Why is fantasy moving to base?
With the Base migration complete, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on why we made this move.
A year and a half ago, we made a bet: launch Fantasy on a brand-new, hyped L2 called Blast.
At the time, it made sense. Pacman had a killer track record. Blur had successfully overtaken OpenSea, and the token was performing well.
Blast didnāt invent anything on the infra side, but they made two genius moves:
š¹Native yield on ETH and stablecoins (3% on ETH, 8% on USDB). That alone returned millions to dApps and users.
š¹The best incentive program crypto had seen: transparent and efficient, with distribution power delegated to dApp builders.
They also saw early that crypto was going mobile, and began working on a crypto App Store concept, the Blast mobile app.
At launch, it worked.
Blast gave Fantasy a real boost. We might have grown without them, but thereās no denying that launching there supercharged our momentum. Iāll be forever grateful to Pacman and the Blast team for that.
But good ideas arenāt enough. Execution is everything. And thatās where Blast fell short. The first six months of the live network went pretty well. But then, things got weird. Communication broke down, slow shipping, and core issues raised by the community were ignored. Some call it a slow rug. I donāt know. But the energy that drove early Blast in 2024 is gone.
At first, it didnāt bother us much. At Fantasy, we stay focused on our own goals and take full responsibility for our growth. Blaming the chain was never part of the plan. We've always worked to abstract the chain layer as much as possible so as long as things were stable, there was no urgency to migrate. So we stayed and focused our energy on things that had higher impact for the game, and for Fantasy as a company. (Monad launch, Clout, our B2B offering, etc.)
But now, staying on Blast is a liability.
Users are increasingly worried about keeping funds there. Growth has stalled. And itās become clear Blast canāt support us in the next phase.
It was time to move on, but where?
We didnāt seriously consider newly launched L1/L2s. There are strong options out there there, but it was too risky to bet on another new chain. Blast is dead now, but anyone around in 2024 knows they had a legit shot at building something great. (They even had Pump fun deployed there. Imagine how different history couldāve beenā¦)
As a builder, the only thing that really matters in a chain partner is distribution. Incentive is a good reason too but without real user reach, they donāt mean much. Even if Berachain offered us $5M today to bridge, we wouldnāt take it.
The only real option for us was solana or base. Both are mature ecosystem, with a lot of users and a great BD team. Three things weighed into our decision:
š¹Distribution
Weāre perfectly in sync with the upcoming Coinbase Wallet rollout. Itās the same vision Blast had, but this time, itās actually shipping. Millions of users have this wallet, and theyāll be able to play Fantasy natively.
š¹Community
While
@0xMikado ,
@travisbickle0x and I love the Solana trenches, most Fantardios are EVM-native. Overall, Fantasy just fits better culturally with the Base community than with the Solana trenchers.
š¹Tech
Migrating to Base took a week. Solana wouldāve meant rewriting everything, 2-3 months of work.
@fantasy_top_ is here to play the long game.
And
@base is where that game continues.