Original author: echo_z, Chain Teahouse
Fan Token, as a tool to connect celebrities and fans, has always been full of imagination. Its value potential includes: as a star to realize and crowdfunding means to allow fans to directly participate in investment; as a proof of rights and interests of fans, to allow celebrities to have a more free fan operation mode; to borrow celebrity influence to allow more Web2 users to join Web3. Especially the last point, which includes the possibility of generalizing the blockchain from a niche community to the general public, has attracted much attention to fan tokens.
Since 2018, there have been projects trying to explore homogeneous fan Token tools, and projects with a value of more than 1 billion US dollars have also been produced. Chiliz for sports teams, Rally, a creator token tool that serves a wide range of users, etc. The NFT boom in 21 years is coming, and the collection value of NFT is naturally suitable for the star effect. Recently, there has been a wave of star NFT trends.
This article selects a typical fan Token project, sorts out the project background, and tries to answer: How much is a fan Token worth, and whether it can make Web3 break the circle.
Chiliz is a tool platform to connect teams and fans through Token. The services provided include:
1 )Assist the team to issue Token and provide a special trading platform for fans Token;
2) Provide a fan operation platform to allow fans Token holders to participate in decision-making team affairs .
In terms of Token issuance, Chiliz provides FTO (Fan Token Offering) Launchpad on its official operating platform Socios to help the team do customized issuance and provide The dedicated Fan Token trading platform has basically the same function and interface as the common centralized trading platform. In the trading platform, you can only trade BTC/ETH through the platform Token CHZ trading platform with issued fans Token, or through USDT. There are currently about 50 types of fan Tokens, and the operational sovereignty of each Token is in the hands of the team. The Token issuance is also defined by the team and has nothing to do with the CHZ issuance. Some Tokens are also listed on the Binance trading platform and can be purchased with USDT.
Chiliz trading platform interface
In addition to providing In addition to the Launchpad function, it is also a tool for fans to participate in voting and manage team affairs, including iOS, Android and desktop. The holders of each type of fan Token can participate in the voting activities of the corresponding teams to decide some affairs of the team, such as the words on the armbands worn by the stars, the team's celebration songs, etc. CHZ itself is a kind of ERC20 and BEP2 Token, but Socios is built on Chiliz Chain, the side chain of Ethereum, and all fan tokens are also Tokens built on Chiliz Chian, so there is no need for Gas fee to vote on Socios.

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The core value of Chiliz is that for the team, it provides a tool to manage fans and strengthen the relationship with fans. For fans, it has a channel to invest in the team and a certain amount of team affairs decision-making power .
Chiliz has released Token since September 2019, and the current circulating market value is about 1 billion US dollars, the full circulation market value is about 1.5 billion US dollars, it is a relatively long-term and well-operated project. Chiliz has made remarkable achievements in cooperation and expansion. Currently, ~50 kinds of fan tokens have been issued, and the market value of the top tokens such as PSG and BAR (Barcelona) has exceeded 200 million US dollars.
Maybe because the CEO and CTO are both from France, Chiliz has the most cooperation with European football teams, including PSG, Barcelona, Arsenal and other famous teams. , and issued a fan Token. The cooperation in the football field also brought two waves of soaring currency prices in early March and late October 21:

The rise in March was caused by multiple reasons:< /p>
1) PSG advanced to the quarter-finals of the UEFA Champions League in March, and PSG generated a transaction volume of 550 million US dollars;
2) Subsequently, PSG issued an announcement saying that it will release NFT;
3) Around March, it happened to catch up with the NFT boom.
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The increase at the end of October 21 was mainly brought by NFT: On October 29, Socios released the first NFT of AC Milan, and the distribution method was also very special. There are at least 10 AC Milan fans Token ACM users who predict the score of Roma vs AC Milan on Socios, and 100 users who guess correctly will get NFT airdrops.
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In addition to the football team, Chiliz is also actively expanding the field of basketball, hoping to open up the US market. In August 21, there were still very few basketball teams to cooperate with. Now it has covered many well-known NBA teams. However, due to the cryptocurrency regulation in the United States, most of these teams are limited to fan operation and cooperation, and there is no plan to issue coins.
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Some basketball teams that Chiliz cooperates
Chiliz has a relatively broad user base, with as many as 133,000 independent addresses holding coins (for comparison: AXS 50,000, Aave 105,000, Dogecoin 4.8 million). What's more interesting is that 45% of the 133,000 holding addresses have no other ERC20 Token except CHZ, and similar users account for about 30% of AXS and AAVE holders. Chiliz has a lot of pure CHZ addresses, and Chiliz may indeed have brought some real fans rather than speculators.
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Among the holders of CHZ, AAVE, and AXS, the proportion of users who have held other ERC20 Token types, the farther to the left, the other The fewer ERC20 Tokens, the more "little white" the address is. See appendix for source data
The main function of the platform Token CHZ is to The Socios platform participates in the first launch of fan tokens and purchases other fan tokens in the trading center. The value of tokens comes from users' demand for fan tokens. In the future, the platform hopes to expand the payment function of CHZ, including payment on e-commerce platforms such as WooCommerce, purchasing online and offline event tickets, adding services in the Socios platform and paying with CHZ, etc.
The total amount of CHZ is about 8.99 billion, and the Token distribution is as follows. Chiliz's token economy is relatively "atypical". There is no mortgage mining incentive, nor does it set up a large number of airdrops. The Ponzi color is very weak.
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Most of the founding teams come from the online entertainment industry. CEO Alexandre Dreyfus is French with 22 years of entrepreneurial experience and has founded online poker games; the CTO is also French and has worked as a compliant online gambling platform in France; in addition, there are also representatives from the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries. Core member.
The white paper lists three cornerstone investors: OK Blockchain Capital, Ceyuan Venture Capital (also an early investor of OK), and Binance. In April 2018, Chiliz raised US$66 million; in April 21, it received financing but did not disclose the amount, led by Jump Trading.
Chiliz's partnership with European teams is its strong The moat can bring a large number of ordinary users and funds to it. Few blockchain projects can produce such large-scale cooperation with the off-chain world like Chiliz. Most projects, even if they cooperate with celebrities, are limited to individual characters or occasional marketing activities.
However, Chiliz’s development path is also subject to regulatory restrictions. The British Advertising Standards Authority once banned the Arsenal team from placing fan Token advertisements on Facebook, and entering the NBA market is also restricted. Regulatory obstacles make it difficult to issue fan tokens.
Rally is a platform that helps celebrities issue tokens and establish connections with fans. By issuing Token, celebrities can customize the level and rights of Token holders, and strengthen fan operation. The platform currently adopts an invitation system, and not everyone can issue tokens by themselves.
Platform Token RLY itself is an ERC20 Token. Rally and all star Tokens are built on the Ethereum side chain. On the Rally platform, you can buy and sell RLY and various Celebrity Tokens can also be traded with each other. The pricing of Celebrity Tokens adopts Bonding Curve to realize price discovery and ensure sufficient liquidity.
There are various ways to purchase star coins, you can purchase with fiat currency through debit cards or credit cards (but each purchase can be up to 500), use digital currency through Coinbase or digital wallet Purchase, or bridge RLY to the Rally side chain to purchase with RLY. In addition, Rally also provides the function of NFT issuance and sale. The NFT issued by each celebrity needs to be purchased with the corresponding celebrity Token.
Rally hopes to provide a Token issuance platform, so that celebrities can become entrepreneurs and have their own economic system without the need for third-party platforms to generate revenue.
Rally released Token in December 2020, with a market value of about 5 100 million U.S. dollars, and the market value of the full circulation is about 3.2 billion U.S. dollars.
Rally currently has no particularly well-known creators on the platform, and the total amount of TokenTVL of the top 10 fans is between 140,000 and 240,000 US dollars (TVL here Calculated by the corresponding value of the total amount of RLY purchased fan Token). Joe Pulizzi, ranked No. 1, is a content marketing expert who writes his own book, blog, and website to provide courses on content creation and marketing. As long as you subscribe to its website content or successfully refer a user, you can get a fan Token TILT worth $5. Holding different amounts of TILT also enjoys different levels of rights and interests. For example, users who hold 20 TILT can enjoy a special Discord channel, and can enjoy a 50% discount when purchasing all website teaching content.
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In August 21, Rally also launched the NFT platform, but it did not cause a particularly big wave.
However, Rally is still actively expanding its business scope. In August 21, Rally carried out a corporate restructuring and dismantled it into five operating entities, each managed by a different team. The specific measures were released by Rally founder Kevin Chou on the Rally forum: "decentralize" the operation of Rally itself, and divide it into five operating entities each performing its own duties. The five entities are: 1) continue to provide the star Token tool Rally.io; 2) the Rally Asia project focusing on the Asian market; 3) a non-profit organization that maintains the underlying blockchain technology, manages the overall project and reward mechanism, and maintains community assets RLY Network Association; 4) SuperLayer (led by Kevin Chou himself), which focuses on incubating new products; 4) RLY Ecosystem DAO, which is composed of all RLY holders and received an initial grant of 20 million RLY and 2 million USDC from the Association.
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Kevin also posted the budget allocation for each operating entity:

Shortly after posting the above proposal, Kevin He stepped down as the CEO of Rally, and launched the incubation platform SuperLayer at the end of October, and recently announced that he will migrate to Solana and develop blockchain games on Solana.
Rally has a variety of business forms, but the most basic fan Token platform business is not very popular, and the project layout may be more dependent on future business. Fortunately, the team has sufficient funds. According to the distribution in the above budget table, the five operating entities hold a total of 86 million USDC and RLY worth about 70 million US dollars.
Rally only has ~8,300 holders on ETH. Considering that star tokens are built on the side chain and can be purchased directly with legal currency, there may be some fans who have never used the ETH main network and only use legal currency to purchase side chain tokens. However, because there are no particularly large stars, the number of these users It is estimated that the level will not be particularly large.
The total amount of RLY is 15 billion, which will be unlocked in 8 years. The current market value in circulation is about 500 million US dollars, accounting for only about 1/6 of the total market value in circulation. In the future, as the token is unlocked, there may be a risk of currency price decline.
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The main function of RLY, on the one hand, can buy star tokens as mentioned above, on the other hand, it can participate in voting governance through Snapshot. Rally's governance forum is very active, and many important proposals will be made on the forum, including the entity split proposal proposed by Kevin, the star Token pricing plan, the Token incentive plan, etc., all passed the forum proposal resolution.
Because all star Tokens are owned by the creators themselves, and the Rally platform does not charge any handling fees during transactions, so Rally itself has no means of revenue. Mainly rely on Rally's demand growth to achieve value enhancement.
It is also worth mentioning that Rally provides radical Token incentives, which is likely to be an important reason for maintaining the currency price in the absence of superstar blessings . The Token incentive method is: if the total value of RLY corresponding to a star Token this week is higher than the average value of the past 4 weeks, then the holder of this star Token will receive RLY incentives, that is to say, as long as the TVL increases, the holder will will be motivated.
Taking TILT as an example, the current total TVL is 244,000 US dollars, and the total amount of incentives this week is 19k RLY, which is about 4,000 US dollars, which is the yield of this week It reached 1.6%, and the annualized rate of return was ~83%. Moreover, these incentives come from Network Usage Rewards, which accounts for 50% of the total, with a total of 7.5 billion RLY. Assuming that TILT, which ranks first, continues to grow and encourages 1 million RLY a year, the incentive pool is enough for 100 such star Tokens to continue The reward is 75 years, which is enough to last for quite a long time.
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Kevin Chou, the earliest founder and CEO of Rally, once co-founded a video game company Kabam, which was later sold for US$1 billion; co-founded Rally in 18 years, and founded the blockchain game development platform Forte in 19 years, which has received US$910 million in financing. After splitting Rally in August 21, Kevin launched SuperLayer, a blockchain project incubation company, together with Mahesh Vellanki, another co-founder of Rally.
The current CEO of Rally, Bremner Morris, used to be the CMO of Rally. Before joining Rally, he was doing marketing on Patreon, a crowdfunding platform for creators. There are also several core members of the team who have worked in companies such as Twitter/Youtube.
The investors displayed on Rally's official website include well-known institutions such as a16z and Coinbase Ventures, but the amount is not disclosed. In addition, in early 21, after passing a community resolution, Rally raised $57 million by selling some community assets.
Rally has a strong team background and financial strength, the project The mode of operation also has a strong spirit of the encryption circle, such as open governance, incentives for Token holders, etc.
The biggest risk of the project comes from whether the business model itself can run smoothly. There are no superstars among the stars that Rally cooperates with (with the strength of the Rally team, they should be able to find superstars. I don’t know if this is because the superstars are not willing to bear the policy risk of issuing coins). They are mainly small and medium-sized creators/entrepreneurs, but as far as the current situation is concerned The platform only provides monetization tools, and celebrities still need to rely on their own abilities to expand their fan base. It is difficult to rely on Rally itself to become famous, and Rally's user growth is not optimistic. This dilemma is somewhat similar to the Web3 music project Audius. Audius provides a platform for musicians to freely release music, but so far it only has ~200,000 daily active users. Without a considerable number of users, it will be very difficult for musicians on the platform to monetize.
In addition to the homogeneous Token, the star issue NFT is also a new type of fan Token, which can also establish a connection between stars and fans. The form of NFT brings stronger collection value and greater possibility of compliance, but the threshold is also higher. Just in this month of this year, a number of popular star NFT projects have been launched one after another.
The PhantaBear project was launched by Ezek in December 21 Announced on the 18th, it quickly became popular due to Jay Chou's endorsement. The project is limited to 10,000 bears, and each bear has a unique combination of characteristics. Bear holders can obtain special membership benefits of Ezek. At 11 a.m. on January 1, 22, the platform was publicly sold at a price of 0.26 ETH each, and sold out within 40 minutes. The short-term trading volume once surpassed BAYC and ranked first in Opensea. The total transaction volume on Opensea is about 29,000 ETH, the current floor price is 1.7 ETH, and the total value of NFT is about 40 million US dollars.
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Phanta Bear's popularity is largely due to Jay Chou's support. Ezek was founded by Jay Chou's friend and Taiwanese artist Liu Genghong. Not only did he cooperate with Jay Chou's trendy brand PHANTACi to be responsible for the NFT design, but the initial marketing also made a big fuss about Jay Chou: On December 31, the day before the official launch of the NFT, Jay Chou and his wife successively in the Two NFTs airdropped by the team were posted on Instagram, triggering a wave of panic buying the next day.
Jay Chou’s IG limited-time news

Kunling IG limited-time news
Subsequently, some twists and turns occurred: On January 3, Jay Chou participated in the co-organization of Jewel Company announced that PhantaBear and Jay Chou himself has nothing to do, not the NFT launched by Jay Chou. But then in the early morning of January 7th to 8th, Jay Chou posted three more posts about PhantaBear on his Ins, which seemed to be supporting this project. Judging from the transactions on OpenSea, the average price and transaction volume both began to soar on January 7, reflecting the strength of Jay Chou's endorsement.
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In addition to Jay Chou's dynamics, there are other stars including Jean-Claude Van Damme, Lin Junjie, Ashin, Pan Weibo and other stars who have shown the airdropped Bear on Ins .
January 18, shortly after the launch of the project, happened to be Jay Chou’s birthday. Played on the NASDAQ billboard in the square. PHANTACi also launched an event: All PhantaBear NFT holders, permanent VIP black cards, black gold members, etc., can receive a limited T-SHIRT as long as they go to designated stores.
Although Jay Chou and PhantaBear do not have a strict business relationship, Jay Chou is in fact strongly supporting PhantaBear. Launched limited T-SHIRT and other ways to promote, to give enough face.
Ezek has also planned a 22-year path for project development: in the first quarter, NFT holders will receive various airdrops in the future, and another superstar NFT will be released ;Starting from the second quarter, it plans to prepare for virtual concerts, cross-chain entertainment Metaverse platform, virtual theaters, private VR clubs, etc. Of course, these are still in the conceptual stage.
The Ezek team has a strong background in the entertainment industry. Ezek was established by Starvision Entertainment Ltd. (S.E.L). The founder of S.E.L is Liu Genghong, so it is generally believed that Will L, one of the three founders in the introduction on the official website, is Liu Genghong; the other founder, Mark G, should be Geng Zhan, who is Xingyi Like the founder, the company focuses on the development of Jay Chou's concept movies; there is also Ed Ow, a technology co-creator, who is rumored to be the son of Wang Xuehong, chairman of the electronic brand HTC. In addition, it is rumored that Jiang Bingcheng, the producer who participated in many Jay Chou films, also joined the team.
IreneDAO is created by The selfie NFT series launched by Red Irene Zhao sold out quickly after it was launched on OpenSea on January 14. These selfies are all added with Crypto Meme, such as "WAGMI", "Take my money" and so on. On the same day, Irene also launched IreneDAO and the corresponding Discord group, and NFT holders have authentication roles in the group. The transaction volume of IreneDAO NFT reached 2.3k ETH, the current floor price is 0.8ETH, and the total value is about 2 million US dollars.
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IreneDAO has a strong grassroots culture. SIMP itself has the meaning of "nymphomaniac", which is in line with the atmosphere of Irene's beautiful photos, but Irene interprets it as "Simplicity, Integrity, Meaning and Purpose", as the value of DAO to express the desire to reshape the creator economy. It is full of grassroots sense of mission, and it has the fun of deconstructing FWB DAO's honest heart wrapped in a rogue surface.
On January 16th, Galaxy Digital CEO Michael Novogratz tweeted that he bought an NFT, and YouTuber Logan Paul bought 20 NFTs in one go. On that day, the trading volume soared to the peak.
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Irene was originally in the traditional financial industry and worked as a part-time IG influencer. Last year, Irene switched to blockchain and also operated a fan group on Telegram. According to Irene herself, the source of this set of NFT is that after she uploaded a batch of selfie emoticons in the Telegram group, someone suggested that she could make an NFT. After she agreed, the community "simps" made 1,106 emoticons Package NFT. Irene said that the income of NFT will be managed by IreneDAO. But some people questioned that Irene himself was the planner of this marketing activity. In addition, Irene also has a blockchain entrepreneurial project So-col, which is a social platform that helps creators issue NFT. However, from the perspective of Twitter attention, So-col only has 6k followers, far less than Irene's 136.8k.
Although the true origin of IreneDAO is controversial, there is no doubt that this is a successful Internet celebrity marketing event, and even brought a wave of SIMP NFT. Fake disks appeared, and some people even made ElonDAO to specifically follow Elon Musk. Many of the projects have nothing to do with the star himself and need to be screened.
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Almost at the same time as IreneDAO, Ghozali Everyday became popular. Ghozali is an Indonesian college student. Starting from January 10, he took selfies of himself sitting at a computer desk every day from 2017 to 2021 and uploaded them to OpenSea as NFTs. Ghozali himself did not expect that within one day he suddenly became popular. On the 11th, the transaction volume soared to more than 500, the current transaction amount reached 388ETH, the floor price was 0.208ETH, and the total value of NFT was about 500,000 US dollars. However, Ghozali has not launched a long-term follow-up activity plan, and his popularity is more of an accidental event.
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The rarity and high price of NFT will inevitably lead to user scale smaller. There are about 5,000 PhantaBear holders, and about 500 IreneDAO and Ghozali Everyday holders each.
Many people expect that star NFT can lead Web3 to break the circle, but I am afraid it is not that simple. The author inquired about the number of NFT holders of PhantaBear and IreneDAO on dune, and the number of other ERC721 Tokens they have held, as a measure of the novice index of NFT holders. As shown in the table below, those who have not traded other ERC721 Token types, that is, pure bear addresses or pure Irene addresses account for 16% of PhantaBear and 10% of IreneDAODE respectively. If it is really the Web2 users brought by breaking the circle, there is a high probability that it should fall into this part, which does not account for many of the total users.
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Among the respective holders of PhantaBear and IreneDAO, the proportion of users who have held other ERC721 Token types, the farther to the left is the other ERC721 Token held by the address The less, the more "NFT novice" the address is. See the appendix for the source data
It is also worth noting that the superstar effect makes PhantaBear more generalized users than IreneDAO, and brings more NFT novices in Web3 . Among PhantaBear holders, other ordinary users with 10 or less ERC721 Tokens accounted for 71%, while IreneDAO only accounted for 47%, indicating that there are more experienced NFT players among IreneDAO holders.
PhantaBear and IreneDAO’s top 5% addresses and top 50% addresses hold similar shares, but PhantaBear’s top 1% address share ratio IreneDAO is significantly higher, largely due to the addresses held by the project party. The number one address among PhantaBear holders minted 500 bears on December 31, before the official sale, and then transferred 174 bears to 81 addresses (note that transfer is not sale), held by Jay Chou and Kun Ling Some #10000 and #8938 held by Kunling are also sent from this address. If there is no project address, the top 1% wallet share will drop to 14.6%, which is close to 12% of IreneDAO.
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PhantaBear and IreneDAO rank range holders have the proportion of the total NFT, the more left, the more top holders. See appendix for source data
The core value of PhantaBear comes from Jay Chou's Endorsement, it was after Jay Chou posted 3 related Ins Posts in a row that the price and trading volume of NFT rose rapidly. Moreover, the project party has a strong background in the entertainment industry, and may invite other stars to participate in NFT distribution in the future. But the hidden worry of the project is that Jay Chou and PhantaBear do not have a strict business binding relationship. If Jay Chou no longer supports PhantaBear in the future, it is conceivable that the value of NFT will be greatly depreciated.
The popularity of IreneDAO and Ghozali is sporadic, and their NFT value is more derived from the commemorative significance carried by the NFT itself (Irene’s photos are accompanied by In the encryption circle meme, Ghozali’s behavior somewhat echoes Beeble’s famous work Everyday). In the future, there may not be more extension possibilities like PhantaBear, but NFT itself has collection value.
Reviewing the above projects, we can see that fan Token has several values There are different levels of implementation:
In terms of star realization, all projects are feasible tools, but the homogeneous Token threshold is lower and the user base is larger Large, while NFT has high prices, high thresholds, and a smaller user base. But the key point is that issuing tokens itself is only a monetization tool and cannot be a growth platform, so we will see that apart from grassroots influencers such as IreneDAO and Ghozali who became popular due to accidental memes, creators who issue Tokens on Rally It's hard to catch on, and they still need to build their fan base on other platforms. The most useful way for monetization tools is to help well-known individuals or institutions to "harvest" investors, so projects like Chiliz and PhantaBear that cooperate with well-known teams/superstars can become mainstream.
In terms of fan rights and interests certificates, there are not many meaningful rights and interests that can be provided at present, and the main function is to increase the fun. Chiliz allows users to participate in part of the team's decision-making, but these decisions are basically some activity layout design, etc., not related to any important affairs of the team; the main benefits currently provided by PhantaBear are gift peripherals, such as gift T-shirt or airdrop new blind box.
In terms of breaking the circle of Web3, only projects with great reputation and low threshold can be truly realized. At present, Chiliz has the most potential and the largest number of users. The cooperation with the team has brought a broad user base, and the homogeneous Token also makes the threshold for user participation low enough. Although PhantaBear has superstar blessings, currently only four to five thousand RMB can buy an NFT, which may only attract diehard fans.
PhantaBear’s timeline as of January 8:
PhantaBear New York Times event&PHANTA Ci activity:
https://www.blocktempo.com/jaychou-birthday-phantabear-holder-can-get-free-tshirt/
IreneDAO source:
https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/m7v34p/simp-daos-irenedao-belledaophine-elondao-pokidao
Chilize white paper:
https://www.chiliz.com/docs/CHZ_whitepaper.pdf
Rally and Roll Token price discovery mechanism:
CHZ address Xiaobai index icon data source, change the contract address to view other tokens:
https://dune.xyz/queries/373708
PhantaBear/IreneDAO address NFT novice index chart data source, the code takes the PhantaBear contract address as an example, you can check IreneDAO for changing the contract address:
https://dune.xyz/queries/371745
PhantaBear/IreneDAO holder's go The degree of centralization, the code takes the PhantaBear contract address as an example:
https://dune.xyz/queries/376060
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