Recap · August 4, 2025 · 26:45
Fantasy Top: Gamifying Social Media, Bridging to Base, and More | TG Podcast
The Signal
Fantasy Top’s founders explain why the social-card game moved from Blast to Base and why a free-to-play version is central to the next phase. They describe a game built around Twitter attention, sizeable weekly prizes, and a plan to reuse its data infrastructure for a lower-cost intelligence product.
Key Takeaways
- 01
Base fit the migration
The founders say they had already been building chain abstraction, and Base’s mini-app opportunity arrived at the right time after Blast’s decline.
- 02
Free play lowers the learning cost
Fantasy Top’s core game retains players but asks newcomers to understand too much, so the team built a faster mobile-game-inspired entry point.
- 03
Cards align communities
The format gives holders an incentive to follow and promote the creators whose cards they own, creating an engagement loop around tournaments.
- 04
Prizes stay material
They cite about $200,000 of weekly prizes, half in ETH and the rest in cards, with leading players receiving roughly $5,000–$7,000 weekly.
- 05
Attention data becomes Cloud
The team wants to apply its scoring and social-data work to an accessible intelligence layer where communities can track topics and attention.
On the Record
“The barrier to entry is quite high. You have to learn a lot of things.”
“Most of the players, when they're in it and they start playing, they are like really fun.”
“The weekly prize that we are giving out equals to around 200k every week.”
The Breakdown
The founders join from two places
The episode begins casually, with one founder in France and the other in Los Angeles after meeting members of the wider crypto scene. Threadguy introduces the pair as the people behind Fantasy Top, then quickly gets to the practical question: how the game intends to grow beyond the players who already understand its card economy and Twitter-native culture.
Leaving Blast without rushing
They say the move from Blast was not simply a last-minute escape. Fantasy Top had wanted chain abstraction anyway, and the decline of Blast gave the team a reason to make a deliberate choice. Coinbase’s outreach around a Base mini app arrived as the team was considering how to put the product in front of more people without making the underlying chain the main thing users notice. Their aim was a new surface for the game, not merely a migration announcement.
A separate on-ramp for new players
The founders identify complexity as the original game’s main limiter. Players who learn it tend to stay, they say, but new users need to understand several systems before the fun becomes obvious. The free-to-play version borrows from fast, addictive mobile games such as Clash Royale and Clash of Clans, giving people a simpler way to learn the mechanics before engaging with the deeper card economy.
Why cards create engagement
Fantasy Top turns social participation into a game. Owning a creator card makes a player materially interested in that creator’s attention and performance, while the tournament setting gives creators a reason to care about their holders. Threadguy describes the engagement around tournaments as unusually strong; the founders present that alignment as a core product advantage, not merely a financial incentive. The card is therefore also a social prompt: players follow what their chosen accounts do.
The rewards at the top
The team gives a concrete sense of the game’s economics through players such as Auto and others who have been consistently strong. They estimate those players can bring in roughly $5,000 to $7,000 a week when card rewards are included. Across the platform, they say weekly prizes total around $200,000, split roughly half in ETH and half in cards.
From game signals to Cloud
Fantasy Top already evaluates Twitter activity and tries to distinguish signal from noise in a score for each account. The founders say that work made a second product, Cloud, feel natural. Part of the company can continue building the game while another group makes intelligence and tracking tools that communities can use to follow attention around a topic or group.
A lower-cost information layer
Their ambition for Cloud is to let a community create and participate in tracking without the cost associated with services such as Kaito or Cookie. The claim is not that game players automatically become analysts; it is that Fantasy Top’s existing data work and understanding of social signals provide a foundation. The Base launch and free game are therefore distribution moves alongside a broader product expansion.
Distilled from the episode transcript · Counterparty Recap Desk
