A quick guide to Treasure
Dear Bankless Nation,
With the recent surge of Ethereum’s layer-two scaling ecosystem, more than a few folks are hailing this year as “L222.”
And while it’s fair to say that this ecosystem is still very young and has a ways to go in various senses, it’s also true that some L2s and top L2 apps are starting to see the beginnings of serious organic traction.
In that vein, one L2 project that’s been facilitating major activity recently is TreasureDAO, which created the Treasure universe that’s taken the Arbitrum One rollup by storm lately.
For today’s Metaversal, then, let’s get you up to speed on the basics of Treasure, the MAGIC token, and TreasureDAO’s upcoming Trove project.
-WMP
The beginnings of Treasure
Treasure’s origins date back to Aug. 2021, when the creators launched a Loot derivative project; each of the 10k NFTs in the generative collection, now simply known as treasures, bore eight randomized resources (e.g. Emeralds, Grain, Honeycombs, etc.).
Afterwards the TreasureDAO community began to quickly grow and the builders therein immediately started plans for Legions. These would be PFP characters that owners could use to “mine, farm, craft, quest, and battle” in the Bridgeworld, Treasure’s gaming universe. Note: both treasures and Legions were free-to-mint drops.
The reveal of MAGIC
In Sept. 2021, TreasureDAO introduced MAGIC as the native token of the Treasure ecosystem via “fair launch” DeFi yield farms.
In other words, the only way to earn new MAGIC rewards was to deposit select NFTs or Sushi MAGIC-WETH liquidity provider (LP) tokens into Treasure’s staking app.
This initial farming period took place over the course of a month, after which 1/3rd of the planned MAGIC was distributed. In the years ahead, the majority of the remainder of the token’s supply will be allocated through further liquidity mining and staking campaigns.
The Treasure marketplace rollout
As the TreasureDAO ecosystem started to rapidly swell, the project migrated its operations to the Arbitrum One rollup in Oct. 2021 to offer better and cheaper UX around transactions. Doing so paved the way for the launch of the Treasure, the first NFT marketplace on Arbitrum, in Nov. 2021. At this time the project started charting its path toward full decentralization.
Treasure today
Fast forward to today, and Treasure’s now a teeming center of NFT activity on the Arbitrum One rollup. For example:
- The marketplace has facilitated nearly $85M worth of trading volume over the last 30 days.
- The market cap of the MAGIC token is now +$90M.
- The platform’s Smol Brains NFTs, which started as a free-to-mint project for Treasure Discord members, are now majorly in demand and have become something of a CryptoPunks analogue for the fledgling Arbitrum ecosystem.
Trove and more on the way
The Treasure marketplace is curated for the Treasure ecosystem. Yet take note because TreasureDAO is also currently working on a generalized NFT marketplace called Trove that they’re designing as an L2 competitor to OpenSea.
Whether TreasureDAO can take away serious market share from OpenSea in short order remains to be seen, but the project certainly has plenty of resources and committed community members to decisively start down that path.
In the meantime the decentralized collective will additionally focus on actualizing Bridgeworld, developing partnerships, and beyond.
Action steps
Check out these additional Treasure resources to dive deeper:
Treasure Tools - analytics and hub
Smol Street Journal - Treasure market reports
MAGIC - Coingecko dashboard
Read my previous write-up On NFT maximalism if you missed it!