The pre-sale is imminent, and one article understands the viral marketing, background and platform economy of Portal

Originally written by Karen, Foresight News

Relying on @Official Referral Accounts and the strategy of interacting with them, the Web3 gaming ecosystem Portal’s viral marketing and vision of multi-chain gaming and player integration have driven its introduction to a wider user base. The data proves that Portal has indeed attracted the participation of a large number of Web3 users such as KOLs and ordinary users.

At the time of writing, a token sale-related tweet posted by Portal on December 8 had garnered 28,000 likes, 35,000 retweets, 341,000 comments, and 9.1 million views. According to Keyhole’s analysis data, Portal’s average number of likes per post reached 12,800 in the last month, and the average number of retweets reached 8,596.

The Portal will be available for pre-sale on December 14, following the release of the whitepaper last week. According to Portal, “It aims to build a unified Web3 gaming ecosystem by partnering with LayerZero to connect games and players across different blockchain networks, and provide players with access to a large number of games and game distribution opportunities.”

What is the background of the Portal?

According to the whitepaper, Portal was developed by the Portal Foundation, a Cayman Islands organization, to support and facilitate the Portal ecosystem by empowering gamers, game developers, and decentralized governance.

According to the information disclosed by Portal in recent days, the members of the Portal Advisory Board include:

• John Yao: CEO of Team Secret, an esports club. John Yao will provide insights and resources into the mainstream esports landscape. Team Secret is a European professional team founded in August 2014 and mainly involved in competitive sports such as League of Legends and Dota 2.
• Jamie King: Co-founder of Rockstar Games. Rockstar Games, the game development arm of Take-Two Interactive, was founded in 1998 and is best known for its Grand Theft Auto series. However, Jamie King left Rockstar Games in 2006. According to GAMERANT, the reason for Jamie King’s parting of ways with Rockstar Games was a miscommunication among the game’s producers about the direction of development after the success of Grand Theft Auto. Jamie King’s primary role at Portal is to drive the onboarding of Web2 games, as well as advising on game and IP creative and directional strategies.
• Russell Hanson: From 2018 to 2019, he was the Chief Scientific Officer of the AI team at Consensys Endjinn, where he was responsible for developing and refining AI models for cryptocurrencies. Russell Hanson will bring generative AI + automation to the Portal and its ever-expanding library of games and digital assets.
• Matt Dixon: Previously served as Director of Business Development at Electronic Arts from October 2016 to August 2022.

Portal’s strategic investors include Newman Group, which will advise Portal on its Asia strategy. The author has not seen any other strategic investors. Portal’s gaming partners include Space Nation, Oxya Origin, Nine Chronicles, Crypto Unicorns, MagicCraft, DeFi Kingdoms, and more, and according to the official website, more than 200 games are ready to integrate the Portal token at launch. Portal also mentioned in its Twitter profile that it is built on LayerZero (the white paper states that it has a partnership with LayerZero) and has partnerships with Magic Eden and M 80 (an esports and gaming organization).

Magic Eden has also previously confirmed that all NFTs in the Portal ecosystem in the future can be purchased using Portal tokens on Magic Eden.

It’s worth mentioning that Yuga Labs posted a vague tweet on November 29 that read, “Surely you don’t know how much I want to tweet ‘I invented portalcoin’ all day. I’m tweeting this to stop this intrusive thought. Go on, degens.” @0x vvp also associated more coincidences, in early November, Yuga Labs will launch a new Magic Eden ETH marketplace in partnership with Magic Eden, and the Portal token will be used as an in-game asset that can be traded in Magic Eden.

The Portal Twitter account was registered in May 2023 with only one followlist (i.e., LayerZero, but LayerZero doesn’t follow anyone), the first tweet was released on June 27, and the number of followers currently reaches 270,000, including NFT OG Franklin, as well as multiple NFTs, Web3 games, KOLs, and more.

However, on the token page of the Portal, it is mentioned that its game token was jointly developed with LZ Technology, but the author has not found any information related to LZ Technology at this time. There is also no information to refer to as to whether the initials LZ are related to LayerZero.

M 80 partners include Portal. Source: M 80

What is Portal?

The portal aims to connect games and players across different blockchain networks based on LayerZero, build a unified Web3 gaming ecosystem, and provide players with access to a large number of games and game distribution opportunities, as well as integrations with networks such as Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, and Klaytn.

At the end of November, Portal launched the first season of Portal airdrop mining on the Crystal Dash website, allowing users to interact with it on X (Twitter) and earn Portal. That said, Portal allows you to earn Crystal Dash points by creating Tweets about the Portal (or simply @ Portal Official) or by interacting directly with Portal content. Points can be used to level up, the higher the level, the more fragments, and then the fragments can be re-crafted into crystals, which are equivalent to portal airdrops. At the end of each season, the points and rank drop to 0 and the shards are retained.

In the second season of the event, which starts on December 5th, points can only be earned by participating in Portal Power Tweets, and you need to interact with them within 12 hours of the Portal Power post, after which you will not receive points (20 points for likes, 40 points for replies, 50 points for retweets, and 60 points for citations).

Portal also offers Portal Passport, an all-in-one login solution that consolidates player identities and assets across a variety of games. Middleware introduced by Portal can manage on-chain transactions for games, elevate gameplay, and allow Web3 and Web2 players to participate.

What does the Portal white paper say?

What is the utility of the Portal Token?

According to the Portal whitepaper, Portal token uses include transaction fees, payment methods, helping games gain greater visibility and attention on the Portal platform through voting and staking, governance, and more. Specifically:

1. Used to pay transaction fees. Transaction fees are made up of cross-chain transactions verified by Portal nodes and Portal network native fees. Although the Portal has not disclosed the detailed fee structure, according to the chart below in the whitepaper, after players pay transaction fees, some of them will be burned, and some of them will be placed in the treasury (this part will be used as rewards to be distributed to nodes, game developers, and then to players).

2. All transactions within the Portal Network will support the PORTAL Token as one of the payment options within the game or in the game-related marketplace, and all fees associated with any cross-chain transactions made through the Portal Network will be denominated in PORTAL.

3. Voting and staking are also one of the main utilities of the PORTAL token. Players and games can earn rewards by staking, and they can also help games gain more visibility and attention on the Portal platform through voting. Portal refers to this incentive system as a stake-to-scale system, which not only monetizes both players and games, but also decentralizes game distribution.

In addition, as the scale of the portal increases, the platform data related to the player’s identity becomes a data collector (called a spectator, such as games and brands) to obtain user resources. The spectator will also be able to stake players to gamers to gain access to sample their personal data and compound the player’s stake share.

At the same time, in addition to the allocation of game weights, staking also serves as an economic allocation function in the Portal, and also performs the following two key functions: 1. Set the number of PORTALs to be recycled and destroyed before allocation; 2. Distribute the share of inflation between the vault and the game.

Fourth, governance, this part of the information will be released later

Portal stack

The Portal stack also includes the Portal Wallet, which removes the complexity of managing mnemonics, private keys, etc., and is compatible with major platforms such as Discord and Google. The platform’s user ID matching system synchronizes wallet addresses with unique IDs, enabling the collection of comprehensive player data and analytics;

The Companion App allows users to explore games, trade cross-chain assets, socialize, and staking-to-scale (driving awareness and attention to games on the Portal).

The “nodes” of the Portal network form a synchronization layer that combines the Portal Web3 engine and the LayerZero Oracle/Relayer. This means that nodes provide a second layer of verification of cross-chain transactions backed by a distributed infrastructure owned and operated by the Portal community. Nodes can be run in the cloud or on-premises. In exchange for providing validation services, nodes are eligible to accrue network rewards and fees, which can be claimed at the end of the 24-hour period.

PORTAL tokenomics

The PORTAL has a maximum supply of 1 billion, which is minted at the start of creation and then released into the Community Treasury over time. THE PORTAL REWARD RELEASE RATE IS RELEASED AS FOLLOWS:

For reward distribution, Portal adjusts the distribution of PORTAL according to the staking ratio. IN THE FIGURE BELOW, THE ABSCISSA S REPRESENTS THE PROPORTION OF ALL CIRCULATING PORTAL TOKENS THAT HAVE BEEN STAKED, AND THE ORDINATE REPRESENTS THE GAME PORTAL DISTRIBUTION, G = √S. Then in the game distribution, the tokens allocated to the node operator are 20% of the game distribution tokens.

In addition, Portal also introduced the concept of recovering fees in the white paper, when users pay PORTAL transaction fees, these fees will be recycled in real time, and some of the recycled PORTALs will be destroyed, and some will be distributed as platform rewards. THE STAKING RATIO AT THAT TIME WILL BE USED TO CALCULATE HOW MUCH OF THE RECOVERED PORTAL WILL BE BURNED. If you are interested, you can do your own research on the specific recovery costs and destruction adjustment mechanisms.

All in all, Portal allows users to stake and vote through the Staking-to-scale system to participate in the game’s attention, visibility, and empower tokens with fee collection, rewards, and burn adjustments, but the impact on the long-term value of the token remains to be seen. It will take time to see if it will be able to propel the entire Web3 gaming ecosystem to a broader perspective. As always, this article does not represent any investment advice, DYOR.

Reference: _Whitepaper.pdf