Crabada: The #1 Game on Avalanche
TLDR: Crabada is the #1 ranked P2E game on Avalanche migrating to the Swimmer Network Subnet (currently on Testnet). Supported by AvaLabs, a bet on Crabada is a bet on the Avalanche Subnet ecosystem and the future of game-fi itself.
The Market and Metrics: The market for Crabada includes gamers within the Avalanche ecosystem. DappRadar has consistently ranked it as the #1 game on AVAX with an average of 5,000 daily users, and 273 k daily transactions as of 3/11/22. The growth curve for the game is made even more interesting when we consider the fact that there is a high $5400 cost to play ($1800 per crab and you need 3 crabs to start a ‘team); this is an indication that strong demand exists, and this is where the opportunity lies.
The opportunity:
The daily active players will grow in the next few weeks as Cradaba announces its ‘battle-game’ and ‘scholarships’. The scholarships will allow new players to join existing teams for a percentage of the profits of that team. This will drastically reduce the barrier to entry and bring in an influx of new gamers who are rewarded for their in-game efforts. The team will also institute marketplace loans so players will not need to pay upfront. The Battle-game will also require more transactions and thus increase the activity on the game itself, it will also require more breeding which further incentivizes token accumulation. Furthermore, the launch of the battle-game will also be available on mobile thus boosting the accessibility of the game itself.
The tokenomics:
There are 2 main tokens within Crabada: $CRA and $TUS. $CRA has a supply of 1 Billion, $TUS is unlimited and is only minted via the game (function of player activity). $CRA is a governance token awarded via staking and playing the game during the ‘incentive period’ (period until the battle game is launched). $CRA is needed to ‘level-up’ in game. $TUS is the in-game currency earned by playing the game in the form of mining, looting, and lending crabs via the Tavern. You use $TUS to buy crabs and burn $TUS when breeding. $TUS is also collected as a marketplace fee (3.85%), this goes to the Crabada treaury, which constitutes as a ‘soft burn’ as it gets out of circulation — thet do this every Monday. This token is the in-game reward token and it gets minted every time players mine or loot, the uncapped supply is necessary to allow for more players to join and earn the token. $TUS is also the gas token for the Swimmer Network (gaming Subnet on Avalanche) thus it has extra utility upon the entire network. A quick scan of the native token $CRA on snow trace shows that there are 16,590 holders, and the allocations are divided in the following way: 56% for the game, 34.8% time locked for the team (2 year vesting schedule), advisors (2 years) and ecosystem (1 year), and 1.2% of the supply is held by the top 10 holders. This is an encouraging metric as opposed to other P2E games with shorter lockups and larger concentrations of supply within the top 10 holders who can then drastically affect the price.
Key Drivers:
The key drivers, like with any game, will be its fluidity, and the ability to drive in new users within the early stages, and retain them over time. The Crabada Twitter has over 40K followers, and the discord sits at 13K active members. Their community sits at 3 core members, 5 mods, and 16 contributors who are constantly active and answer community questions concisely. An indicator of the future success of Crabada is how willing oxtender (founder) and his team are to learn from Axie Infinity’s mistakes, a conversation with their team mods revealed that they are already thinking about ways to circumvent inflationary effects on the game by introducing finite elements in each epoch so that not all game items are over-supplied. How Crabada deals with the competitive landscape will also be a key driver, as more games will now be incentivized to port over to Avalanche Subnets, with DeFi Kingdoms already leading the charge. Rest assured, this is a game to watch.
Risks:
Inflationary risk as more crabs get bred and supply increases. Counter: can create NFTs add-ons in the future that have a fixed capacity and can be used to level up. This means although there may be many crabs, there can be a finite amount of ‘boost’ accessories that can enable ongoing demand.
Subnets and the swimmer network are still new
Out-Competed by higher fidelity games that will come out in the future. Counter: the simplicity and lower load times of Crabada, combined with the large presence in places like Indonesia and Turkey where internet speeds are slower could make lower fidelity games maintain popularity.