After two and a half years of operation, Fantasy.top officially announces the closure of the project.

Written by: kipit

Translated by: Luffy, Foresight News

TL;DR

• All angel round and seed round investors will receive a full refund of their principal and interest; the investment funds will be returned in full;
• Fantasy has relied on revenue for two and a half years, with a total of about 20 million dollars returned to the community;
• The core lesson we learned over the past two and a half years is: if a product prioritizes economic interests above all else, it will attract speculators rather than users first. This principle applies not only to card-based blockchain games, but is also the fundamental reason why the vast majority of social tokens and early token projects struggle.

The decision to shut down Fantasy was not made impulsively. We spent months exploring all possible directions, talking to people we trust, and seriously discussing transformation. Ultimately, we reached a consensus: we do not have enough faith to continue. Therefore, we choose to responsibly end it all and let it conclude gracefully.

This article serves as a retrospective note: what we built, why we failed, and what new understandings we gained about social products, cryptocurrency, and tokens in this process. We are not the first team to test this track, nor will we be the last. If these experiences can help later entrants avoid the pitfalls we encountered, then this entrepreneurial exploration will have value.

The Products We Built

For two and a half years, Fantasy has relied on its own revenue to achieve self-sufficiency. Although the project was led by Dragonfly to raise 5.6 million dollars, the team never used any investment funds for operations, a rarity among crypto projects, which we take great pride in.

Core benefit data of the project is clear:

• Distributed 2,665 ETH (approximately 8 million dollars) to ordinary players
• Distributed 1,078 ETH (approximately 3.2 million dollars) to top creators/influencers
• Based on the Blast ecosystem, a total of 12.2 million dollars in ecosystem incentives given to all players and influencers
• After adding Blast rewards, 86% of players ultimately achieved profits

Overall, the funds returned to the community by Fantasy far exceed the revenue obtained from the community, which is the project's most valuable achievement.

We have created one of the most viral products in the social crypto sector, introducing new mechanisms: industry mental influence scoring, social graph prediction markets, and lightweight free play modes.

We have maintained a rapid iteration and efficient launch rhythm for our products. Even so, we were still unable to break through developmental bottlenecks.

The Core Reason for Fantasy's Failure

The core reason for our failure is simple: We attempted to place cryptocurrency on a foundation that was not originally built for it.

Trading card games have their own mature business logic, with Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh being top-tier entertainment IPs that are globally popular and enduring. Players are keen on card collection, trading, and battles, making for a vast audience base.

Yet all crypto card games ultimately face failure, from TopShot and Sorare to our current situation. This is no coincidence, but a result of structural defects in the sector.

The core logic of traditional top-tier card games is to develop the game first, followed by peripheral products. Players acquire cards primarily to enjoy the thrill of battling, and the financial premium that accompanies the cards is a natural derivative of mature gameplay and a robust community ecosystem, not the primary motivation for user entry.

In contrast, crypto card games completely inverted this logic: cards first became speculative financial assets, while gaming enjoyment became secondary. The players drawn in were not those passionate about gaming but rather a group of speculators looking to profit from card hype, with vastly different motivations.

Once a project is thoroughly financialized from inception, every operational decision thereafter is restricted: there is no freedom to optimize gameplay, as any rule changes directly affect card prices; it becomes risky to launch new playing modes for fear of triggering community interest reallocation. In the end, the team focuses less on refining game content and is forced to become managers of financial markets, which is the industry dilemma we found ourselves trapped in.

We detected this issue long ago and attempted to break the deadlock with full force. We launched arena modes to lower asset holding thresholds, built lightweight traffic channels, opened free play access, and even eliminated the NFT asset system, fully transforming into a social prediction market approach. Each adjustment was intended to return to the original focus of “game first,” but we were never able to reverse the overall downward trend.

The decline of the Blast ecosystem further exacerbated the developmental difficulties. At that time, the excitement surrounding Blast was unprecedented, with a large influx of users into Fantasy seeking the rumored massive ecological airdrops. During the first month of the project’s mainnet launch, revenue hit a historical peak, accounting for 70% of the project’s total lifecycle revenue.

Starting at the peak led all subsequent operations into a declining trend. The team no longer made steady plans for long-term growth and could only respond passively to the decline in traffic and interest after the buzz faded.

Financialization Changed User Tiers Completely

This industry-wide problem is ubiquitous in the crypto field. Social tokens were initially intended to reshape the connection between creators and fans, yet nearly all related attempts have failed, for the same underlying reason: true fans follow creators out of recognition of their work, philosophy, and community atmosphere, not purely for profit.

Once the token price fluctuations are embedded between fans and the content they love, the pure emotional connection becomes completely distorted. The most active participants in the community may shift from loyal fans to short-term traders.

This is not a trivial matter but rather a core issue constraining the sector’s development.

The crypto industry excels at designing incentive mechanisms and gathering consensus among participants, which is its core strength. However, there is a common misconception in the industry: simply overlaying financial attributes onto traditional internet products, games, and social communities can achieve business model upgrades.

On the contrary, adding financial attributes will entirely alter the essence of the product, and in most cases, will even severely undermine the product’s core value.

Attempting to reproduce crypto products based on traditional internet ecosystems for scalable growth is fundamentally unfeasible; financial attributes have always been mere additional functions that directly reshape user demographics and the motivations for their entry.

Deep Reflections on Track Tokens

This logic applies not only to end products but also to crypto startups themselves.

Our team has never issued a native token for the project, even though we have had multiple ideas, but we ultimately chose to abandon them. The reason is simple: it would be irresponsible to issue tokens before the project has reached substantial development milestones. 95% of tokens on the market decline in price after launch, and knowing the outcome, engaging in token issuance to profit at others' expense is something we strongly oppose.

Looking at various token issuance projects throughout this industry cycle, I increasingly believe that most projects have serious flaws in their token issuance mechanisms themselves.

Issuing tokens at a stage when a project lacks a developed product and stable market demand is fundamentally a mistake. I once thought traditional financial regulations were overly strict, but now I fully understand their underlying logic: stringent regulation exists to protect ordinary investors from startups that lack commercial viability. The crypto industry directly bypasses this layer of risk control, leading the entire sector to pay the price.

Rushing to issue tokens without validating product-market fit is harmful to projects and offers no benefits. After issuing tokens, the team’s focus shifts entirely to price fluctuations, while ordinary users only pay attention to market volatility, causing everyone to neglect deepening product development, leaving the project completely stagnant.

Even high-quality projects like Across Protocol, which have real revenue and stable development, openly acknowledge that the negative impacts of issuing tokens far outweigh their actual value, a conclusion that merits serious contemplation across the entire industry.

In this cycle, high-quality tokens that performed well are exceptions, not the norm: projects such as Hyperliquid, Pump, and Jupiter first build mature business systems and achieve stable revenue, relying on platform profits for token buybacks and empowerment, issuing tokens only after demonstrating strong capability.

The decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) sector is one of the few structural exceptions, but many early DePIN projects launched with inflated valuations, which cannot survive in today’s market and to this day, there is still no recognized long-term success benchmark in this sector.

Similarly to financialized card games, projects issuing tokens too early are prone to fall into a vicious cycle. Once the tokens are launched, overly inflated market financial expectations severely constrain startup projects' flexibility to trial and error, exploring the correct development path.

Full Refund of Investor Funds

All angel and seed round investors in Fantasy will receive a full 100% refund, with the exact amount they invested returned in full.

The reason we are confident in this is that the project has been self-sufficient throughout its operation and has never used external investment funds. Initially, investors were optimistic that the project could grow into a billion-dollar entity; however, the project has no chance of achieving that goal, and we do not have sufficient faith to invest this money into a transformation path we are not certain about.

We greatly value the trust given by our investors and will never waste that trust on blind attempts that we do not believe in ourselves.

To Platform Creators

Heartfelt gratitude to all of you! When the project’s business model had yet to be validated, you chose to join and co-create based on your own fame and influence, collectively earning over 3.2 million dollars on the platform. We hope this return lives up to the trust you placed in us initially.

To All Community Users

It is every community user who made Fantasy what it once was. All the impressive data achievements mentioned above cannot be separated from your strong support. We have strived to create the most entertaining social game in the crypto sector, and we truly did succeed for a time. Thank you all for your companionship day after day, actively forming decks and participating in competitions.

It is regrettable that we ultimately could not meet everyone’s expectations. We fully understand everyone’s disappointment and regret, and we accept this outcome calmly.

If anyone still firmly believes that there is a billion-dollar business idea hidden behind Fantasy, you are welcome to try your hand at it. The entire sector presents opportunities with no entry barriers, and we are willing to share all our practical experiences and lessons learned without reservation.

We have encountered many insurmountable industry barriers, and later entrants need not repeat our mistakes and tread the same trials. Perhaps consider a completely new development approach to avoid the detours we took and to create an even higher quality product than ours.

Writing this retrospective is not a formal farewell but rather leaves a reference for future entrepreneurs.

At this stage, the inherent growth ceiling of crypto card games is clear; social products that prioritize financial attributes are destined to only attract speculators and struggle to solidify a core fan base; issuing tokens prematurely, detached from actual product needs, tends to drag down project development.

These issues are not unique to our project but are common pain points across the entire crypto industry. These challenges are not insurmountable, but they cannot be simply replicated by outdated models.

We are not the first to test the waters, nor will we be the last. The most precious quality of the crypto industry is its boldness to explore and experiment; entrepreneurial exploration inherently has ups and downs, but every attempt carries unique value.

Finally, again, thank you to everyone who has ever trusted and supported us.