i dug into the onchain data from @cryptothegame s2 and found an unexpected story...

entering the finale, whales controlled 130+ votes, but at the end we were left wondering where they all went.

so, where did the whales go?

breakdown in the thread 👇
paragraph.xyz/@richiebonilla.eth/where-did-the-whales-go-ctg-s2

An interactive crypto survival game. Follow @dylanabruscato and the /crypto-the-game channel for live updates. CTG S3 is coming soon. 

When we saw whales accumulating jury tokens, the dominant narrative was that they were angling to steal the pot for themselves.

The beauty of an onchain record is that we get to examine their actions and see how it challenges the personas we collectively projected onto them.

optimist • building the front page of onchain culture at /forage • recovering dao tool builder

The biggest whale flipped in support of Player #733

Holding 45 votes on finale morning, "Whale 1" registered the ENS "35on733.eth".

They proceeded to sell 19 votes, most of which were bought by...

stani.eth and yalor.eth swept up 20 votes each on finale day to support Player #733

this made them the third-largest and fourth-largest jury voters

however, it turns out many of these votes were already cast—dampening their impact.

Two of the biggest whales supported @0xjeff (third place)

It appears that CabalKiller and King Wilbert were the same person (or were at least colluding).

They gave @0xjeff 26 of his 32 votes for being the underdog candidate.

(See full post for details)

I haven't seen evidence of whales supporting @ted (second place)

Despite the claims that Ted was backed by “the cabal”, and while it may be true that some of the smaller whales cast their votes for Ted, I have not seen evidence of it at the time of writing.

Were the whales as selfishly motivated as we imagined?

CabalKiller and King Wilbert seemed to be motivated by an anti-influencer, anti-sponsor vendetta.

They supporting an underdog candidate.

Whale 1 flipped to supporting Player #733 in the final vote.

Would someone motivated exclusively by personal greed so readily support a charitable cause?

The other whales didn't make waves, and it's possible they didn't vote at all. As a result, it's hard to speculate on their motivations.

As we reflect on this season, we are invited to ponder the impact that decentralized technologies have on what we build and the games that we play together—not only the games we design but also the metagames that emerge in, around, and between them.

CTG S2's open economy held a mirror to our space. In that mirror we feared seeing greedy boogeymen gobbling up votes to steal the prize money for themselves, but what we found were a whole lot of people interested in turning an individual win into a collective one.

This is powerful not just because it feels good but also because it aligns with our claims about crypto's impact on the world.

Thank you to @cynthiavlad, @bhaumik, @davidphelps, @treegirl, @0xzakk, and @danhunt for reading drafts of this.

And thank you to @dylanabruscato, Tyler J. Cagle, and Bryan Lee for creating CTG

It is, without a doubt, the most fun I’ve ever had online
paragraph.xyz/@richiebonilla.eth/where-did-the-whales-go-ctg-s2