May 7, 2024 - Economy

Culture hash: Popularity party

What's old is new again.

The big picture: The blockchain world loves to game the fame of its best known proponents.

The latest: Fantasy Top is a new NFT game running on the Blast blockchain (which is associated with Blur, a top-performing NFT marketplace).

NFT cards representing famous folks on Crypto Twitter are traded and assembled into dream teams. Points on those dream teams are based on actual engagement on Twitter.
The people the cards represent get a cut of trades of their cards.

Flashback: We've seen this before — several times.

In 2018, there was Crypto All Stars. This NFT game had an innovative feature: what was called the snatch mechanic. Anyone could take anyone else's NFT if they were willing to pay more for it than the last person paid.
In 2019, there was TCR Party. This one was more an experiment than a real money maker, but it used tokens for crypto users to curate a list of the smartest people in the industry.
In 2021, there was BitClout, which created tokens representing noteworthy folks, so investors could kind of own shares in them.
In 2023, we got Friend.Tech on Base, which was similar to BitClout in many ways and remains a going concern.

If these sound like popularity contests, that's because they are.

💭 Our thought bubble: Imagine when some enterprising geek ports one of these games to an American high school.