DigiDaigaku: not so ‘Free to Own’

From ‘Free to Play’ to ‘Play to Earn’ to ‘Free to Own’

Today, to play a video game, there are several possible options. The first, the most classic, is to buy the game to be able to play it. Soon, another model appeared, the ‘free to play’ (F2P) which allows you to play the game for free with theoretically the possibility of finishing it. True, Free to Play games are free but many mini in-game purchases are pretty much required to improve your character, unlock quests or buy bonuses and so on..

Since 2018, a term has gained popularity to designate games that allow you to win NFTs or crypto: the ‘Play to Earn‘. After the crypto market crash at this time, a great public disinterest followed. But users who patiently suffered the pain were eventually treated with generous giveaways from Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, Decentraland and Gods Unchained.

‘Play to Earn’ has subsequently become a marketing argument for many concepts: ‘Play and Earn’, ‘Move to Earn’, ‘Own to Earn’ and today DidiDaigaku offers ‘Free to Own’.

What do we own with DigiDaigaku?

Difficult to know because there is very little information available about the project to date. With no roadmap announced and no Whitepaper available, getting informed about the stages of the project you have to put your trust into the Twitter account of the CEO Gabriel Leydon.

‘Free to Own’ is the main concept of DigiDaigaku. Given the dazzling success of the collection, this concept deserves our attention. ‘Real ownership’ being a strong principle of Web3, what do you really have when buying an NFT from DigiDaigaku?

First of all, reading the GCU, it would seem that the owner of the NFT does not have much right to the reuse of the work contained in the token. In addition, the .json file is hosted centrally on their server.

It’s normal to want to adjust settings along the way for video game assets. But in the strict sense of “real possession”, it would seem here that the buyer does not own that much.

Analysis of the DigiDaigaku Free Mint.

The major marketing point of this project is that it’s free! Undeniable fact: the mint was free. Only, the mint was ‘stealthy’. This means that a limited number of people were aware that it was coming. Let’s go into more detail about this mint through an analysis of the hard NFT data.

On August 9, Gabriel Leydon announced that DigiDaigaku’s mint was open. Announcement taken up by Limit Break in the aftermath. With a mint limit of 1 NFT per wallet, we counted 1926 unique wallets that were able to participate in this mint. Remember that a wallet does not represent a real user. Please note:

• The contract deployer has mined 97 (from asset ID #3 to #99).
• The first two NFTs were mined by two unique wallets. These two NFTs were transferred to the deployer after being mined. 

After the first 100 NFTs, the mint lasted 13 minutes before ending. Sales soared and in one hour the price of sales stabilized around $1000 until the end of the day. Even though the mint was free, the least we could say was that it was not fair to everyone. In addition, access to the project quickly became out of reach for lower-budget users.

Analysis of the DigiDaigaku Minters

Given the speed with which the collection has been minted and its stealth nature, it may be interesting to look further into the wallets that participated in this event. Taking the number of sales per wallet as the main indicator, here is a summary table of their performance.

For this analysis, we considered data from August 9th, 2022 to September 4th, 2022. Sales that took place on Sudoswap were identified as transfers, so sales that took place on that exchange were not taken into account.

Of the 930 addresses that made 0 sales, 776 had only the interaction of sending their NFT to another address. It was also this group that made the most purchases (81) for a total of $165,578.

The 879 addresses that made 1 sale generated $1,165,340 in volume with an average price of $1,325. We identified 11 purchases for an average of 65.82 dollars. The detail is given in the table above, but addresses with more than two sales represent 515 sales for a total of $1,605,701.

Activity of DigiDaigaku NFTs

Regarding the assets themselves, let’s take a closer look at their activities. Sales were separated from transfers with the exception of sales that took place on Sudoswap being counted as transfers.

DigiDaigaku #826 has been sold 10 times and has 12 transfers. Other assets also have a significant number of transfers:

• #1730 has been transferred 20 times for 2 sales.
• #626, 19 times for 3 sales.
• #216, 18 times for 4 sales.
• #308, 17 times for one sale.

These few NFTs show abnormally high activity compared to other NFT transfers. NFTs transferred from 1 to 5 times represent 4114 transfers or 89% of total transfers.

DigiDaigaku Analysis Conclusions

What can we conclude from this data? Our first analysis of the DigiDaigaku’s mint published on social networks last week highlighted the profits generated by the different buyers of this collection. Only, the USD indicator alone can be misleading and after a month of DigiDaigaku’s mint, it seemed necessary to us to be more precise about this collection.

Although the mint was free, its stealth aspect, which is reserved for a small group of individuals, calls into question its supposed accessibility. Despite the August 9th entry price of more than $12,000, the usefulness of the DigiDaigaku Genesis is still not displayed on the project website.

It is therefore difficult to continue to discuss any gratuity. In view of the license of use for collectors which is very restrictive and greedy in its data collection, it is hard to know what anyone really owns..!

With no real usability and with a team still forming, it would seem that the interpretation of the ‘Free to Own’ model is the subject of strong speculation. Gabriel Leydon explained the possibilities offered by the airdrop received (the Spirits) but it will surely be necessary to be very patient before being able to test the promised adventure game in full.

This is one project that has exhibited the importance of digging into the data to get a full picture of its current and past behavior and real community.