2022 Achievements
We set out 2022 to be the year where we move fast, learn fast in proactively cultivating value for holders of our $PATH tokens; primarily by means of increasing our total treasury value and embedding utility. In order to do so, we worked on five key execution pillars that serves to be a hyper-connected, synergistic, and self-enriching ecosystem.
1. Path Ventures (treasury)
Since our inception, we invested and partnered with 65 early-stage blockchain games to the tune of US$5.1m so far. This was to fund and grow these projects, with most currently at the seed stage but there were also some titles in secondary markets.
Up until the end of 2022, we generated a total profit of US$1.44m through our investments and secondary market plays. As a result, we bought back 20m of $PATH, which represents 2% of total token supply, and an additional US$810k buy order layered in about 10–35% below spot value.
Amid the black swan event that was the FTX fallout, we’re glad to share that the majority of our portfolio companies were not affected by the collapse of the exchange, but the valuation of public tokens and NFTs were massively hit. The market value of Path’s invested portfolio currently stands at US$4.4m post-FTX.
Breaking down our investments further, the multiple on invested capital (MOIC) for seed stage companies is currently at 0.86x (we are cognisant of the fact that these are multi-year plays). However, the MOIC for secondary market plays to date are much higher at 1.5x.
Beyond investments, the Path Ventures team has also cultivated a strong reputation and thought leadership in game economics and bootstrapping zero to one growth. This is reflected through the various engagements and advisory tokens awarded to us on selected projects.
Going forward, our focus will be more on secondary plays due to the increased liquidity and greater ability to control our risk exposure, especially in a turbulent bear market.
Here are the latest numbers for our performance:
Cash / Unutilised Treasury
Token Investment
NFT Investment
2. Path Guild
With our origins firmly rooted in web3 gaming guilds, it’s no surprise that we saw 5,000 gamers playing under the PathDAO flag at our peak. While the direction of the market has seen this number fall since, we’re still going strong and maintaining a smaller number of scholars!
Current number of scholars
Walken: 250
Genopets: 220
Fancy Birds: 170
Karmaverse: 90
DGPals: 80
Our guilds have also been performing extremely well internationally, and our best results can be found below:
Axie Infinity:
Top 8 in AxieCon 2022
Top 1 in Axie Caracas Qualifier
Top 2 in Axie Caracas LAN
Top 4 in Axie Sura Infinity Cup
Multiple top 3 finishes in E4E Axie Daily Tournaments
Karmaverse:
Season 1 player rank — 1
Season 1 guild rank — 1
Season 2 player rank — 2
Season 2 guild rank — 1
Season 3 player rank — 5
Season 3 guild rank — 2
0xlympics:
Top 2 in Axie Infinity
Top 1 in Thetan Arena
Our guilds have consistently achieved fantastic results, and it’s a testament to the talent and commitment of our player base that PathDAO has been able to establish itself as one of the world’s leading guilds!
Special events
Our first ever global web3 gaming challenge was centred around the move-to-earn game Walken. Participants had to compete for a prize pool of 20 Walken NFTs worth $2,000 by hitting their targeted number of steps, and posting their achievement on social media!
For us, it was a highly successful event with participants spanning countries such as Greece, Italy, Venezuela, Australia, USA and the Philippines, while the event hashtag #PathDAOWalkenChallenge reached tens of thousands across Twitter.
Read more about the PathDAO Walken Challenge.
AxieCon Barcelona
This event was one of the highlights of the year for us, as it was the largest gathering of the Axie community in history! In addition, there was the small matter of the largest LAN tournament in web3 gaming, which boasted a prize pool of USD1 million!
It was also a great opportunity for us to finally meet our Axie esports team in the flesh, having previously communicated purely online. Our star player Flowurr performed amazingly to secure a top 8 finish in the Axie Origins BYOD series, taking home USD16,500 for his efforts!
3. PathPlay (gaming platform)
Our founding vision of PathPlay is to host a million gamer networks, where $PATH is the digital currency that powers these communities.
PathPlay was initially built to serve our community and give them a place to engage with one another, contribute and receive rewards. Ultimately, its role was to act as a digital home for them.
Since then, we’ve opened the platform to serve other communities beyond the web3 space such as gamer content creators and cosplayers for them to engage with their loyal followers. At present, PathPlay currently has over 1,500 weekly active users across over 15 communities, mainly targeted towards content creators, cosplayers and gamers. Each community is powered by $PATH whereby followers can engage with their favourite content creators,
In the coming months, we aim to fully understand the needs of creators and communities on PathPlay in order to tweak the platform accordingly. This will also involve the building of a toolkit for communities to best serve their members, which includes quests, rewards, auctions, and tipping. This viability was first demonstrated through our pilot auction for a content creator that saw her lifetime digital platform earnings eclipsed in a single day!
We are also prioritising polishing up the overall experience to ensure a slick end-to-end journey for all users.
4. Path Finance
We established Path Finance as a way to solve a big pain point for young gamers in the developing world — a lack of access to financial services. This was especially apparent when we received an influx of funding requests from the Philippines in December 2021 following a devastating typhoon. To date, we’re proud to share that we’ve helped over 200 deserving individuals and disbursed a total of US$35,000 in loans over the past year.
We also introduced a Pay Later product for gamers to be able to access NFT assets for web3 gaming immediately, with the value to be repaid to Path Finance over two months.
In the future, we aim to target content creators as their unconventional income stream is usually not recognised by established financial institutions, making it tough to obtain credit. For example, a prospective gaming streamer could apply for a loan to purchase streaming equipment to kick start their career
We also want to build a credit model based on on-chain data and loan repayment records. Through our active collection of data, this will help us to extend more undercollateralised or uncollaterised loans to people who need it.
Testimonials
When I needed money to pay for my brother’s tuition, Path Finance really gave me a helping hand. I really am so thankful for this program. LFG!! — BonBon #2967
I thought of starting a small business by making and selling dishwashing liquid, but I faced the problem of where to find capital to start. Through Path Finance, I took a loan to kick start my small business and bought all the materials like chemicals, bottles and labels for my product. Now my business is growing day by day. I’m very thankful to Path Finance for helping me! — carizu #5650
I was already hired as a permanent staff in the Department of Education here in our Division but there were still some requirements to complete. Path Finance was a big help for me as I had no other way to borrow money. With the loan, I completed all requirements on time, and now I am starting my job. Thank you so much 😊 — Idam#7547
Such testimonials speak to the good that Path Finance has done, and we aim to continue expanding this in order to make financial services as accessible as possible to all gamers.
5. Team Path (gaming lifestyle brand)
Team Path aims to create a cultural movement that bridges the gap between gaming and lifestyle! This has led us to work with generations of gamers, content creators, artists, designers, musicians, photographers and writers who believe in the fusion of gaming and culture.
On the competitive front, Team Path is currently building up its reputation in the local VALORANT scene, performing well at the national level while continuing to hone their skills against continental giants in Asia. We also joined the Gwangju Esports Asia bootcamp in Gwangju, Korea, gaining valuable experience training with professional Korean players.
As part of shaping Team Path into a lifestyle brand, the team has also been working with prominent local gaming personalities to create collaborational content that bridges the gap between gaming and entertainment. Our top videos and shorts have breached almost 100k views each, suggesting that we’re on the right path!
Our first apparel collection is also in the works, and we aim to release this in Q1 2023!
Up to now you may have notice there is no update from Path Insights - simply put, there wasn't much competitive advantage nor anything meaningful to press on there as the internet had plentiful of repeated information or insight - we focused out efforts on Team Path as a better way to win the hearts of gamers as oppose to media.
So what have we learnt from 2022?
1. Growing $PATH value for stakeholders
We understand that pegging value alone to treasury value is insufficient to provide stakeholders with exponential growth. To this end, we aim to introduce more utility on the token in the future.
While growth of treasury through seed round investments is a long-term play, increasing our share of investments through secondary investments provides the capital efficiency of our funds and allows us to derisk quicker. This is something we are already beginning to implement.
Moreover, with play-to-earn no longer being a feasible revenue model, we need to explore short-term revenue streams in other forms.
2. Gaining valuable attention in the Path Ecosystem
Currently, the total addressable market (TAM) of web3 gamers alone is too small, largely because the majority of them remain focused on “earning” rather than “spending/owning”. To increase the value of attention, we must find or bring in segments of users that have web3 wallets and are willing to spend more in games.
Targeting web2 gamers who already have a spending habit with key value propositions will allow us to reach a larger and more valuable TAM, with the next stage focusing on getting them into the web3 scene en masse through ownership of wallets and NFTs. We also plan to target web2 gaming content creators in order to onboard their communities, which should in theory help us to overcome the typical cold start problems in any network creation.
3. Increasing utility for $PATH tokens
Through our experiences this year, we are of the firm belief that building a product that delights and hooks users will drive more sustainable utility for $PATH (e.g. if $PATH is used to purchase digital goods launched by gaming content creators) versus pure web3 features like staking. Going forward, the $PATH tokens in our treasury should be utilised to bootstrap this user growth rather than to incentivise staking behaviour.
4. Growth of the overall web3 gaming industry
Despite turbulent market conditions like the collapse of FTX, we remain hyper bullish on the promise of web3 in the gaming space. This only extends the adoption timeline, but we believe it’s inevitable.
While gaming developers often overpromise delivery timelines to maintain hype, we know that good games take time to build, and therefore it is likely that anchor web3 games with sustainable economies and attractive gameplay will only start emerging in 1–2 years at the earliest, especially since most projects have only raised funds within the last 6–12 months. Nevertheless, the promise of web3 in the gaming space is not limited to game development; we believe leveraging web3 in the gaming community space is another major way to bring gaming communities en masse into web3.
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