TIP-24: Financing a Bridgeworld Game Through Protocol Owned Liquidity

Summary

TIP-24 outlines a proposal for TreasureDAO (“Treasure”) to reallocate a portion of the MAGIC/ETH protocol owned liquidity towards standing up a game development team for producing a playable Bridgeworld game.

Background

Protocol-owned liquidity was crucial to Treasure’s early success and helped us maintain sufficient liquidity and survive the prolonged bear market, emerging as one of the most promising projects in web3.

MAGIC is in a different and more sustainable place today. To date, the DAO has accumulated 39,575.62 MAGIC/ETH SLP. At the time of writing, these tokens are equal to 1,824,650 MAGIC and 1,504.35 ETH ($4.85 million in total)

Listings on Binance, Coinbase, OKEX, and many other CEXs have drastically reduced our reliance on MAGIC/ETH SLP for liquidity. CEX listings have further created arbitrage opportunities for Sushiswap LPs who are currently earning 17.7% (at the time of writing) in real unsubsidized fees alone thanks to MAGIC’s strong daily volume (often $150 million+). The collective effort of DAO contributors has produced an outcome for which all fair launch projects hope to achieve: DEX liquidity provision is now inherently +EV even without token incentives.

Proposal Rationale

Bridgeworld began as an on-chain strategy game about resource acquisition and social coordination between players and guilds in their struggle to control MAGIC. Much of the experience can be described as an “idle game” requiring minimal interaction from players and has remained one of the most successful games of this genre in web3.

As we launched increasingly interactive features for Bridgeworld, it became clear that the current limitations of fully on-chain games (latency, UX, gas costs; etc) constrained game design significantly, especially in attempts to create interactive and immersive experiences that can attract new players, keep them engaged, and expose broader audiences to novel game experiences that feature interoperability as part of a core game loop.

We propose using 60% of the protocol owned liquidity (23,745 of the total 39,575 SLP) to finance a playable Bridgeworld game, similar to the Smolville arrangement made in 2022. We are currently working with our network of seasoned gaming leadership and recruiters to build a second game team for a tactics game incorporating Bridgeworld digital collectibles and ecosystem NFTs.

Financing a game through protocol owned liquidity divestment will have several key advantages for Treasure, Bridgeworld players, and the larger ecosystem:

**Reinvesting protocol owned assets into a higher-fidelity game and art: **Producing a high-quality game for Bridgeworld as well as hiring an art team with experience in AAA games to redo the Legions art in the style of the new game.

**Interoperability sandbox: **A proper Bridgeworld game would elevate Legions and create a sandbox environment to create and test out interoperability opportunities for projects that wish to integrate their characters into Bridgeworld. A Bridgeworld game produced with the help of seasoned gaming leadership and experienced developers would evolve Bridgeworld to a standard-setting web3 game, one with intricate lore and a unique vision for interoperability.

**Achieving the original vision for an interoperable Treasure: **Bridgeworld was initially conceived as the “base layer” metaverse for an ecosystem of diverse metaverses. We thought about this vision in two ways:

  1. First, the DAO was interested in creating an auto-battler game incorporating NFTs from across web3, making an original meta-game to establish interoperability between cartridges. Creating a playable meta-game benefits Treasure not only by providing a sandbox for interoperability exploration. It will also entice new partners to join the ecosystem by unlocking access to new experiences for their assets inside Bridgeworld, giving it its namesake.
  2. Second, we envisioned the base layer metaverse being built on a dynamic between two resources (MAGIC and Treasures). Achieving this part of the vision will require spending significant time with partners to scaffold a cross-game economy for Treasures, the primitive resources and commodities of the Treasure ecosystem. Partner games share emissions of Treasures, reskinned to match their unique aesthetic. Liquidity for the underlying resource grows as more partners opt into the dual resource economy of MAGIC and Treasures. MAGIC functions as the stabilizing device for the ecosystem, being necessary to “turn on” Treasures and make them productive, while Treasures offer new games a source of deep liquidity with which to bootstrap their own economies. Given the scarcity of MAGIC and the flexible supply of Treasures, the DAO should leverage the Treasure NFTs as a productive resource to the greatest extent possible to bolster the ecosystem.

We now know that this vision – a playable meta-game for the ecosystem at large and growing a cross-game economy for Treasures – will require two separate groups working on Bridgeworld. Our internal team already has significant learnings and expertise in systems and economic design and is well-suited to implementing greater adoption of Treasures. Working with AAA veterans on the playable meta-game will free up our team members to focus exclusively on their core expertise, while allowing new contributors to lend their particular strengths that the current team lacks. Bridgeworld has immense potential as a concept and as a mechanism to grow Treasure at large. This proposal will provide the necessary resources to bring the dream of Bridgeworld to life.

Proposal

Divest 60% of the DAO-owned MAGIC/ETH SLP (23,745 of the total 39,575 SLP) for the purpose of financing a playable Bridgeworld tactics game:

  • ETH portion of the SLP will be converted to USDC for the purposes of standing up the initial game development team and production. Production of the game will require an initial investment of up to $2 million based on initial estimates, covering recruiting, hiring of a game director, creative lead, engineering lead, and art director, and other core operational costs. The DAO can decide after the initial iteration of the game whether to scale up the operations, which would require additional funding.
  • MAGIC portion of the SLP will be divested as per the current arrangement with Flowdesk. Any MAGIC put toward this program will be divested as per TIP-22. The total amount of MAGIC divested by MAGIC per day cannot exceed 1-2% of daily volume on the most liquid MAGIC exchanges.

Voting

The polling process begins now and will end on Sunday, March 12, 2023 at 4:0