An Overview of Frenpet on Base
By James Huang August 31, 2024
Introduction
We’ve been playing FrenPet, which is an on-chain tamagotchi game within the Base ecosystem. If you were around in the late 90s, early 2000s, then this game will throw you back to the days where you had your mom feed your tamagotchi while you were at school. The gameplay of frenpet is simple, the mechanics and tokenomics are easy to understand, and the design fits like a glove with the on-chain nature of the game.
We’ll start with the gameplay before diving into the game’s tokenomics and internal economy.
The Gameplay
To start the game, you mint a free pet NFT. It’s free to mint, you just have to pay for gas. Since it’s on Base, gas fees shouldn’t cost more than a few cents. We’ve seen people manage multiple pets and the community has built tools to make it easier for owners to manage multiple pets.
The main objective of the game is to keep your pet alive, collect points by fighting other players, and complete quests by defeating monsters.
After minting your pet, the pet will have a “Time of Death” or TOD timer of 3 days, which starts to countdown right away. To reset this timer back to 3 days, you use the native FrenPet $FP token to buy 1 Shroom to feed your pet.
This does a few things:
- Your pet’s TOD goes back to 3 days. This timer cannot go above 3 days. This forces players to stay engaged with the game and levels the playing field against whales.
- Your pet gains 5 points.
- The $FP token you used to purchase the Shroom is burned.
The developers plan to keep the cost of a Shroom low, so it can continue to attract players. As a result, the amount of $FP required to buy a shroom will decrease if the price of $FP rises (as it has in the past few weeks).
Now that you can keep this thing alive, let’s look at how you earn points and strengthen your pet. You’ll need 100 points to start battling other players. There are a couple of ways to earn points:
- Daily Spin the Wheel (free, just requires gas)
- Stake $FP (requires you to swap for $FP tokens)
- Feed your pet Shrooms (costs a small amount of $FP)
We talked about the Shrooms and the Daily Spin is a random generator that gives you a range of possibilities from no points to 2000 points to a shield. We’ll cover the staking here:
The staking mechanism forces players to stake $FP and lock it up in a contract in the game. The $FP is returned to the player over the course of 30 days and in exchange, the player receives points. We’ll cover what points represent in the game tokenomics section, but for now, points allows your pet to level up and after 100 points, allows you to fight other pets. Each time your pet levels up, you can spin the gacha. It has an 80% chance of giving you 1-4 attack/defense or 20% chance of taking away 1-3 attack/defense.
Attack and defense are important for gameplay against other players. Every 30 minutes, players with over 100 points can attack anybody in the game. In FrenPet, it’s called “bonking” because why not? When you “bonk” another pet, the mechanic that determines who wins is calculated by:
(Attacker’s Attack Points) / (Attacker’s Attack Points + Defender’s Defense Points)
The winner takes 0.5% of the loser’s points.
The store has equipment players can buy, including a shield which protects users from being Bonked for 24 hours. There are a number of other accessories and it’s not clear what they will be used for. Some of them just look cool!
After 40 wins against other players, your pet can venture out and complete quests, where they fight against monsters in the environment. Monster fights are always 50-50 chances of win or lose and not dependent on attack or defense. With a win against a monster, the player receives three things: points, gold, and an NFT of the defeated monster. After losing to a monster, players need to bonk two more players to get another chance at fighting the monster.
So, much of the gameplay follows these simple actions: feed your pet, earn points by spinning the wheel or staking, bonk other players every 30 minutes, and fight monsters. Accruing points and gold in the game results in economic rewards. Now, we’ll cover the game economy and tokenomics as they are intertwined.
Game Economy and Tokenomics
Game Economy and Tokenomic
The FrenPet token $FP powers the economy of the game. The $FP tokenomics are simple:
- 10,000,000 maximum supply
- Remember those Shrooms to keep your pet alive? All $FP used to purchase Shrooms are burned. Since the game launched, over 2.5 million $FP tokens have been burned.
Frenpet tokens were distributed in an equitable manner:
- 100% of the FP tokens were distributed via a baseSwap pool with an initial buy limit of ~$0.80 cents per player, any player could get a maximum of 5000 $FP tokens to mint a pet and play the game
- The team didn't pre-receive any tokens, all tokens they own were acquired.
Okay, so how does this all tie into the game? The Frenpet documentation describes this well:
There is a 4% tax every time someone buys or sells $FP tokens on UniSwap. Once the smart contract accrues 1000 $FP tokens from taxes, they get automatically swapped into ETH and distributed as follows:
- 2% goes to the players of the game as rewards.
- 1% goes to the developers of Fren Pet.
- 1% gets added back as liquidity provision to support the $FP economy.
The player rewards are distributed according to your share of in-game points in relation to the total points of all pets in the game.
So, the big takeaway here for a player is that points represent your share of ETH earned from this rule.
Gambo, an active player with multiple pets, shared on Twitter their earnings by pet:
Of course, this is subject to change as the volume of $FP trading changes and the composition of players changes.
What about the gold you mentioned? In the game, there is the concept of pGold, which users can acquire by trading $FP for or earn by defeating monsters. There will only ever be 1,000,000,000 pGold. pGold represents the share of the player’s treasury, which is effectively a pot of $FP tokens.
The treasury is filled with $FP through a 10% fee on purchases in the store, which includes shields, revivals, and cosmetic gear.
As of today, the treasury currently holds 228,495 $FP. Meaning 4376 pGold is equivalent to one $FP token. However, the treasury is only increased as more people play the game, so theoretically, the value of pGold will increase over time.
Closing Thoughts
Overall, we’re impressed with the gameplay, all of which is on-chain and the thoughtful tokenomics and game economy. Whether you want to play the game because it brings you back to the tamagotchi days or you’re trying to figure out the best strategy for earning the most money off this game, we think this game balances game mechanics with crypto in a way that feels natural and fun.
