Unveiling Binance Launchpool New Project Portal: From Viral Marketing, Background to Platform Economy

Written by: Karen, Foresight News

This article was first published on December 11, 2023, with the original title "Pre-sale Approaches: Unveiling Portal - From Viral Marketing, Background to Platform Economy"

With the strategy of relying on the official Twitter account and interactions, the viral marketing of the Web3 gaming ecosystem Portal and its vision of integrating multi-chain games and players have driven it to attract a broader user base. Data shows that Portal has indeed engaged a large number of KOLs, ordinary users, and other Web3 participants.

As of the time of writing, a tweet related to the token sale released by Portal on December 8 received 28,000 likes, 35,000 retweets, 341,000 comments, and 9.1 million views. According to Keyhole analysis data, Portal's average likes per post in the past month reached 12,800, with an average retweet count of 8,596.

Portal will launch its pre-sale on December 14, and prior to that, it released its white paper last week. Portal stated, "The aim is to build a unified Web3 gaming ecosystem by connecting games and players across different blockchain networks through collaboration with LayerZero, providing players with access to a multitude of games and opportunities for game distribution."

What is the background of Portal?

The white paper shows that Portal is developed by the Cayman Islands organization Portal Foundation, aiming to support and promote the Portal ecosystem by empowering gamers, game developers, and decentralized governance.

According to information disclosed by Portal in recent days, the members of the Portal Advisory Board include:

John Yao: CEO of esports club Team Secret. John Yao will provide insights and resources into the mainstream esports field. Team Secret is a European professional team established in August 2014, primarily participating in competitive projects such as League of Legends and DOTA 2.

Jamie King: Co-founder of Rockstar Games. Rockstar Games is a game development subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, founded in 1998, best known for the Grand Theft Auto series. However, Jamie King left Rockstar Games in 2006. According to GAMERANT, the reason for Jamie King's departure from Rockstar Games was a communication breakdown regarding the direction of game development after the success of Grand Theft Auto. Jamie King's main responsibility at Portal is to drive the inclusion of Web2 games and provide advice on game and IP creative and directional strategies.

Russell Hanson: Former Chief Scientist of Consensys Endjinn AI team from 2018 to 2019, responsible for developing and refining AI models for cryptocurrencies. Russell Hanson will introduce generative AI + automation into Portal and its expanding library of games and digital assets.

Matt Dixon: Former Director of Business Development at Electronic Arts from October 2016 to August 2022.

Portal's strategic investors include Newman Group, which will provide advice for Portal's Asian strategy. The author has not yet seen other strategic investors. Portal's game partners include Space Nation, Oxya Origin, Nine Chronicles, Crypto Unicorns, MagicCraft, DeFi Kingdoms, etc. According to the official website, over 200 games are preparing to integrate Portal tokens upon release. Portal also mentioned in its Twitter bio that it is built on LayerZero (the white paper indicates a partnership with LayerZero) and has collaborations with Magic Eden and M80 (esports and gaming organizations).

Magic Eden has previously confirmed that all NFTs in the Portal ecosystem can be purchased with Portal tokens on Magic Eden in the future.

It is worth mentioning that Yuga Labs posted a vague tweet on November 29, stating, "You have no idea how much I've wanted to tweet 'I invented portalcoin' all day. I'm posting this to stop that intrusive thought. Go ahead, degens." @0xvvp also linked more coincidences; in early November, Yuga Labs announced a collaboration with Magic Eden to launch a new Magic Eden ETH marketplace, where Portal tokens will be used as tradable in-game assets.

The Portal Twitter account was registered in May 2023, with only one account followed (LayerZero, which does not follow anyone), and the first tweet was posted on June 27. The current follower count has reached 270,000, including NFT OG Franklin and several NFT, Web3 gaming, KOLs, etc.

However, the Portal token page mentions that its game token is co-developed with LZ Technology, but the author has not yet found information related to LZ Technology. As for whether the initial "LZ" is related to LayerZero, there is also no information available for reference.

M80's partners include Portal. Source: M80

What is Portal?

Portal aims to connect games and players across different blockchain networks based on LayerZero, establishing a unified Web3 gaming ecosystem and providing players with access to a multitude of games and opportunities for game distribution, while also integrating with networks such as Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, and Klaytn.

At the end of November, Portal launched the first season of the Portal airdrop mining event on the Crystal Dash website, allowing users to interact with it on X (Twitter) and earn Portal. In other words, Portal allows users to earn Crystal Dash points by creating tweets about Portal (or simply tagging the official Portal account) or directly interacting with Portal content. Points can be used to level up; the higher the level, the more fragments are earned, which can then be synthesized into crystals, equivalent to Portal airdrops. At the end of each season, points and levels reset to 0, while fragments are retained.

In the second season event that started on December 5, points can only be earned by participating in Portal Power tweets, and interaction must occur within 12 hours after the Portal Power tweet is published; interactions beyond this time will not earn points (20 points for likes, 40 points for replies, 50 points for retweets, 60 points for quotes).

Portal also offers a one-stop login solution called Portal Passport, which can integrate player identities and assets across various games. The middleware introduced by Portal can manage on-chain transactions for games, enhance gameplay, and allow participation from both Web3 and Web2 players.

What does the Portal white paper say?

What are the uses of the Portal token?

According to the Portal white paper, the uses of the Portal token include transaction fees, payment methods, helping games gain higher visibility and attention on the Portal platform through voting and staking, governance, etc. Specifically:

1. Used to pay transaction fees. Transaction fees consist of cross-chain transactions verified by Portal nodes and native fees of the Portal network. Although Portal has not disclosed detailed fee structures, according to the white paper, as shown in the following image, after players pay transaction fees, a portion will be burned, and a portion will be placed in the treasury (this portion is used as rewards distributed to nodes, game developers, and returned to players).

2. All transactions within the Portal network will support the PORTAL token as one of the payment options for in-game or game-related markets, and all fees related to any cross-chain transactions conducted through the Portal network will be priced in PORTAL.

3. Voting and staking are also one of the main uses of the PORTAL token. Players and games can earn rewards through staking and can help games gain higher visibility and attention on the Portal platform through voting. Portal refers to this incentive system as the stake-to-scale system, which benefits both players and games and decentralizes game distribution.

Additionally, as Portal scales, platform data related to player identities will become resources for data collectors (referred to as spectators, such as games and brands) to acquire user resources. Spectators will also be able to stake against players to gain sampling rights to their personal data and compound players' staking shares.

At the same time, in addition to game weight distribution, staking also serves as an economic allocation function in Portal, executing the following two key functions: 1. Setting the amount of PORTAL to be burned before distribution; 2. Allocating inflation shares between the treasury and games.

4. Governance, this information will be released later.

Portal Stack

The Portal stack also includes the Portal Wallet and Companion App, where the Portal Wallet eliminates the complexity of managing mnemonic phrases and private keys and is compatible with mainstream platforms like Discord and Google. The platform's user ID matching system synchronizes wallet addresses with unique IDs, enabling comprehensive player data collection and analysis;

The Companion App allows users to explore games, trade cross-chain assets, socialize, and engage in Staking-to-scale (driving the visibility and attention of games on the Portal platform).

The "nodes" of the Portal network form a synchronized layer combining the Portal Web3 engine and LayerZero Oracle/Relayer. This means that nodes provide second-layer verification of cross-chain transactions supported by distributed infrastructure owned and operated by the Portal community. Nodes can run in the cloud or locally. In exchange for providing verification services, nodes are eligible to accumulate network rewards and fees, which can be claimed at the end of a 24-hour cycle.

PORTAL Token Economics

The maximum supply of PORTAL is 1 billion tokens, which will be minted at the genesis and then gradually released to the community treasury over time. The release rate of PORTAL rewards is calculated using the following formula:

Regarding reward distribution, Portal adjusts the distribution of PORTAL based on the staking ratio. In the following diagram, the horizontal axis S represents the proportion of all circulating PORTAL tokens that are staked, while the vertical axis represents game PORTAL distribution, G = √S. Then, in the game distribution, the tokens allocated to node operators account for 20% of the game distribution tokens.

Additionally, the Portal white paper introduces the concept of fee recovery, where fees paid by users for PORTAL transactions are recovered in real-time. Of the recovered PORTAL, a portion will be burned, and a portion will be distributed as platform rewards. The staking ratio at that time will be used to calculate how much of the recovered PORTAL will be burned. If interested, one can research the specific recovery fee and burn adjustment mechanisms.

In summary, Portal empowers users to participate in the visibility and attention of games on its platform through the Staking-to-scale system, using fee collection, rewards, and burn adjustments to empower the token, but the long-term impact on the token's value remains to be seen. Whether it can drive the entire Web3 gaming ecosystem towards broader development prospects also requires time to verify. As always, this article does not represent any investment advice, DYOR.