The Decentralized Game Console

How the Treasure Chain will bring us closer to our vision of interoperability and a self-sustaining metaverse.

Contributors at Treasure have spent three years trying to articulate why a project like ours would eventually become the decentralized game console. This vision was something that came out of our community in 2021 and has propelled us forward ever since.

I want to outline in this post our progress towards reaching our community’s original vision. The launch of the Treasure Chain and the eventual addition of game-specific rollups called Infinity Chains will put us in much closer reach.

This piece will start with a high-level discussion of general concepts we’ve discussed throughout Treasure’s history (game interoperability, the decentralized game console, “Imagination Legos”) then move into a more practical discussion of how the network of chains moves us towards this vision.

Interoperability is Inevitable

Our original notion of game interoperability was loved by idealists and derided by a handful of game builders. “Blockchain games will not be interoperable”, they said. The irony here is that they always have been! A spike in activity in one game causes network congestion that increases the cost of production in every other game. We now see games moving to dedicated app-chains as we expected. Our original aim since the first month of MAGIC was blockspace solely dedicated for a metaverse function and turning the notion of cross-chain bridging into a fantasy experience akin to intergalactic barges moving between planets. MAGIC is the unit of account, the cost to ferry, a single metaverse currency. We look forward to proving out this idea more tangibly with the Treasure Chain and eventual Infinity Chains. We aim to make technology mystical and show that the blockchain doesn’t need to be abstracted away to enable an immersive experience.

The “unsexy” case for Treasure as a platform is that users will want a persistent identity layer to connect disparate achievements and assets across blockchains. Game builders need performant chains. Gameplay is therefore balkanizing. Treasure exists as a platform to connect these player experiences. We see Treasure as poised to succeed by virtue of how far ahead we are in creating a web3-native platform to connect game experiences into a single console. At the same time, we are pushing ourselves to deepen game world interoperability in anticipation of a larger market shift.

In my opinion, it is inevitable that games start integrating each other’s mechanics and resource economies to form a larger network of games.

This outcome will occur in NFTs and gaming for the same reason that forks often fail and networks tend to aggregate. We have reached a critical inflection point where cultural objects like CryptoPunks have achieved historic status. At the same time, the market has become saturated to the point that it’s very difficult to build a new community using an airdrop. These two phenomena happening in parallel means it’s incredibly difficult to get users to switch from one community to another or to create a new community at all. Traditional advertising targets users based on consumer data. But in NFTs, we generally make durable goods, not Kleenexes. It is very difficult to get someone to substitute their PFP identity for a newer product. Persistent identity layers that tie achievements to these avatars will make it even more difficult. New market entrants will be forced to build alongside objects that are deeply ingrained in user behavior. We see the idea of personal attachment even extending to memecoins now! It is now commonly accepted that PFPs and other NFTs will become interoperable in games, but now that we see tribal attachment extending to ERC-20 memecoins as well, interoperable resource economies are the next logical step.

What is the cost of getting a crypto community to switch to a new identity? Not quite as high as a hard fork, but comparable in cost accounting for the differences in market cap between ETH and CryptoPunks. Projects (or game worlds) with persistent moats will have created identity layers, resource economies, even digital physics systems into which users are deeply ingrained. You can lump all of these objects together into the Imagination Legos category. Whether they are NFTs or smart contract-based game mechanics, these things exist on-chain as components that other builders can incorporate and build atop. I credit Loot for being the project that demonstrated this idea most clearly and sparked a movement from which Treasure began.

Many blockchain-based objects will lack the cultural strength to fend off forks, but some will have immunity to vampire attacks. These lucky few will become the basis for the decentralized metaverse as we described it in 2021. Today, the idea of a metaverse composed of decentralized infrastructure, interlinking economies, and tribal affiliations isn’t some far off dream. It’s the likeliest market outcome. We believe that we are building a successful version of it. MAGIC will not only fulfill the unglamorous purposes of creating a single platform for game builders everywhere, assisting with data collection and ability to bootstrap new communities through airdrops… We hope it will also continue to represent an idealistic, forward-facing vision for blockchain games to attract even more builders to join us. I will discuss the idealistic vision for Treasure now.

Shared Sequencing

Treasure’s aim has never been to be a simple marketplace or publisher, although these roles are crucial to our DAO. Our aim since the beginning has been broader and focused on a version of gaming that is inimitably crypto-native.

We are working towards increased game interoperability, a goal that directly informed our chain design. In addition to the Treasure Chain, we plan to begin adding game-specific L3s. A shared sequencer will allow these separate roll-ups to achieve interoperability. MAGIC will be the common fee token across this network of chains. As decentralization becomes feasible, MAGIC will also serve as the staking token to support this cross-chain infrastructure. Treasure will be able to scale horizontally while each project retains the freedom to customize their home-chain-world to suit their specific needs. New chains will sometimes have their own tokens. In this world. MAGIC functions as a unit of account for our metaverse forex and the currency for the sequencer and cross-chain infrastructure, which we plan to announce more of in the coming year. Beyond this, we want to take the idea of building blocks across a cluster of rollups to start pushing the envelope on cross-game integrations in a way that has never been attempted.

Here is how I anticipate the market will progress for projects focused mostly on skeuomorphic versions of traditional gaming products like Steam. A marketplace will gain an initial edge and utilize LayerZero to become the “meta-platform.” A race to the bottom ensues where more money pours into crypto to tackle the leader, finance vampire attacks, and compress profits for creators. Game builders will try to protect themselves by making even more of their NFTs into soft, non-tradable assets. Builders will lean into commercial deals rather than smart contracts to lock in revenue. Many once-ambitious game designers hoping to use the blockchain in new ways will need to water down their idealism simply for survival. Market participants start to look indistinguishable from web2.5 games, fail to create any type of genre unique to the blockchain, and get out-funded by better, higher-fidelity games from traditional gaming.

I believe that most web3 projects are roleplaying as kings waiting for the real dynasties in traditional gaming to simply flip the switch and start allowing NFTs. Everything that’s been made will be washed away in a single block the moment these companies enter the market.

The alternative is what I called an “economic vanguard” where a small number of game builders team up to experiment with deeper-level integrations at the level of economy, lore, culture, and so on while co-creating decentralized infrastructure that allows each team to continue growing. Vampire attacking such a vanguard involves many attack surfaces, the strongest of which is the culture they have formed together. The ambitiousness of the vanguard’s vision continues to inspire a die-hard community. A sticky community keeps liquidity inside the network and on the marketplace. Collectives such as these will stand their own in a unique way and begin aggregating their energy. In the early years, they will look quite weak. But over time, they get stronger. They will have made a decentralized game console. They will have made something like Treasure.

Treasure is working with a group of core, well-aligned game builders on careful experiments for creating linkages between what are essentially separate games and rolling the snowball into our own self-sustaining metaverse.

A community-weaved fantasy built on DAO-owned protocols. The snowball begins very small – games that reference each other’s NFTs and lore – then grows into larger integrations like digital weather and other shared realities. Eventually, it becomes an experience even more immersive and personal than a generic sandbox. I tried to articulate in 2021 that the metaverse will be a community-created story involving multiple builders permissionlessly stacking Imagination Legos to make a single world. At the time, I only had intuition to fall back on here and a vague expectation that the deepening of cultural significance for NFTs would form the cement needed to make our own thousand-year monuments on the blockchain. I want to go further here and “double down” on my original claim.* I think it’s incredibly likely that maybe not in one or two years but twenty years the people who’ve toppled the traditional gaming goliaths were the ones who best figured out how to use decentralized protocols and a collective commitment to game interoperability as a way to scale themselves beyond isolated indie developers. The entrance of traditional gaming giants into the blockchain scene will likely obliterate the most dominant web3 projects, revealing their moats to be sandcastles. The ones left standing will be the little vanguards, slowly piecing together the components needed to create the true decentralized metaverse.

Moats in blockchain games will be different, weirder, and categorically unique from anything in traditional gaming. I want to credit Parallel here for their 0 to 1 moment with AI-based games. It is much clearer to me having learned about Colony and reverie layers how separate worlds will become more closely threaded. I look forward to seeing what they create here and want to acknowledge it here as a good example of someone blazing down an untrodden path in search of true web3 PMF.

*Treasure community members sometimes point out that the early project was very “DeFi-focused” whereas now we talk about cultural objects. The initial thesis has not changed as far as I’m concerned. Instead, I’ve accepted the length of time it will require for decentralized finance and NFTs to merge in a more soul-affirming way than what we encountered in the past few years. I am more confident than ever that NFTs will eventually make suitable building blocks for new financial systems. Early attempts faltered for a variety of reasons. Individuals primarily speculated on NFTs’ value with no intrinsic enjoyment of the object. Game worlds were low-fidelity and not sticky social experiences. The term “DeFi'' remains a dog whistle for certain kinds of market participants who are interested in slash-and-burn yield farms rather than sustainable decentralization. And so on and so forth. I still believe in the initial vision of Treasure as strongly as I did in 2021 but am prepared for a longer journey here. What excites me about the blockchain is the ability for simple protocols to enable highly imaginative individuals to become financially independent without the need for commercial deals. If the First Renaissance featured patronage of artists, the Second Renaissance will be based on self-patronage. NFTs and blockchain more generally will be the foundational technologies responsible for this shift. With enough objects that rise to the level of non-speculative value, DeFi protocols will enable entire economies based purely on cultural artifacts. I believe my two kids will retain a significant amount of their net worth in NFTs one day. They will pay back their friends for cab rides in metaverse tokens and memecoins, choosing ones that let them express their personality.

I want to live in a world where currency is a shibboleth, a method of proving one’s affiliation to a tribe. There shouldn't be one successful coin. Hopefully there are thousands. I find this idea beautiful and hope to contribute to its progress.