Points Parlor
Shortly before I joined DeGods, the team had built a time bomb.
At our peak, we were the second largest NFT project in the world. The cheapest DeGod on the market listed for over $20,000. Our total ecosystem, spanning DeGods, y00ts, and $DUST, was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
NFT projects live and die based on one thing: keeping their community engaged and not selling. When people sell, the price drops. When the price drops, more people panic and sell. It's a game of speculation and confidence. So projects are constantly looking for ways to keep their holders holding.
One of the most popular solutions for this is called "staking." The idea is simple: you lock your NFT up on the project's website (you can't sell it while it's staked), and in return the project rewards you for your loyalty.
DeGods was one of the first projects to launch a staking system. Every staked DeGod earned one "DePoint" per minute. But there was no explanation, internally or externally, of what the points would ever become.
It worked, though. Over 75% of the total supply of the collection was locked up. Holders would log in every day just to watch their point totals tick up. The points had no real value yet, but people were treating them like they did, speculating about what the payoff would eventually be. Token rewards? Prizes? Cash? A bigger reveal? The longer the team stayed silent, the more elaborate the theories got.
By the time I arrived, hundreds of millions of points had accumulated and expectations had grown into something dangerous.
Frank came to me directly. You need to help us figure out what to do with these points. That's when I started building Points Parlor.
Success was well-defined: drain the entire ecosystem of points, distribute real value back to holders, and make it something people came back to every day, not a one-time event.
My first instinct was a casino-style loot box game. Spend points, open boxes, win prizes. I put together a few rough pitch decks. The team liked the direction.
Then I got on a call with our lawyers. They flagged it immediately. Loot boxes were a legal minefield. The name alone would invite scrutiny we didn't need.
No loot boxes. Okay, card packs then.
I had our designers start exploring what it could look like.
Then came the math. I needed a game design that would drain the full points supply over a sustained period, not too fast and not too slow, while staying interesting enough that people came back each day.
The structure I landed on: multiple pack tiers with different odds, and a pricing model that escalated the more packs you opened within a single day. Open your first pack, it costs X points. Your second, a little more. Open too many at once and you're paying a premium.
The idea was to reward discipline. Players who paced themselves across days would come out ahead. Impatient ones who burned through everything in one session would get less for their points.
With the mechanics in place, the next question was what people would actually be playing for.
To defuse the speculation that had been building for months, the prizes needed to be genuinely impressive. We started floating ideas: expensive physical prizes, community brand items, stuff people would screenshot and post.
The only question was how to fund it without spending several hundred thousand dollars of our own.
The answer was to treat the game like an advertising machine. If we could build something with thousands of people opening packs and posting results every day for weeks, that was exactly the kind of engaged, crypto-native audience that companies in the space would pay to reach.
I got our business development guys, Bobby and Malcolm, to set up calls with companies across the crypto and NFT world: exchanges, apps, games, other NFT and meme coin projects, anyone who wanted sustained attention from one of the most affluent and engaged audiences in the space.
The pitch was built around a simple concept: weekly skins. Each sponsor would take over the entire visual identity of the game for their week. Custom pack art, branded color palettes, their assets woven into every interaction. It looked like a collab, not an ad.
We signed several sponsors. The anchor deal was with Kraken. They singlehandedly funded the Tesla.
Then came the design.
I was in Figma every day for weeks with Raff and Cubby, our designers. We made countless variations of the game interface.
How the packs looked.
How they opened.
How prizes revealed themselves.
We worked through every edge case: one DeGod or a hundred, multiple wallets, different chains, different point balances across your collection. Then mapped the whole flow on desktop and mobile.
After the design was locked, I wrote the PRD for Anthony, Robin, and Leonard, our engineers, so they could build it. I also prepared a separate summary for the lawyers to formally sign off on.
I also wrote and designed the instruction manual, the one players would actually read. I have always loved old school game manuals. Simple, clear, and to the point.
Tried my best to pay homage.
The last piece was the launch thread. I spent several hours on it.
Most people don't understand how long it takes to write a good tweet thread. Every word, every pixel in every graphic has to be perfect.
After day 1 of Points Parlor, 4,279 DeGods played the game. They opened 54,883 packs and spent 73,679,600 points.
After 90 days, every single point in the ecosystem was spent. $400k worth of prizes were distributed. And we didn't spend a dollar of our own money to do it.
And this guy got a Tesla.
Points Parlor was built by a lot of talented people. It would not have happened without Frank, Raff, Leonard, Anthony, Robin, Cubby, and Bobby.