@vitalik recently wrote an excellent piece on how memecoins can be better (charity coins and robinhood games):
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/03/29/memecoins.html

While many memecoins donate to charity, his idea of robinhood games remains a new and vastly unexplored space.

pushing the next paradigm of memecoin through conquest,  

play dogwifgun game in Base and earn $WIG in dogwifgun iPVPo

dogwifgun.org

We believe that $WIG (and the Conquest game) is the first memecoin that falls under Vitalik’s definition of a robinhood game.

While a “meaningful and fun” game is ultimately up to players to decide, the economics of Conquest is designed to be positive-sum and value creating.

A positive-sum launch mechanic makes the average participants better off, compared to the fundamental zero-sum nature of traditional memecoins.

Although this is still just a theory and an experiment, we think there are three key elements of why the IPvPO model is positive-sum.

In our design of Conquest, we make the leaderboard a key focus of the game, for both nations and individual players. This model is used by Web2 games like Clash of Clans to great success.

“Whales” may not seek purely profit-optimizing play, effectively subsidizing small players.

But ranking highly may also be a financial-optimizing strategy itself! By looking beyond just a single game or memecoin.

Crypto is an attention-based economy, and many influencers achieve their fame by ranking highly on CEX trading leaderboards.

We hope for a similar dynamic.

Second reason:

Players will also receive Conquest Points for the game we’re still actively building. It is clearly better value for a IPvPO participant to get points in a substantial project, compared to aping into yet another traditional memecoin.

This may also be a new model to develop complex crypto games without the conflict of VC capital. It is speculated that the recent popularity of memecoins is a direct response to the often extractive nature of private VC allocations.

Memecoin tokenomics often feel far more fair.

As a broader trend in the crypto space, players also appear to be eschewing NFTs and crypto games. They are embracing memecoins instead.

Perhaps in response to being burnt by crypto games that are “Play to Earn”, the market now clearly values the fairness of memecoins greatly.

The IPvPO model is fundamentally different from Play to Earn. 

With P2E, the game token is used recursively to buy NFTs that in turn produce more game tokens. This turned out to be mostly unsustainable.

The IPvPO model just takes ETH and emits the entire token supply at the end.

Third reason:

Tens of thousands of memecoins are launched every day, but the vast majority of them fail to take off. Ignoring rugs, even an earnest attempt is extremely difficult in the face of overwhelming competition.

But the IPvPO model gives a new memecoin a much better chance.

During the IPvPO window, all participants share a common experience in the game, forming friendships, rivalries and even their own memes. 

We hope this shared experience forges an initial core community around something a bit more substantial than spamming “gm” in chat.

Please keep in mind that this is still just a theory and experiment that needs to be validated when we launch.

But we hope this thread convinces you that there is a way to push the memecoin space forward.

You can try out our testnet game on Base Sepolia right now!

First reason:

As Vitalik astutely points out in his article, “fun can be positive sum”. 

But beyond just a sense of fun, players are willing to spend a lot of feelings of progress, achievement and status, with zero expectations of financial return. 

The F2P games market thrives on this dynamic.