Another crypto platform shuts down after 2.5 years
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The year continues to batter and bruise the crypto industry with shutdowns and bankruptcies.
On May 20, the onchain trading card platform Fantasy Top became the latest to announce that it is shutting down after two and a half years.
Related: Coinbase-backed super app shuts down
Structural trap no one escapes
In a post on X, Fantasy Top co-founder Kipit explained that the greatest trading card games (TCGs), such as Magic, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh, succeeded because they were games first and assets second.
Players bought cards to play, and financial value followed as a consequence of gameplay quality and community depth.
Crypto TCGs invert that order entirely.
"The card is financial before it is anything else," Kipit wrote. "You don't attract people who love the game. You attract people who want to make money from cards. Those are not the same people."
That financialization paralysed the team's ability to iterate.
Every gameplay change risked moving card prices, while every new mode redistributed value. The team apparently attempted multiple reroutes, like a free-to-play mode, a lighter onboarding funnel called Clout, and eventually a full pivot to prediction markets that stripped the non-fungible token (NFT) layer entirely. None moved the needle.
"We saw the trap and tried to escape it," Kipit wrote. "Every move was an attempt to get back to 'game first.'"
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Token launches and a price on everything
Kipit extended the critique beyond Fantasy Top to the industry at large. They argued that premature token launches inflict the same damage on companies that financialisation does on games.
"A token before product-market fit is poison. Every employee thinks about the price. Every user thinks about the price. You stop building and start managing sentiment," Kipit wrote.
Despite the closure, Fantasy Top confirmed that all pre-seed and seed investors will be reimbursed in full.
This was possible because the platform, which raised $5.6 million from Dragonfly, never touched investor capital to fund operations. The business paid approximately $20 million back to its community over its lifetime.
