how $LORDS is the best way to get exposure to onchain gaming in 2024
a thesis on why to buy $LORDS
A few weeks ago I realized that I spend so much time in the onchain gaming space but I’m barely exposed to it at all while I own too many assets of other games which I don’t follow much at all.
This led me to think about the best way to be invested in this space… and I came to the conclusion that there are not many options at all and one stands out: the $LORDS token driving the Realms ecosystem.
what does $LORDS do?
LORDS is the governance token of the Realms ecosystem. It’s used to vote on proposals, fund community projects and emitted to stakers of their NFTs.
It’s also used as an entrance fee to play Loot Survivor and then used to fund the prizepool for the top players on the leaderboard. So far ~$50k has been spent to play LS.
It will eventually be a core part of the Realms autonomous world in Eternum.
the thesis around LORDS:
no alternatives
The onchain gaming space is tiny, a small niche of another small niche which is web3 gaming. There are only a handful of teams building so far, and only a few of them have live games or assets released to buy.
Hence it’s difficult to find projects you can buy into as retail with a lot of upside potential.
Right now we’re experiencing a taste of a bull run in gaming.
A BTC and ETH pump is usually followed by alts pumping themselves.
If a true gaming bullrun will happen, you can make a similar bet that attention will flow into more niche narratives.
Like onchain gaming, autonomous worlds or gamblefi… and LORDS offers exposure to all of it.
which makes it into a…
asymmetric bet on Realms and onchain gaming
When a specific narrative is heating up, fundamentals cease to matter. It’s obvious that LORDS would benefit from a general hype around onchain games, but Realms is working on their own projects with potential:
Loot Survivor is their onchain arcade machine. A text based dungeon crawler live on the Starknet mainnet. People can pay LORDs as an entrance fee to play the game and be featured on the leaderboard. The top players then get a portion of the fees as rewards. Players spent over $40k to play Loot Survivor already.
Eternum is their more ambitious project. Their own autonomous world. It’s comparable to 4x games like Civilizations. Eternum is meant to be the foundation of the autonomous world and encourage players to build on top of it.
The game is in development right now and there is a playable devbuild available to try out.
On top of their 2 games, Realms also has a big treasury which is holding almost $200m on LORDS currently.
The treasury is used to fund development of their games and other projects, for example their own L3 built together with Cartridge. Which by the way, will use LORDS as gas token once it goes live.
And it’s also used to fund…
community creations can turn into winners
In the spirit of fully onchain games, we have to mention the community and community made projects.
It’s a core part of Realms spirit and a big part of their treasury is reserved to fund these community projects.
A great example is a Blade Runner inspired UI for Loot Survivor.
Recently the Dojo Game Jam concluded with 20 games built by the community, many as part of the Realms ecosystem.
A lot of these creations drive value back to the LORDS ecosystem and there is no reason why one of them can’t take off and become a huge winner.
being a major presence on Starknet
We saw a lot of L2s and alt L1s getting attention lately.
First it was Solana and Avalanche, then it went to Sei, Injective and others.
Starknet is about to airdrop their token and possibly inject a lot of liquidity into the ecosystem.
LORDS is one of the few tokens on Starknet and one of the major projects building their. For reference, the Loot Survivor contracts is in the top20 contracts across all of Starknet.
If Starknet gets similar attention to the projects mentioned above, its’s inevitable that LORDS will benefit from it too.
conclusion
When betting on LORDS, you’re betting on the success of onchain gaming and vice versa, in my eyes it’s the best way to get exposure to the industry:
little alternatives
bet on Realms & onchain gaming
community creations can make a difference
a huge L2 in the background with Starknet
LORDS as gas token on their own L3
disclaimer
I personally own LORDS and plan to buy more in the coming months, this is not financial advice.