Ethereum Game ‘Fantasy Top’ Pays $1.25M to Twitter Influencers It Turned Into NFT Cards

After launching on Ethereum scaling network Blast a week ago, the game—which allows players to create card lineups of their favorite Twitter (aka X) influencers, and earn rewards based on those influencers’ respective social engagement—took crypto by storm.

The in-game “heroes” turned into cards include meme coin trader Ansem, DeGods creator Frank, and even Su Zhu—the co-founder of collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. (Disclosure: Rug Radio co-founder Farokh Sarmad, president of the combined DASTAN parent company that includes Decrypt, is also one of the Fantasy Top “heroes.”)

Influencers earn a 1.5% fee from the trading volume of their card as well as a share of 10% of all pack sale revenue. Now Fantasy Top has made its first payouts—and creators are cashing in.

The top three earners for week one were content creator Jenn Duong in first, then the aforementioned Ansem and Blast founder Pacman tied for second. First place was crowned with 6.7 ETH ($20,500) while the other two were blessed with 6.1 ETH ($18,700) apiece.

“$18K in earnings for [the] first week, not too shabby,” Ansem posted on Twitter, in response to the news. “Fantasy Top [is] one of the crypto apps that could onboard a lot of Web2 creators.”

Scoring in Fantasy Top is based on your lineup’s real world social media engagement. On Sunday, it appeared that Duong’s Twitter engagement was being artificially inflated by bots with degens trying to perform better in-game. She publicly condemned people doing this, temporarily putting her Twitter account on private as she sorted through it.

But Fantasy Top says it’s using anti-botting protections when it comes to scoring, and Duong has also seen substantial organic engagement due to her video content around Fantasy Top, as well as other Blast apps and protocols.

On top of the 409 ETH ($1.25 million) given out to heroes—300 ETH generated from pack sales, and 109 ETH from the card marketplace—another 2,480 Blast Gold was distributed to players too.

We’re yet to know how much Blast Gold will be worth, but crypto industry observers estimate the value to be above $10—adding an additional $25,000 or more to the game’s first week payouts. “Heroes” also earn FAN points, which could be a precursor to a future token airdrop, though that’s currently unclear.

Fantasy Top also said that it plans to launch a feature that lets influencer “heroes” share their earned rewards with players who own their in-game cards, which would give the game a SocialFi component. Some influencers have already confirmed plans to share their rewards with NFT holders.

Edited by Andrew Hayward