From August 2021 to May 2022 I was the economy designer on Raid Party, an idle MMORPG that ran entirely on Ethereum. The papers below were recovered from the project’s public archive and are presented as found: nothing edited, every link goes to the original address. The economy they describe drove over $100M in on-chain volume, itemized in Exhibit A, and the project was acquired that summer. My last paper is dated May 2, 2022.
The whitepaper. The system the rest of these papers tune: an active-supply model instead of hard caps, an 85% burn on every $CFTI spent, yield paid linearly on party damage. Included for context: the system was the team’s, the tuning below was my desk.
A balance patch with the reasoning attached, before launch: the enhancement system rebuilt on a logarithmic curve because the original spread “was too punishing and would have halted progression almost fully in the late game,” plus the sink hierarchy and the treasury split.
The drop economy: a seven-tier rarity table and foraging built as a second staking lane that costs you yield to use. Item generation is paced deliberately slow: hyperinflation kills item economies, boredom doesn’t.
The problem paper: deep liquidity was existential for the game economy and the team legally couldn’t provide it. Four candidate solutions, pros and cons in writing, and an invitation to mix them.
The solution paper, published four days after the $625M Ronin bridge hack hit Axie Infinity and the play-to-earn market began falling apart in earnest: one-way protocol-locked liquidity and a fee-sharing savings token that resets if you leave, with the stated goal of slowing the currency’s velocity.
Competitive systems with real money on the line: an eight-week season over a 350 ETH prize pool. A rising floor and ceiling so early winners can’t coast, penalties for leaderboard sitting, and snapshots at randomized times, because you can’t game a reading you can’t see coming.
The full case study is still in excavation: dashboards, post-mortem, all of it. The money is in Exhibit A.
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