🔍 Dookey Dash by Yuga Labs

The newest release from the house of Yuga is a skill-based, endless runner game called Dookey Dash. The player’s score is determined by how long you survive during the endless run, the types of fragments you pick up along the way, and the obstacles you destroy. If you’ve played Subway Surfers or Temple Run before, you already know how the gameplay works.

Yuga’s other NFT collections are having quite a moment themselves. Volume from Yuga assets nearly reached 50% of the total NFT volume on Ethereum during the past month. Dookey Dash just added fuel to the fire with sales of BAYC and MAYC increasing over 120% in the 24hr following the announcement.

In order to play Dookey Dash, you need a Sewer Pass NFT that can act as your entry ticket. These can be claimed for free if you happen to own a BAYC or MAYC already. If you don’t own one of those, you can also buy a Sewer Pass on the secondary market. There are 4 tiers of Sewer Passes with a higher tier adding more bonus points to your final score.

Currently, the lowest tier that offers no bonus can be bought for 2.73 ETH while the highest tier that offers a 30% bonus can be bought for 5.92 ETH. Apart from playing with a higher tier of Sewer Pass, you can also spend APE tokens during the gameplay and buy a Powershart Pack. This is a trio of boosters that lasts for 10 minutes after being bought. So far, players have spent more than 349K APE tokens in-game (worth more than $2.1M).

Once you have a Sewer Pass, you can use it to play the Dookey Dash game unlimited times until Feb. 8, 2023. Your score is associated with the unique Sewer Pass and wallet combination used to play the game. So if you sell the Sewer Pass after playing the game, the buyer will not inherit the points you scored in the game.

However, users can store the Pass in a cold wallet and use a delegated hot wallet to play the game. Users can assign a fresh new hot wallet as a delegate for the cold wallet where the Sewer Pass is stored. This creates an effective way of offering your Sewer Pass out for others to play while storing it in a cold wallet. This feature was initially discussed as a security improvement for Bored Apes which are notorious for falling victim to phishing attacks.

But delegation has opened up the game, and all of its incentives, to players who cannot afford to buy the entry ticket. Sewer Pass holders are now paying professional gamers to play using their Passes to secure a higher score – creating a system where gamers get paid to play. Holders simply delegate their Pass to a hot wallet that is used to play the game. After the game, holders receive the private key to the hot wallet.

This is impactful for two reasons. One, web3 incentives are onboarding professional gamers. The delegation feature enables relationships to form between holders and gamers. Incentives are aligned as holders pay the gamers to compete for them, similar to gamers getting paid to compete for a professional esports team. This can onboard a lot of professional gamers into web3 gaming.

And two, professional gamers are incentivized to promote web3 games. Well-established gamers or teams often have millions of followers on social media. As they advertise their Dookey Dash services, their audience of largely web2 gamers is exposed to the nascent Dookey Dash. Combine financial incentives with a fun game and you also have professional gamers flexing on Twitter when they hit the leaderboard.

Currently, over 25K Sewer Pass NFTs have been minted with more than half of them categorized as tier 1. So far, a cumulative of 9.5K wallets have been used to play the game using a Pass.

The game is only available for a limited time. You can only claim a Sewer Pass NFT and play the game until Feb. 8, 2023 (there’s still time!). After that, scores are frozen. Only the wallet that last played the game with the Sewer Pass will have its high score frozen with the Sewer Pass. Users who hold their Pass until Feb. 15 can participate in the “Summoning” – this is when players with a score higher than 0 can burn their Sewer Pass for a new to-be-announced NFT that can be used in future mini-game sets.

We also discuss this game in our January Gaming Roundup, available exclusively for Delphi Pro members here. Here’s an edited snippet from the report:

“Seven days after the launch, Dookey Dash has had a reported 4M game sessions, 19,539 unique players (out of 23k minted NFTs), and roughly $800k (in APE) spent on IAP with a roughly 25% conversion rate. These are impressive stats given that Yuga Labs has paid $0 on user acquisition (UA) or platform fees. Traditional F2P mobile developers expect to spend upwards of 75% of gross revenue on UA/fees, and even the best games see conversion rates of 5-10% for non-paying to paying users.”

📅 This Week in Delphi Research

January Gaming Roundup

January 2023 set the stage for what could potentially be a great Q1 for the gaming sector, with many tokens seeing triple-digit growth during the month. This monthly update by Joseph touches on the TreasureDAO ecosystem, the Dookey Dash game, announcements by Gala Games, and many other exciting events in the gaming sector.

Markets Setup for Rollercoaster Ride in 2023

2023 is setting up to be a rollercoaster ride for markets. Risk assets are off to a roaring start this year, with crypto leading the charge. In this report, Kevin and Jason take a closer look at global liquidity trends to shed more light on the biggest market trends we’re tracking this year. Our macro braintrust says an expansion in global liquidity is the most important catalyst for a renewed and sustainable bull run.

Following the Market’s Footprints: Order Flow Explained

In the last episode of our Market Frameworks series, we proposed that changes in market prices could be a result of reflexive and inelastic markets. In this fourth installment, Jason builds upon this to argue that order flow is the most optimal data to study in such an environment. He further looks into market profile and footprint charts as tools to determine when and where to transact in markets with confidence.

Examining Frax Finance’s “DeFi Trinity”

Frax Finance is a household name for seasoned DeFi users. The protocol’s long-term vision is to build out the “holy trinity of DeFi” – a stablecoin, a lending market, and an exchange. This report by Gen examines the various mechanics that regulate FRAX demand and supply. The report reveals how Frax interacts with the Curve/Convex ecosystem and how it seeks to diversify with new initiatives like Fraxlend and Fraxswap.

📖 Delphi Reads

A bunch of protocols, including Maker, Yearn, Dopex, Balancer, and others, sent out cryptic tweets implying that a big announcement was coming up on Monday. This turned out to be entirely anti-climatic as this was more of a public relations meme to show coordination among social media teams while cross-promoting other protocols. See a collection of these tweets here.

Stablecoins are undoubtedly one of the most impactful applications of crypto. The total value settled using stablecoins reached $7T in 2022. Despite last year’s bear market, the total circulating supply has remained relatively stable. More and more market participants are now comfortable holding stablecoins rather than exiting the ecosystem altogether. Read more here.

A 93-tweet thread covers everything that we discuss in our Year Ahead for Infrastructure report, including access control, interoperability, scalability, privacy, account abstraction, bridges, zk-proofs, modular chains, Solana, Cosmos, L2s, and so much more. Read more here. To stay in the loop on future releases from Delphi Research, join our Telegram group here.

🔥 Meme of the Week

The real bridge wars are being fought on the forums of Uniswap. The DEX is holding a highly contentious vote to decide if the protocol should deploy v3 on the BNB Chain. The crucial question is what bridge will be used to enable cross-chain messaging – LayerZero or Wormhole? Read about the drama that ensued here.

Meme via @devinawalsh.