Summary
Deprecate Atlas Mine by first disabling deposits, then sunsetting Atlas Mine emissions altogether as part of a broader shift to a gaming first sustainable growth model.
Background
To date the Treasure ecosystem has been able to become the premier gaming destination on Arbitrum with >$270M processed volume across 20+ games and >80k MAGIC holders.
What stands out is that we have achieved this completely organically with a grassroots web3 community, creating the foundations of a “decentralized Nintendo” – a game publishing platform supporting an ecosystem of games driven by a deeply passionate community of players and builders.
**None of this would have been possible without the initial bootstrapping efforts of the Genesis Mine, the predecessor of the Atlas Mine_._ **We began with humble beginnings as a Loot derivative, fairly distributed through DeFi mechanisms and the tokenomics reflected that. The “decentralized Nintendo” vision materialized some time after.
- We attracted many talented people and the initial ecosystem of game developers which formed the origins of our “decentralized Nintendo thesis”
- This has blossomed into an ecosystem of gaming studios and game developer partners today, many of which use MAGIC and Treasures as shared game building resource primitives in building a network of interconnected games.
- As we have built out the network, we have begun attracting even more high quality games. Slowly at first, then all at once.
Rationale for Change
Since launch, we’ve endured many ups and downs, including a brutal bear market that has extinguished narratives like play-to-earn games and “gamefi.”
We’ve come out more resilient and wiser. In order to become a premier gaming ecosystem, we must build on solid and sustainable foundations. Through our experiences and discussions with dozens of partner games in both web3 and web2, we’ve learnt that:
- Speculator-driven games that involve passive staking have short lifespans and are rarely sustainable, hurting players and causing collateral damage to the ecosystem.
- Over-financialized staking games attract the wrong audience, and financialized game loops inadvertently turn players into speculators
- Developers must resolve conflicts of interest between early speculators and future players. They end up spending more time “fixing” and “balancing” the game to solve political stakeholder issues, rather than building a fun game.
- Passive staking often results in value extraction and creates misaligned incentives between passive stakers and enjoyment-seeking gamers.
- Removing passive staking enables the ecosystem to flourish on sustainable grounds, where MAGIC can be used to drive user growth, build more enjoyable gaming experiences, and improve ecosystem fundamentals.
Legitimate game developers see games as an art form and don’t want to build pseudo casinos for gamblers. We must move rapidly beyond speculator-centric mechanisms such as passive staking if we are to become a leader and pioneer in web3 gaming–one that can attract reputable game studios and AAA studio game development talent.
**Therefore we must transition to a sustainable growth model. **While the Atlas Mine served the purposes of bootstrapping our community, it is a relic of our DeFi origins–a redundant vestigial tail–no longer appropriate if Treasure wishes to elevate the next level and secure higher quality games and developers.
Proposal: What does the transition look like?
We propose to sunset the Atlas Mine (passive staking) in the following phases:
- Phase 1: disable deposits
- Discuss additional option of removing vesting for unlocks (“rip the bandaid off”)
- Phase 2: remove emissions entirely from Atlas Mine (excludes Harvesters)
- Phase 3 (long term): reworking emission schedules to be more sustainable and better align with network growth which we will address in a later TIP as it deserves a separate discussion and needs to be designed in conjunction with governance.
Phase 1: Disable deposits in Atlas Mine Disable any further deposits to the Atlas Mine effective immediately if the proposal is ratified. This will require an upgrade to the Atlas Mine contract.
What happens to Governance after Atlas Mine deposits are paused? In the long term we look to evolve governance towards a reputation based system:
- The reputation system (currently being formulated) may involve TreasureXP with light touches of social identity to improve transparency and robustness of governance
- Sunsetting the Atlas Mine means that our governance model needs to change. In the interim we propose the following:
- MAGIC remains the governance token
- A two-week lock is required for voting
- A lock-up period mitigates short-term attempts to manipulate voting
- Harvester deposits and Sushi MAGIC/ETH LP remain on a 1:1 MAGIC to governance vote basis.
Phase 1 (cont.): Remove vesting on Atlas Mine unlocks Approximately 50 million MAGIC from 12 month stakers in the Atlas Mine will unlock and begin vesting on 25th January. Each unlocked deposit undergoes 45 day linear vesting.
Two options for the DAO to consider:
- Remove vesting (“rip the bandaid off”)
- Keep vesting
Pros of removing vesting
- Allows the ecosystem to move forward and focus on what’s most important, creating amazing shared gaming experiences together.
- Removes negative catalysts and distractions in one fell swoop and avoids 45 days of potential and hypothesized selling pressure, during which negative sentiment may hinder ecosystem project launches and momentum.
- Avoid the following potential implications from persistent negative price action:
- Hurt morale and raise alarm with people outside of the ecosystem (who are unaware of the Atlas Mine unlock)
- Speculators may create fear, uncertainty, and doubt adding burden to builders.
- Dominate topics of discussion in the community and overshadow any game feature launches through this period (undermining marketing efforts)
- Encourage long-term oriented stakeholders to capitulate and sell (negative sentiment and market psychology implications).
Cons of removing vesting
- Expect sharper price action and volatility surrounding the day of the unlock.
- Some depositors may strategically time their sales over a number of days and sell into any rallies, creating market uncertainty and volatility.
- Vesting allows for would-be sellers to sell in an orderly and predictable fashion.
**Phase 2: Sunset Atlas Mine emissions swiftly and completely ** Disable emissions to the Atlas Mine with a deadline for ‘Cataclysm’, e.g. 1 month after unlock.
- We can achieve this manually by setting utilizationOverride in the Atlas Mine contract
- No code migration is required
- This will happen naturally after disabling deposits as users gradually unstake (as the percentage of circulating supply staked drops below 30%, Atlas Mine emissions naturally turn off).
Note that emissions from the Atlas Mine are not automatically redistributed to existing Harvesters. This is a net reduction in MAGIC emissions overall (returned to the mining pool to be redistributed via active play).
Implications for Bridgeworld NFTs
- While the Atlas Mine provides utility for Treasure and Legion NFTs, it became less effective as an NFT sink after the emergence of staking pools that allowed many players to share high powered NFT boosts.
- Harvesters alleviate that problem through caps on pool size. Launching more Harvesters in replacement of the Atlas Mine will create more sinks for Legions, Treasures, and Consumables and allows us to take the next step in the Harvester roadmap towards Harvester Games, active play, and rotations.
- Corruption
- Corruption will drive more utility to Consumables, giving Treasure and Legion NFTs more use cases outside of their role as Mining Boosts.
- Corruption is a dynamic system, a global decay mechanism that closes the economic gaps on the bulk of Bridgeworld’s game loops and items.
- It’s dynamic: costs and rewards of purging corruption dynamically adjust in response to aggregate levels of corruption in the world, introducing seasonality.
- Corruption Crypts (a new on-chain game launching for BW) is a perpetual maze; Legions race their way through the crypts to reach forbidden crafts and forge corruption. They will make tradeoffs to pursue treasures or to divert corruption to one of various Harvesters.
Future Plans: Where do we go from here?
In the past quarter Treasure made foundational steps establishing itself as a premier gaming destination and game publisher in its vision of becoming ‘decentralized Nintendo’. With over $270M processed volume across 20+ games and >80k MAGIC holders, listings on the world’s largest CEXs like Binance and Coinbase, and onboarding a wave of quality games into the ecosystem, the progress we have achieved to date is undeniable.
All of this progress has come through obsessive focus on growing ecosystem fundamentals and stakeholder engagement. The thesis is simple: a collection of intimately connected games with shared values, goals, and direction will enjoy outsized success and broader adoption than they would have achieved individually.
The culture and values underpinning the grassroots Treasure ecosystem (soon to be greatly expanded with the forthcoming Game Builders Program) fosters unique collaboration between developers across a wide range of genres and audiences.
As a result, Treasure is uniquely positioned to:
- drive meaningful web3 gaming experiences
- explore economically interoperable virtual worlds; and
- deliver delightful ecosystem features that build upon those valued by gamers in traditional gaming platforms such as ‘Steam’.
The combination of the above transitions Treasure into a decentralized distribution and publisher platform that attracts amazing, like-minded game builders.
Upcoming roadmap items include:
Harvesters The Harvester Takeovers era will begin and serve to promote launches of new upcoming gaming cartridges:
- Two games are earmarked for the first Harvester Takeovers in Q1, Knights of the Ether (KotE) and The Beacon. Indicatively, this will involve:
- Harvesters rotating periodically via Harvester Games
- Top competitors of the selected games will get slots in a Harvester for a given period of time allowing them to obtain MAGIC rewards for their skills
- There will be special interoperable crafting game loops that allow the Takeover game to include their game items as inputs.
- The goal for Harvester Takeovers will be to help create a rich and constantly evolving endgame that involves multiple games
- Many games experience lull periods between product feature launches (especially games that don’t have focus on endgame PVP gameplay) and must rely on constantly launching new features
- Harvesters can be powered up by any NFT collection. We look to launch themed Harvesters for specific games (e.g. a Beacon Harvester to promote competitive dungeon runs after their launch).
- In attracting top caliber games to the ecosystem, we may also present Harvesters as a Sink-as-a-Service framework in addition to the Harvester Takeover competitions.
As part of sustainability discussions around Harvester emissions, we will discuss reshaping emissions to align with long term in ecosystem fundamentals In Phase 3, we look to reshape the “Mine” emission schedule to establish more robust and sustainable foundations for Bridgeworld Harvesters and to better align incentives with long term ecosystem growth. We will present the proposal in a separate TIP as it deserves a dedicated discussion.
Our proposals to establish protocol owned assets (TIP-18) will help secure sustainable real yield that may be used to fund ongoing prize pools long term.
Decentralized Steam: Repositioning infrastructure to become a gaming experience first ecosystem
- Gamertag and Global Identity
- Login with Treasure
- Guilds and Social Gaming
- Proof of Play - TreasureXP, Quests and Achieve
Gamertags, Global Identity, and Guilds Treasure will look to give players a sense of identity and social belonging through gamertags, global identity and guild frameworks.
Guilds may have a TreasureXP requirement, Gamertag requirement, and/or a MAGIC requirement as well as provide an aspirational goal for players to progress through and engage with Treasure’s reputation system. TreasureXP and Guilds may help:
- Encourage social based gameplay / interaction
- Enforces better player behavior, as players who don’t adhere become pariahs.
This reputation system will spearhead another aspect of network growth (via web3 social graphs). Introducing social and cooperative play will help retain and engage players, and we can leverage social referrals within game loops to supercharge user growth.
Social Referral Growth Strategies By creating a social graph between players (starting with guilds) we imagine literally every kind of in-game activity to be augmentable by referring and activating friends.
- “follow and refer guild members to boost production rate of X”
- “invite a friend to play every week to stack your boosts–don’t lose your streak”
But these social games do best when they sit on top of a social network or channel, such as the network of discord channels across the Treasure ecosystem.
The above is a small look into why we are so excited for 2023 and beyond! We’re just getting started!