We’ve seen mash-ups of fantasy sports and NFT trading cards, but what about something with more crypto-native subject matter? Enter Fantasy Top.

Built on Ethereum layer-2 network Blast, Fantasy Top takes the premise of fantasy football and other fantasy sports games, but swaps out pro athletes for crypto influencers. It’s like Crypto Twitter: The Game, and it’s more than just a surface-level riff on the social media sphere.

Fantasy Top has gotten off to an electric start, dominating industry chatter while driving surging trading volume—and becoming one of the most profitable protocols or apps across all of crypto. Curious how to get started? Here’s what you need to know.

What is Fantasy Top?

Crypto Twitter often feels like a spectator sport, so it makes sense that someone turned it into a fantasy game. Fantasy Top takes the core premise of fantasy football, soccer, or baseball, and swaps in 120 (and counting) crypto influencers, traders, content creators, and personalities.

Each “hero” in the game is based on a denizen of Crypto Twitter, and they get their own NFT cards minted on Ethereum layer-2 network Blast. You can buy and trade the NFTs, which come in multiple rarity levels and can be upgraded by acquiring multiple copies of a lower-level edition and trading them up. Higher-level cards come with a larger score multiplier.

In Fantasy Top competitions, you’ll select a lineup of five owned NFT cards and lock it in. Scoring is based on the actual Twitter engagement of your industry “heroes,” amplified by your cards’ particular score multipliers, so there’s strategy involved in both buying up cards for your lineup and picking the best cross-section of crypto tweeters to place highly in a competition.

Rewards thus far include Ethereum (ETH), Blast Gold points that will go towards the network’s upcoming BLAST token drop, and FAN points, which may ultimately lead to future benefits on Fantasy Top—or perhaps an allotment of airdrop tokens.

Do I need NFTs to play Fantasy Top?

Yes, Fantasy Top requires NFT cards to play. You’ll need at least five to lock in a lineup for a competition, and at this point, there’s no option to play the game without the NFTs.

Fantasy Top sells packs of cards with dynamic pricing based on demand (currently around 0.4 ETH, or nearly $1,200), or you can purchase individual cards from the app’s NFT marketplace.

Fantasy Top is played via the website, and like with other fantasy sports, you simply set your lineup and then watch the points roll in. Your leaderboard placement at the end of each competition period determines your rewards.

What can I win in Fantasy Top?

With such significant demand right out the gate, the early rewards are substantial indeed. In the first “main competition,” Fantasy Top served up a total prize pool that included over $150,000 worth of ETH, potentially more than $2 million worth of Blast Gold (based on analyst projections), and other perks to players.

And the crypto influencers who've become in-game heroes are seeing sizable benefits, too. A share of the overall pack sales, along with a cut of the marketplace fees, are paid out to the influencers.

Less than a week after Fantasy Top’s mainnet launch on May 1, 2024, the game paid out $1.25 million worth of ETH (in total) to heroes, along with what’s estimated to be at least $25,000 worth of Blast Gold points.

The future

Fantasy Top is early and buzzy, but the team has already teased plans ahead for the future—and it also clearly has some kinks to work out along the way.

One week after launch, the game has already added leagues, which split players up into Silver and Bronze categories based on their performance thus far. Rewards will apparently vary by league designation, with “rewards increasingly skewed towards the top performers,” according to a tweet.

What’s ahead? More in-game heroes, apparently, along with an improved scoring model, a “whole array of sub-competitions,” and other “surprises” to come.

But as Fantasy Top attempts to grow, it will also need to deal with the immediate problem of users (or external observers) “botting” tweets from the heroes, manipulating the scoring and leading to some early pivots as the team figures out how to handle it all.

Some heroes have complained of being targeted by botters, and Fantasy Top already decided to end its first main competition early due to manipulation concerns. The game is built around social media engagement, so that’s something they’ll have to sort out if Fantasy Top is going to try and parlay this early buzz into a sustainable game model.