Crazy "Hematopoiesis" Zentry Starts Building a World-Class "Shared Game Universe"

Author: Jasmine, Hive Tech

Recently, Zentry, which upgraded its brand just one month ago, announced its "financial report" for nearly half a year: as of May 22, 2024, Zentry's treasury holds a value of $151,367,382, an increase of approximately 44% since the beginning of 2024, driven by the project's liquidity reserves and investment returns.

This self-sustaining "Web3 native army" was formerly known as the prominent Web3 gaming guild GuildFi. In April of this year, GuildFi was upgraded to the new brand Zentry, transitioning its positioning from a DAO to a "Metagame Layer."

To this end, one of the "most profitable" teams in the GameFi ecosystem is setting up a brand new framework: activating various economic values hidden in physical world lifestyles through Web3 underlying infrastructure and game economics.

A "massively multiplayer online game" is under construction, and Zentry describes one of its scenarios: what if you could unlock an exclusive NFT by having coffee with three friends for five days, thereby enhancing your DeFi benefits?

To achieve this vision, Zentry's own "side quests" are being accomplished one by one.

Diverse Scenarios: Game Economics as the Foundation for Valuing Lifestyles

Earning money through exercise, that's StepN; Play To Earn, most famously represented by Axie Infinity; earning money through writing, which BuildSpace is already doing…

Imagine if all "X To Earn" could be completed by a single online character within one ecosystem, rather than requiring you to navigate different applications, allowing you to earn corresponding economic benefits, significantly enhancing efficiency and experience.

What Zentry aims to do is exactly this: using a game economics model to bring 3 billion players worldwide into a unified ecosystem that spans digital and physical realms, supporting seamless integration of various platforms' loyalty systems, player identities, and cross-platform activities, enabling everyone to create a lifelong dynamic character profile and develop their status, traits, and wealth through interactions in various ecosystems.

To put it more concretely, it's like an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online game) akin to "Ready Player One," but with diverse scenes and products in the system, offering players different gaming storylines.

Zentry is committed to building the entire ecosystem through three vertical cores of the Metagame Layer: using underlying blockchain as infrastructure to connect Web2/Web3 data covering identity, assets, and behavior; developing and accessing a range of applications that attract various player groups and target consumers, including Web2; and creating a diverse multiverse IP worldview, deepening engagement through compelling stories and collaborative IP partnerships.

The gateway to the Zentry world first opens from the online social scenes most commonly used by Web2 users.

On May 9, Zentry's social portal Nexus beta version officially launched, integrating the Web3 economic model with the world's largest Web2 social platform, X. Users can log in by connecting their X accounts to Nexus with an invitation code. Actions such as tweeting, commenting, liking, replying, and retweeting will earn fragment rewards. High-quality tweets liked by Zentry's official X account @ZentryHQ will also receive substantial fragment rewards.

Interface of Zentry's social portal Nexus beta version

Users familiar with the Web3 crypto asset market know that these fragment-like points will transform into economic returns in the form of crypto assets in the future.

Earlier, on April 29, Zentry disclosed its collaboration with another Web3 gaming ecosystem DAO, Beam (formerly Merit Circle), to jointly incubate the modular blockchain Sophon. This project is a high-throughput blockchain network based on the Layer2 network zkSync, primarily serving entertainment, gaming, and the currently popular AI applications.

Zentry and Beam jointly incubate Sophon

In this collaborative incubation, in addition to financial support, Zentry will form a strong association with Sophon as a provider of the gaming application layer. This also means that Zentry's ecosystem will integrate a foundation specifically designed for building new application scenarios for gaming and AI, paving the way for the aggregation of diverse applications, while the game distribution platform Zoltan is also on the horizon.

Additionally, Zentry has a large number of products set to launch, such as Radiant for gamers, Zigma for NFT collectors, and the popular AI product Azul. The foundational infrastructure for Zentry's integration into a "world gaming ecosystem" will also be gradually rolled out between 2024 and 2025, including Z-SDK, Social Graph, and identity information layers.

From Zentry's recent actions and plans, it is evident that its execution strategy adopts a method of first focusing on parts before the whole, synchronously building products and underlying infrastructure to plan the entire ecosystem. In this process, users interested in Zentry need to keep up with official updates and participate in testing and interactions with new products. Of course, as a Web3 project, users' contributions will be linked to the economic returns generated by incentives.

Brand upgrades, token swaps, new product launches, and high-energy collaborations have led to a 6% increase in Zentry's original token GF (GuildFi) over the past month, currently priced at $0.38. On April 25 of this year, GF began swapping with ZENT, lasting for four months, with an exchange ratio of 1:10. Currently, ZENT is priced at around $0.039, with a 9% increase over the past 30 days, and Zentry's circulating market cap stands at $210 million.

The original token swap for the new coin has also changed ZENT's total supply from 1 billion to 10 billion due to the 1:10 swap ratio. Although the unit price has been diluted, the increased supply will benefit the usage scenarios of ZENT within the Zentry ecosystem and the growth of the community.

An effective use case is the incubation of Sophon by Zentry.

Recently, Sophon has raised $60 million through the sale of nodes to acquire its token SOPH, becoming one of the most funded projects in the recent Layer2 sector. Opportunities to obtain SOPH also include staking qualified assets in its initial liquidity pool, and currently, ZENT has become one of the stakable assets. This means that holders of ZENT will receive returns from SOPH.

It is foreseeable that as the Zentry ecosystem continues to enrich, the intrinsic value of ZENT will be mutually empowered by the values of various partner assets embedded within the ecosystem, solving the current problem faced by many Web3 projects that can only rely on their own operations for growth. Continuous access to high-quality underlying infrastructure, large-scale scenarios, and applications will also provide a steady stream of momentum for Zentry's growth.

Excess Funds: $150 Million Treasury to Build an Ecosystem Incubator

To cover the Web3 gaming economy into Web2 and even daily life scenarios, Zentry needs to span various platforms including games, social, entertainment, and lifestyle. In addition to technology, resources and financial strength are also required. To this end, Zentry has been making comprehensive financial reserves for project upgrades.

Zentry's predecessor was the gaming guild GuildFi, which Web3 players often refer to as "gold farming communities." They are not only the most profitable team in the GameFi ecosystem but also the most knowledgeable players in DeFi and P2E models.

According to past data estimates, before upgrading to Zentry, GuildFi earned over $10 million annually, consistently ranking among the top three in the gaming guild sector. The gaming guild with the highest market cap, Merit Circle, announced its brand upgrade to Beam last October, with its FDV soaring from $290 million to a peak of nearly $3 billion within six months.

The potential of Zentry after its brand upgrade is gradually becoming evident.

CoinGecko data shows that Zentry's FDV is $372 million, ranking second in the GameFi Guild&Scholarship sector, only behind Yield Guild Games (YGG).

On May 28, Zentry also publicly disclosed its treasury data after the upgrade for the first time: the total value exceeds $150 million, an increase of approximately 44% since the beginning of the year, with its accumulation and growth primarily derived from two parts: liquidity reserve funds and investment returns.

Zentry treasury amount and composition

Zentry's treasury disclosure is quite transparent, not only revealing specific asset data but also providing fund addresses for ecosystem observers to verify on-chain at any time.

According to public data, Zentry's liquidity reserve currently includes mainstream crypto assets such as stablecoins and ETH, totaling $78,105,000. Among them, stablecoins like USDC and USDT used for various lending and yield protocols are valued at $17,850,000, while 16,000 ETH staked across various protocols is valued at $60,255,000.

Given the recent surge in ETH prices, the value of ETH in Zentry's liquidity reserves has also increased by $1.1 million.

In addition to liquidity reserves, another way Zentry is "blood-producing" for the launch of the new ecosystem is through investments. Its investment targets include seed tokens and equity, liquid tokens, and NFTs, totaling $73,262,382.

List of projects invested by Zentry‍‍‍‍‍‍

From the investment projects disclosed by Zentry, it has been laying out in the three main areas of social, gaming, and AI since last year, clearly preparing for this year's upgrade.

Some of these projects have yielded excellent investment returns for Zentry. On-chain data shows that investing in the gaming blockchain project Xai has brought over $10 million in revenue to Zentry, equivalent to the profits of the past year; the recently announced incubation of Sophon has also made it a partner in Zentry's ecosystem, with ZENT already acting as a "shovel" for digging into SOPH token value.

Zentry has also openly stated through official channels that its investment projects are selected not only for their financial returns but also for the collaborative value they will add to the Zentry ecosystem.

Zentry's "blood-producing" capability and product launches have already attracted new "blood donors." On May 30, the official announcement of strategic partnerships with investment institutions Spartan Capital, LongHash Ventures, Synergis Capital, and DWF Labs was made. These well-known funds have joined the ranks of ZENT holders alongside earlier investors such as Binance Labs, Coinbase Ventures, Pantera Capital, Hashed, Defiance Capital, Animoca Brands, Vessel Capital, Play Ventures, Dapper Labs, Arche, and SkyVision Capital.

With a treasury fund of $150 million as a backing and large institutions continuously endorsing it, Zentry is both self-developing products to provide new experiences and expanding its ecosystem through investment incubation. Walking on two legs and collaborating, Zentry is gradually building "the world's largest shared gaming universe" step by step according to plan.

Stepping away from old concepts like GameFi and gaming guilds, the upgraded brand Zentry is transforming into a more appealing and innovative narrative: gaming is not only entertainment but also a value expression of lifestyle.