Binance recently announced Hooked Protocol ($HOOK) token sale on its launchpad.
Hooked Protocol claims to be “the on-ramp layer for massive Web3 adoption to form the ecosystem of future community-owned economies”.
Its first app, Wild Cash, allegedly has achieved 50K DAU and 3M MAU, on top of the Google Play leaderboard in Indonesia. But compared to the previous X2E project STEPN, everything seems rushed to be shipped, with a lot of information undisclosed and unclear.
Hooked Protocol adopts a triple-currency design similar in Web2 games, where $HGT (Gold) is the tertiary token, $uHGT is the secondary token, $HOOK is the primary/governance token.
Similar to STEPN, $HOOK’s launchpad price $0.1 is close to the private sale prices $0.06 – $0.12. The initial circulating supply will be 10% (50M). In 1 year, the circulating supply will increase to 22.33%, which means ~5M/month token release speed in the first 12 months.
Given the low price and circulation at the beginning, we can at least expect short-term upward momentum. As for the long term, it is hard to predict since we currently have little to no information on the protocol revenue model, burning, token conversion and other mechanisms.
Its utility token $uHGT, can be converted to $HOOK but the conversion mechanism is currently unknown. In-game currency $HGT, can be converted to $uHGT at 1:1 rate currently, once the user’s $HGT balance reaches 800K.
The price movement of $uHGT can be tracked on PancakeSwap (need Hooked Protocol confirmation): DEXTools
$uHGT token contract (need Hooked Protocol confirmation)
The $uHGT current supply is ~46B with the token price at ~$0.00000068, which means the current market cap of $uHGT is ~$30K.
One other interesting thing is this address, which seems to periodically buy $uHGT and send them to the black hole address which we are not sure why. $uHGT burning?
Assuming a daily reward of 30K $HGT, the user can accumulate 800K balance in ~27 days. Users can increase their rewards by participating in mining and referral programs. Users can get 800K instantly if they can invite 155 friends (30K for the first referral and 5K after).
800K is only ~$0.5, but free money is free money right? Plug in the 3M MAU, we can estimate the protocol is giving away ~$1.5M per month at least.
This may explain the sudden, exponential growth of Wild Cash. The problem is the lack of token sinks. So far there is only mining rig upgrade which consumes $HGT.
Besides, it is not very clear to us how the protocol generates revenue. With more information coming, we might have a clear picture soon.
Users can also swap their $HGT for $BUSD and stake them for an estimated 20% APY. Last time we staked stablecoins for a 20% APY was with, ugh, $UST.
Wild Cash is pretty wild, are you Hooked?