Fantasy Top, an NFT trading card game, has transferred over $1.2 million worth of ETH to crypto influencers on X (formerly Twitter) whose profile pictures are featured on trading cards.
Launched earlier this year by the pseudonymous creator Travis Bickle on the Ethereum-layer 2 network Blast, Fantasy Top is a gaming project that enables players to trade NFT cards portraying the X profile pictures of approximately 250 influencers in the Crypto Twitter community. Called NFT Heroes, these influencers include Ansem (a memecoin proponent), Frank DeGods (founder of DeGods and y00ts NFT projects), Pacman (Blur and Blast founder), Su Zhu (former co-founder of crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital), and others.
Fantasy Top distinguishes itself by incentivizing the crypto influencers with rewards from the trading activities. These receive a 1.5% commission on trading volumes for their cards and a 10% cut from card pack sales. Due to the inherent rewarding mechanism, several influencers have promoted the trading card game to their followers on X.
Admitting how Ansem, one of the featured influencers, played a role in publicizing Fantasy Top, the game’s founder, Travis Bickle, said:
“Following the Ansem tweet, our growth has been explosive. While we've seen Fantasy's virality from the start, the scale this time is unprecedented.”
Although there were initial concerns about automated bots inflating engagements with influencers’ trading cards, Fantasy Top addressed the issue by implementing its “anti-botting algorithms.”
Yesterday, Fantasy Top’s dynamic gameplay earned it a spot among the top ten crypto protocols accumulating the most fees and revenue from users. At the time, the NFT trading game ranked #7, superseding prominent projects like PancakeSwap. At the time of writing, however, Fantasy Top has dropped to #15, recording fees worth over $289,000 over the past 24 hours.
Fantasy Top’s gameplay revolutionalizes how trading cards can be played. It demonstrates how a well-crafted gaming experience and targeted marketing can create explosive community engagement. The game is poised to capture more gamers’ attention as it expands its ecosystem.