.
Each “hero” in the game is based on a resident of Crypto Twitter, and they have their own NFT cards issued on the Ethereum layer 2 Blast network. You can purchase and trade NFTs, which come in multiple rarity tiers and can be upgraded by acquiring multiple copies of a lower-tier edition and trading them. Higher tier cards come with a larger score multiplier.
In Fantasy Top competitions, you will select a lineup of five owned NFT cards and lock it. Scoring is based on actual Twitter engagement from your industry’s “heroes”, amplified by your cards’ particular score multipliers, so there is strategy involved in both purchasing cards for your lineup and choosing the best sample of crypto tweeters to place prominently in a competition.
Cards in Fantasy Top. Image: Fantastic top
Rewards so far include Ethereum (ETH), Blast Gold Points which will go towards the network’s next BLAST token drop, and FAN Points, which could ultimately lead to future benefits on Fantasy Top – or perhaps to an allocation of airdrop tokens.
Do I need NFTs to play Fantasy Top?
Yes, Fantasy Top requires NFT cards to play. You’ll need at least five to lock in a lineup for a competition, and at this point there’s no option to play the game without NFTs.
Fantasy Top sells card packs with dynamic pricing based on demand (currently around 0.4 ETH, or almost $1,200), or you can purchase individual cards on the app’s NFT marketplace.
Fantasy Top is played via the website and, like other fantasy sports, you simply set your lineup and then watch the points roll in. Your ranking on the leaderboard at the end of each competition period determines your rewards.
What can I win in Fantasy Top?
With such great demand, the early rewards are indeed substantial. In the first “main competition,” Fantasy Top offered a total prize pool including over $150,000 in ETH, potentially over $2 million in Blast Gold (based on analyst projections), and other perks for the players.
And crypto influencers who have become gaming heroes are also seeing massive benefits. A share of overall pack sales, as well as a cut of marketplace fees, goes to influencers.
Less than a week after Fantasy Top’s mainnet launch on May 1, 2024, the game paid $1.25 million worth of ETH (in total) to heroes, as well as what is estimated to be at least $25,000 worth of Blast Gold points.
The future
Fantasy Top is early and busy, but the team has already announced its plans for the future – and it also clearly has some issues to iron out along the way.
A week after launch, the game has already added leagues, which divide players into Silver and Bronze categories based on their performance so far. Rewards will apparently vary depending on league title, with “rewards increasingly geared towards high-performing players.” according to a tweet.
What awaits us? More heroes in the game, apparently, as well as an improved scoring model, “a whole host of sub-competitions” and more “surprises” to come.
But as Fantasy Top attempts to grow, it will also have to deal with the immediate problem of users (or external observers) “bottoming” heroes’ tweets, manipulating the score and leading to some early pivots while the team figures out how to manage all this.
Some heroes have complained about being targeted by kickers, and Fantasy Top has already decided to end its first main event prematurely due to handling issues. The game is built around social media engagement, so that’s something they’ll need to address if Fantasy Top wants to try and turn that early buzz into a sustainable gaming model.