Emerging From the Bear Market: Where is Sidus Heroes, the Metaverse Game Platform, Headed?

Introduction

Sidus Heroes is a metaverse game platform. As part of its roadmap, the team plans to launch a variety of sci-fi games, thus constructing the Sidus metaverse. For detailed information about the game content, refer to this article previously published by Gate.io. The team, with many years of Web2 game development experience, is considered one of the few Web3 game teams capable of delivering AAA-quality graphics. Other teams believed to have similar development capabilities include Animoca Brands, Forte, Illuvium, and more.

This article will evaluate the team’s performance during the past two years in the GameFi and NFT bear market. It will also analyze the future direction considering factors such as tokenomics, user scale, and community governance.

Tokenomics

Between December 2021 and January 2022, the peak price of $SIDUS was about 100 times the issue price. The chart below indicates that during this period, early investors and the team were primarily still in the lock-up stage. Over the next two years, during the significant bear market for GameFi and NFT, the coin price continuously decreased. Despite this downturn, the team quietly continued to progress along their roadmap.

Source: Official Website. Tokenomic Diagram: $SIDUS’ Lock-up Ratio

Sidus Heroes has raised at least 20 million US dollars from investment institutions such as Animoca Brands, Polygon, and OKEx Blockdream Ventures. The tokens of these early investors will not be fully unlocked until at least October 2023, and only 30% of the team’s locked tokens have been unlocked. The roadmap has been planned until 2025, indicating that the team is prepared for long-term construction and delivery.

Source: Official Website. Tokenomic Diagram: $SIDUS’ Lock-up Ratio

With the approval of Bitcoin Spot ETF, the cryptocurrency market has begun to show signs of a bull market. The two tokens of Sidus Heroes have also been lifted and adjusted to a certain extent. Riding on this momentum, the Sidus DAO community passed two proposals for burning tokens in November 2023, causing $SIDUS to rise by 3 times and $SENATE token to rise by 25%.

Currently, the price of $SIDUS is around $0.0065, without falling below the IDO sale price of $0.0018; the price of $SENATE is around $0.2, without falling below the IDO sale price of $0.18. In CEX, 20% of the trading volume of these two tokens occurs on Gate.io. It can be seen that market makers and liquidity are mainly on Gate.io, with relatively good depth. However, the governance token $SENATE has over 60% of its trading volume on Uniswap, indicating that the community’s retail investors hold more $SENATE.

The team demonstrated resilience by navigating the bear market over the past two years. They used a proportion of tokens for liquidity (100% to be unlocked in April 2023), collaborated with market makers, and launched NFT staking 1.0 and 2.0 to safeguard the project’s value.

Player Scale

In 2021, during the IDO and NFT sales, some users pointed out a recurring issue with GameFi projects. The design of the mechanism limits user expansion. Typically, the GameFi project party sells a limited number of NFTs, such as the mere 6000 Sidus NFT Heroes. Players must hold NFTs to participate. The project party then sells NFT projects for users to stake or participate in other games. Because participation in the game, Play-to-Earn, and staking for token rewards requires holding NFTs, the number of active players is limited. Official data shows that each game activity involves only 900-2,000 people, which is not surprising given these conditions.

At the peak of the coin price, participating in the game required at least $70, plus the additional ETH Gas Fee. If you wanted to form a team of three legendary NFTs, it could cost up to $45,000. These high costs are a significant reason for the game’s limited user base. Recognizing this issue, the project team launched the real-time strategy game, XENNA, in May 2023. Developed by Sidus Heroes, XENNA is available on the Google Play Store and has been downloaded over 10,000 times.

The Future

The Sidus DAO community holds a significant position within the entire Sidus Metaverse, affecting the future of Sidus Heroes. According to a proposal that took place in December 2023, Sidus Heroes will establish a Sidus Launchpad. Essentially, Sidus Heroes would represent the community to invest in talented independent game teams. There are two key points:

1. The Sidus Launchpad’s investments involve fundraising, utilizing $SIDUS for staking. DAO members with more $SIDUS holdings will receive higher dividends due to level differences. In the short term, this is advantageous for $SIDUS.

2. However, in the long run, as these game teams and their projects diverge from past Sidus metaverse game projects and originate from outside, the proposal explicitly states they are likely to issue their own native tokens and NFT projects, independent of the Sidus Metaverse. Therefore, this is primarily a collaboration and investment activity.

According to the official response from Sidus Heroes on February 16, details regarding which teams will be addressed, whether they have other funding support, and the actual launch time will be announced soon, as depicted in the figure below.

Source: Sidus Heroes Official Discord

Furthermore, it’s worth noting that although it’s $SIDUS instead of the governance token $SENATE that determines the distribution of Launchpad profits, from the voting held in 2023, it can be seen that in the long run, the team still hopes to use dual tokens as a governance + incentive method. This is also how the distribution is done for different game development teams under the Sidus universe.

Proposal to rebalance the game project incentive pools

Conclusion

The recent NFT bear market has prompted GameFi project teams to reduce the emphasis on NFTs in their ecosystems. For example, XAI now refers to NFTs as ‘Keys’ within their Sentry nodes, while Cheelee, with a greater focus on Play-to-Earn, has renamed the NFT section in their app to ‘Play’. Given this, the previous strategy of GameFi projects, which included using NFTs to determine game eligibility, branding, and supporting the game metaverse ecosystem through governance tokens and steady market support, may evolve in the future.