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Trillionaire Thugs Deep Dive - V1

In today's deep dive, we are introducing the largest NFT project in Australasia - Trillionaire Thugs.  This project has a TON of awesome stuff going on, so let's run through a few topics you can expect to learn about today: 

1. The Basics - Helpful tidbits to understand the project better

2. The Team - Detailed info about the founders of TThugs

3. Intellectual Property - How TThugs is leveraging IP to their advantage

4. P2E Gaming - How Play-2-Earn works and how TThugs is creating their own P2E game

5. The Community - Exclusive insight on the community sentiment

This is a thorough breakdown, so whether you're a TThug holder, researching this project, or just want to learn about NFT Intellectual Property and Play-To-Earn games, you're in the right place! Now, let's get into how Trillionaire Thugs is using these concepts to foster a strong community of entrepreneurs.

Project Basics

One of the goals of Trillionaire Thugs (TThugs) was to bring the hip-hop and urban scene to the NFT market. THUG stands for ‘True Hustlers Utilize Grind’, and this NFT collection looks to onboard and educate hustlers into this new Web3 world - all facilitated by entry to the TThugs community.

According to one of the founders, Fortafy, “Trillionaire” was chosen as an aspirational word that no one individual has yet reached, but represents the potential value an entire community could bring to Web3. Once we get into the TThugs NFT utility and the passionate community, you'll quickly understand why TThugs has such high aspirations.

On January 28th, TThugs launched 7,777 NFTs with 350+ 3D traits, which quickly sold out to the community within three hours, for a mint price of 0.3 ETH. Three days after mint, the floor price quickly rose to over 5 ETH, with the highest sale at 5.555 ETH. This showed the potential as the team behind TThugs started viral marketing campaigns which saw over 80 Billboards worldwide, including SpaceX and Times Square, launched a partnership with a massive clothing brand (Culture Kings), and had over one billion impressions worldwide after 30 days. A week following the successful mint, the TThugs art was revealed, consisting of 7,377 normal Thugs, 390 gold Thugs, and 10 unique Thugs. One of those unique Thugs is currently the highest-selling TThug NFT, which sold for 15 ETH back in February, worth over US $45k at the time.   

From the OpenSea graph above, you can see how TThugs has been impacted by this bear market. That being said, TThugs has been able to hover around the mint price, which is good compared to other Aus/NZ projects. Regardless of the bear market, the project roadmap has not slowed down as they are now entering phase three, and the community has only grown stronger as evidenced by over 3.8k unique holders (of which 98% held for over a month and 93% held for over 3 months). Currently, only 1% of TThugs are listed on the open market. 

The Team

Just like any business, a new project is only as good as the founders and the team behind it. When it comes to this new world of Web3, it's important that the founders are not only doxxed, but also have plenty of experience running successful ventures. The team behind Trillionaire Thugs does this in a captivating way; its founders merge viral marketing and business experience with a stacked backlog of successful mobile games.

The first Trillionaire Thugs co-founder to mention is Fortafy, real name Sam Ratumaitavuki. Fortafy is a New Zealand-born businessman, entrepreneur, and former rapper. He leveraged his marketing know-how in Web2 to build one of the largest Facebook followings in 2015 with 3.9 million followers. He has since grown to be one of Australasia's biggest crypto influencers. Fortafy combined his hustle mentality and business expertise to create a mobile games company. He amassed over 250 million downloads thanks to his viral marketing campaigns. In a recent interview, Fortafy said he has been in crypto since 2015, and NFTs since 2017. Fortafy knows where Web3 is heading, and his experience with mobile game companies and entrepreneurship makes him fully equipped to create a legacy in the Web3 space.

To complement Fortafy’s business and marketing prowess, TThugs co-founder, Marc Lejeune, holds the technical expertise to deliver a successful, high-value, Play-2-Earn mobile game. Marc is a young, successful entrepreneur who specializes in game development. This led to him becoming a major shareholder in various gaming companies and creating one of the highest-downloaded casual mobile games in 2016. Marc was an associate producer for Ubisoft and went on to become the founder of Eye Box Games and co-founder of Fortafy Games and Perfect Tap Games. Marc is the lead developer for the TThugs mobile game, which we will be covering in more depth later in this article.

Co-founders Fortafy and Marc have an extensive network and vast experience in both the business and gaming industries. They have hand-picked an elite team to work alongside them to grow and build TThugs. Most of the members of the TThugs team are doxxed on the Trillionaire Thugs Website, which you can find here.

NFT Intellectual Property

By definition, Intellectual Property (IP) refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions, literary or artistic works, designs, symbols, names, and images used in commerce. The owner of the IP is normally the creator, and IP can only be legally used by its owner. With the technological revolution of NFTs being able to authenticate ownership of digital assets, we now have a system where NFTs can be subject to the same IP protections, including copyright, design patent, and trademark rights. 

It's a utility most common with the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), which was one of the first projects to pioneer holders having full ownership over their NFT's Intellectual Property. According to the founders, this move was made to give BAYC sustained long-term value to a holder. The early days saw holders commissioning custom art of their Bored Ape, but merely a year on we have seen Bored Apes quickly become the face of many new brands such as; Seth Green starting a TV show with his ape, the Bored and Hungry Restaurant in LA, Happy Dad using their ape on banana flavored cans, Fullsend branding their beef jerky with different apes, and rock band Kingship using apes as the band members identities.

This tangible value, as well as freedom, is exactly how Trillionaire Thugs aims to foster a community of hustling entrepreneurs across the world. In a podcast with Moe Money, Fortafy talked about how TThugs can be used to uplift and educate members of the community on branding and business; commercializing their TThug NFT for a revenue stream while utilizing the community status of a TThug to jump ahead of the pack compared to any custom brand IP. If the Bored and Hungry Restaurant opened on its first day without its Bored Ape branding, do you think it would still have had a line around the block? 

So with respect to TThugs, how has this community used IP? Well, to start with a nice bonus, OG holders and 60+ day holders received a FREE physical 1-of-1 collectible card of their TThug, which contains a QR code linking to their collection on OpenSea. Gary Vee did something similar with VeeFriends trading cards, except with TThugs you actually own the image you're holding. Despite TThugs being a very young project, we have already seen use cases start to sprout, such as the TThugs comic series by holder @LBGFX, or the Thug Morning Krew Podcast that used their TThugs to grow Web3 personalities Monday to Friday, with Gratitude Mondays, Queens Table Talk Tuesdays, Waiata (Karaoke) Wednesdays, and Friday Family Feud Games. One of New Zealand's top rappers, Savage, recently performed at Tomorrowland, the world's largest EDM festival, wearing a custom-printed shirt of the TThug #360 NFT he owns. If he decided to sell these custom-printed shirts of his Thug, he would collect all the revenue from this. Another TThug holder made a world-first: creating a gelato flavor using their NFT, in turn creating revenue from the IP they own. Using TThug #2226, the flavor “Trillionaire Treat” was created: Chocolate Caramel Peanut Butter Crunch with 24K Gold. Trillionaire Treat will be available in all “Oh Gelato” stores in Brisbane, Australia, and the launch will coincide with the store’s 1st Anniversary in mid-October.

The opportunities of commercializing a brand built around NFT IP ownership are truly endless, but the real value is the way NFTs foster a community that brings more power and value to the IP; such as the way Bored Apes were used to instantly level up new start-ups. With that piece of the puzzle in mind, think about how 7,777 Thugs can be used to brand entrepreneurial ventures. The label of "Trillionaire" Thugs doesn't seem so far-fetched. 

Play-2-Earn games

We have talked about TThugs giving ownership over IP that has value in the physical world, but what makes TThugs special is the way they bring this idea of ownership into the digital world through Play-2-Earn (P2E) games. With both founders of TThugs having vast experience in viral mobile games, the P2E game in the TThugs roadmap is definitely one of the main value propositions of the project. Firstly, we'll discuss what makes P2E games different, and how the team behind TThugs is creating a mobile game that will benefit holders. 

To get started, as seen in the photo above, Play-2-Earn looks to combine Pay-To-Play and Free-To-Play models into one ecosystem, focusing on maximising player engagement over profit, boiling down to three key principles: 

• Provide skilled players ways to earn, as a reward for being highly engaged with the game. 

• Enhanced ownership of digital assets. Players are able to own, trade, and monetize their assets.

• Transparent and participatory in-game economies.

Just like any other game, P2E refers to a platform where players have the chance to earn any form of in-game assets, such as unlocking skins or better weapons, purchasing emotes from a store, etc. The difference with P2E is instead of those transactions being unidirectional where money only goes in, P2E attaches to the blockchain and a marketplace, which allows a player's digital assets to be transferred back to the real world as a valuable resource.

One of the most popular P2E NFT games was Axie Infinity, however, since its high late last year, the Axie Infinity token has dropped more than 92%. According to Fortafy, in most current P2E games, people played to make money. The games were missing the fun aspect which made them unsustainable. With P2E games, headlines tend to focus on large, ambitious, multiverse-type games, such as The Otherside. It's evident that the current landscape is still very new for this type of desktop/PC "metaverse" format however that's not the same for mobile games. An eMarketer study found in 2012 an average of 1.6 hours per day was spent on mobile phones, in 2017 that rose to 3.4 hours, and in 2022 the worldwide average is 4.5 hours. So, TThugs want to “build where people are spending most of their time”. 

The TThugs team has a plethora of experience outside the crypto space and is choosing to leverage this on the game. The goal is to onboard casual people into the crypto space through Trillionaire Thugs, as the casual mobile game market is much larger than the crypto community. Targeting the wider market is also why Marc said in pre-production that they changed the artistic style of the Thugs to make them more cartoon and generalized for the larger population. They also made the game landscape and portrait, so it's one-hand playable and reaches every type of player. The key takeaway here is how Fortafy is leveraging the game to expose the TThugs brand all over the world to new people. These people moving from the game to the NFT collection is what will drive a sustainable ecosystem.

The TThugs Game

Many NFT projects promise a Play-2-Earn game on the roadmap, often through fake animations and renderings. Few projects actually have the team and experience to make a sustainable P2E game, acquire new users for a sustained period of time and make it go viral.

The P2E game will be a top-down, shooter style for mobile devices, and will have a desktop version if there is demand. Holding a TThug is not mandatory to play, but will give benefits inside the game for staking, earning rewards, or instantly unlocking accessories and equipment dependent on your TThug.

The weapons will be an NFT which you can buy and sell on a Marketplace and use in-game. Smart contracts also allow NFT weapons to gain experience and be upgraded. In a recent AMA, Fortafy said there will be two options for buying/selling game accessories or token currency - through OpenSea and/or possibly their own Marketplace. Original TThug holders, or OGs as the community calls it, are set to be air-dropped weapons on their release.

The top-down, shooter mobile game is built on an IOS and Android-compatible engine that integrates their blockchain partnership with Polygon/Matic. This decision to use Polygon over classic Ethereum will be further discussed in the staking section below, but long story short, Polygon allows for a much higher number of transactions at a much lower cost, making it more efficient. TThugs have announced an upcoming partnership with a global gaming publisher that has 900+ million downloads and over 50m of funding. This kind of partnership will really separate Trillionaire Thugs from the rest and is soon to be announced.

As the TThugs game will introduce casual players into the world of P2E, the TThugs team will be hard at work setting up tutorials and content. They want to make it as frictionless as possible for new people to join the game and be introduced to the TThugs brand.

The TThugs game is set to release in early 2023. If you've been a keen member of the 120K person Discord community, then you would have been sufficiently filled in on game updates through its almost excessive amount of AMAs and project updates. When it comes to the release, it is worth mentioning that Fortafy has stated: 

“if it was up to me & the community wasn’t involved, I would wait until the market turns. Its all about timing. But I have to consider the community and roadmap, it might not line up but we can do another campaign and run with it. Its our specialty”. 

As well as best timing opportunities, Fortafy has included “hidden gems” like the addition of dance emotes into the game as part of the marketing campaign. These can be added quickly to leverage the latest internet dance trends.

Staking your TThug

Enough chit-chat, let's see how TThugs holders will benefit from this P2E game. and earn rewards through staking. Staking is the mechanism that Ethereum has just been updated to with the Eth 2.0 merge, but in simple terms for this game, staking is a way of offering holders rewards for locking up (staking) their digital assets. 

A testable demo of this staking interface through TestNet is shown in the picture above, where the Ethereum-based TThug NFTs will stay on the Ethereum network, but be merged onto Polygon to enable the staking of the Polygon-based game token. A key piece of information here is the game token. Just like every other video game, games are ruled by an in-game token or currency, but instead of normal in-app purchases where the money only ever goes inwards, the blockchain offers a tradable marketplace where you can sell the in-game token currency back to fiat. 

Polygon, formerly known as the Matic Network, is a “layer 2” or “sidechain” scaling solution that runs alongside the Ethereum blockchain, which aims to provide multiple tools to improve the speed and reduce the cost and complexities of transactions on the blockchain network. Polygon was chosen as the blockchain for the TThugs P2E game due to its extremely low gas fees for transactions. The concept of minimizing transaction costs is crucial for a mobile game where you are constantly unlocking, trading, buying, and selling your NFT inventory. 

From one of the Game Development AMAs, Fortafy stated that a key focus for the game is creating a sustainable ecosystem, which will depend on the delicate balance of the game's tokenomics. The main priority has been game development and securing the publisher, but once this has been announced the team will be focusing on the blockchain and tokenomics to make the economy sustainable. The information from presentations is that there will be retroactive staking rewards for the OG holders, and differing staking reward multipliers for the three different Thug types; 1x Thug, 2.5x Gold Thug, 5x Unique Thug.

The Community

There is no doubt TThugs has some cool stuff going on with the utility of the project when it comes to IP or the P2E game. That being said, don't let this overshadow the major value of the project, the ‘TThugs community’ (TThugsArmy/TThug Family) and network.

From launch, it was clear TThugs was different from many other NFT projects, as their target audience was not limited to the crypto/NFT community and Twitter. Pre-mint, they utilised other social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, and welcomed anybody and everybody to their community. They introduced many of their community to NFTs, crypto and the Web3 space for the first time, so a strong focus was on education. The TThugs Discord server quickly grew to 120k+ members, with many music artists, professional athletes, successful entrepreneurs, celebs and influencers coming through. In the latest game update AMA, it was stated that 85% of holders are from Australia or New Zealand. When asked if the project was specifically targeting this market, Fortafy said “No, it wasn’t my intention”. “It just came naturally with the marketing, as I have a lot of people from my network and community who I'm connected with from that part of the world.”

I witnessed Trillionaire Thugs empowering people and changing lives every day through education, drive, positivity and motivation to always be your best version. That is, for many holders, the point of TThugs. It’s not just about the NFT art collection or mobile game, it's about creating and uplifting the community. The OGTThug holders are from over 52 different countries, so they are not just limited to the Pacific, Australia and NZ. In the Moe Money podcast, Fortafy has already mentioned that international viral marketing campaigns are in line for the future to give TThugs a more global reach.

One of the key pillars of the TThug Ten Commandments which promote a respectful and supportive community is the idea of being a student of the game. In this early age of NFTs, I think this point on education is one of the most important. It's what governed our mission statement for Morning NFTea, and education is one of the key ways TThugs is creating an uplifting and strong community. It's not just threads about hot or cold wallets, or turning off DMs in your discord server, it's about encouraging real education. There have been TThugs Financial Fridays, custom YouTube tutorials for Thugs to learn Web3 basics, and countless voice chats/Twitter Spaces with successful & experienced guest speakers. There are multiple education channels where any Thug is met with a wave of support, including mental health support awareness, and even a TThugs book club. Another major benefit to holders has been to watch and learn the ins and outs of a start-up business in Web3. The founders have been transparent with this and have educated the community on the whole process; from setting up a Web3 company in Abu Dhabi with government support to building a studio/games company. Developing a P2E game and how to network and make partnerships that make sense has also been part of this process. The team also showed resilience towards potential barriers and the ability to pivot for the best of the project and community.

Of course, having a strong community is all well and good, but what makes TThugs so strong of a community is the persistent support and commitment from the TThugs team. Here's a quick list of some of the utilities that have been given to the community:

Engagement

• A monthly newsletter to keep up-to-date with TThugs project progression, including specifics on what each team member has been doing

• AMAs with the founders every month

• NRL sports tipping competition with prizes

• Monthly Poker Tournaments

• Game nights

• Community-run podcasts, comics, VC & Twitter Spaces

• Thug Morning Krew in the VC

Networking

• Shoutout to Thug of the week recognising generosity and commitment within the community.

• Plug ur Biz channel, giving Thugs the platform to promote their business.

• It's not just the networking inside of TThugs, but the partnerships made outside

• Culture Kings: the largest streetwear store in Australia - Exclusive Trillionaire Thugs merch drop

• Jumy: a premium NFT boutique for exclusive digital art / The Matic Studio high-end digital studio - Curated 3 variations of 3D CGI Animated Artworks as NFTs for an airdrop to Holders

• The Grass is Greener Festival (TGIG): music festival doing the first NFT ticketed event to come out of Australasia - 90k Australian worth of NFTs to be distributed to TThug Holder

• Polygon Blockchain

• With more partnerships to be announced…..

Giveaways

• Rewarding long-term holders, exclusive merch and 1 of 1 collectable cards to OG and 60-day holders. Weapon NFT airdrop and tokens to come.

• Airdrops - Jumy/Matic studio NFT in October, three designs for each unique, gold, thug Holders.

• Monthly airdrop giveaways which have included TThug NFTs, raw ETH, other NFTs, Tickets, NFT Whitelist spots and 1-on-1 calls with the founders.

• Giveaway raffles for tickets to major sporting events including international rugby games, NRL games, boxing matches and accommodation.

• The Grass is Greener Festival Partnership - Australasia's first NFT ticketed music festival, $90k in value will be airdropped and distributed to holders.

That being said, there can still be some drawbacks to such a strong and passionate community. Earlier this year Trillionaire Thugs made some rounds of negative publicity after a raid on T-Pains twitch stream resulted in him calling the Thugs’ comments “spam”, and that their marketing technique was off-putting. It's clear that T-Pain didn’t appreciate the full might of the TThug community spamming his comment section. In the immediate aftermath, the TThug Discord voice chat became a place to groupthink an apology. “It’s been a learning experience for us,” was the consensus.

Every man and his computer thinks they can become the next Ethereum billionaire by buying into NFTs early and selling at the peak. The difference here is that Trillionaire Thugs have formed a community that insists on longevity and prides itself on value coming from the community itself. “I have Trillionaire Thugs tattooed on me,” says Fortafy. “It’ll always be a part of me no matter what.”

Conclusion

A big thank you goes out to anybody who made it this far! This has been a more in-depth breakdown than usual, but a project deserving elaboration. In full transparency, the team at Morning NFTea currently holds five Trillionaire Thugs, two of which were from release week back in January. As always, our breakdowns are not sponsored or for promotion. This breakdown serves to consolidate the project for potential investors and to introduce people to the interesting ways NFTs are being used, such as NFT Intellectual Property, Play-To-Earn games, and forging international communities.

We hope you found value in this article, and would greatly appreciate your support towards Morning NFTea as we continue to build an easily-digestible and educational newsletter for the Web3 space.

We will continue to report on TThugs as this project develops, so if you're interested in future updates then hit that Subscribe button below!

Take care Fam!

Here at Morning NFTea, we are building an educational newsletter that brings the most interesting and curated NFT stories straight to your inbox, twice a week. We are doing this because over the next coming decades, we believe NFTs are going to completely revolutionize the world in a way that only a tiny portion of the world currently sees. We are here to share this amazing technology with you through Morning NFTea.

OpenSea: Trillionaire Thugs

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Article Time Stamps

Published: September 25th, 2022 (4pm EST)

TThugs Floor Price: 0.21 ETH

ETH Price: $1,299.56

DISCLAIMER: 

None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.