A Hint of MAGIC: Hunting for Treasures on Arbitrum

Introduction

Treasure DAO is a GameFi ecosystem on Arbitrum that’s recently garnered a huge amount of attention. It began as a simple Loot derivative in Sept. 2021. But as the project amassed a large community, Treasure DAO has been able to expand far beyond its initial vision into an entire ecosystem of projects in the short span of a few months. MAGIC, the native token of Treasure DAO, is the glue that ties together the various products in the ecosystem. Currently, it’s the denomination asset (like ETH on Opensea) for all NFTs in the Treasure marketplace.

Armed with a sizeable treasury and a $20M + ecosystem fund, Treasure’s vision is to be a decentralized game studio, kind of like a Nintendo for the Metaverse. Blockchain game developers will be able to leverage Treasure DAO’s infrastructure and community to bootstrap game universes much quicker.

Treasure DAO comprises five main product lines at various stages of development:

1. Bridgeworld

2. Smolverse

3. Life

4. Treasure (Marketplace)

5. Trove (Marketplace)

Bridgeworld, Smolverse, and Life are the three core games that are being developed on Treasure. We will cover each of these individually later in this report.

The Treasure Marketplace is a DAO-controlled NFT exchange that powers the ecosystem’s economy. Unlike OpenSea, NFTs on the Treasure market are denominated in $MAGIC.

Note: On Mar. 2, the Treasure marketplace was hit by an exploit that resulted in several Genesis Legions & Smol brains being stolen by a malicious hacker. 154 NFTs were affected but in the end only 4 NFTs could not be recovered – the team has committed to making affected members whole again. The marketplace was paused and re-deployed again on Mar. 12 after code reviews and audits. There is no evidence of any long-term consequences from this incident as things currently stand.

Trove is the second marketplace being built by the DAO. Here, the denomination asset will be ETH instead, making it open to all NFT projects including those that don’t want to denominate their collections in MAGIC. It will include different user levels (based on volume traded) that unlock greater personalization and deeper analytics of NFT collections. Stakers on Atlas Mine, the main incentive program, may earn a share of the royalties on the platform, in addition to MAGIC rewards. The estimated launch date for Trove is in Q2 2022. To learn more, you can read the seven page Trove whitepaper here.

In terms of the roadmap, the Product Lead for Life and Bridgeworld added some color for Treasure DAO’s plans in a recent podcast. To sum it up: there is a lot in the pipeline, such as refining the Bridgeworld and Life games in the coming months and continuing to develop Trove. The team is actively hiring new team members with plans to have a designated development team for each core project.

Separately, the team has indicated a plan to move the games onto Cosmos using an application-specific chain that would enable low latency