DigiDaigaku: Not So “Free to Own”

During the month of August, a project has been on everyone’s lips: DigiDaigaku, let’s take a look at this project.

From ‘Free to Play’ to ‘Play to Earn’ to ‘Free to Own’

Nowadays, to play a video game, there are several possible options. The first and most classic is to buy the game to be able to play it. Another model soon appeared, the ‘free to play’ (F2P) model that allows you to play the game for free with theoretically the possibility of finishing it. It is true that free to play games are free, but many in-game purchases are practically necessary to upgrade your character, unlock missions or buy bonuses, etc.

Since 2018, a term has gained popularity to designate games that allow you to win NFTs or cryptocurrencies: ‘Play to Earn’. After the collapse of the cryptocurrency market at that time, great public disinterest followed. But users who patiently endured the pain were eventually rewarded with generous gifts from Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, Decentraland, and Gods Unchained.

‘Play to Earn’ later became a marketing pitch for many concepts: ‘Play and Earn’, ‘Move and Earn’, ‘Own and Earn’ and today DidiDaigaku offers ‘Free to Own’.

What do we own with DigiDaigaku?

It’s hard to know because there is very little information available about the project to date. With no roadmap announced and no Whitepaper available, to find out about the stages of the project, you have to rely on CEO Gabriel Leydon’s Twitter account.

‘Free to Own’ is the main concept of DigiDaigaku. Given the dazzling collection, this concept deserves our attention. ‘True ownership’ being a strong Web3 principle, what do you really have when you buy an NFT from DigiDaigaku?

First of all, based on the general terms and conditions, it seems that the owner of the NFT does not have many rights to reuse the work contained in the token. Additionally, the .json file is hosted centrally on your server.

It’s normal to want to adjust settings on the fly for video game assets. But in the strict sense of “actual possession”, it seems that the buyer here does not own much.

Analysis of DigiDaigaku’s Free Mentholization

The most important marketing point of this project is that it is free! An undeniable fact: mentholization was free. Only the mentholization was ‘stealth’. This means that a limited number of people were aware that it was coming. Let’s delve deeper into this mentholization through an analysis of NFT hard data.

On August 9, Gabriel Leydon announced that DigiDaigaku mentholization was open. The ad was later picked up by Limit Break. With a mentholization limit of 1 NFT per wallet, we counted 1,926 unique wallets that were able to participate in this mentholization. Remember that a wallet does not represent a real user. Please note the following:

The contract deployer mined 97 (asset ID #3 to #99).
The first two NFTs were mined by two unique wallets. These two NFTs were transferred to the deployer after being mined.
After the first 100 NFTs, mentholization lasted 13 minutes before ending. Sales skyrocketed and within an hour the sales price stabilized around $1000 until the end of the day. Although mentholization was free, the least that can be said is that it was not fair to everyone. Additionally, access to the project quickly became unattainable for users with lower budgets.
Analysis of DigiDaigaku Miners

Given the speed with which the collection was mined and its stealthy nature, it may be interesting to delve deeper into the wallets that participated in this event. Taking the number of sales per wallet as the main indicator, here is a summary table of its performance.

For this analysis, we considered data from August 9, 2022 to September 4, 2022. Sales that took place on Sudoswap were identified as transfers, so sales that took place on that exchange were not taken into account.

Of the 930 addresses that did not make sales, 776 only had the interaction of sending their NFT to another address. It was also this group that made the most purchases (81) for a total of $165,578.

The 879 addresses that made 1 sale generated $1,165,340 in volume with an average price of $1,325. We identified 11 purchases for an average of $65.82. The detail is shown in the table above, but addresses with more than two sales represent 515 sales for a total of $1,605,701.

DigiDaigaku NFT Activity

As for the assets themselves, let’s take a closer look at their activities. Sales were separated from transfers, with the exception that sales that were made on Sudoswap were counted as transfers.

DigiDaigaku #826 has sold 10 times and has 12 transfers. Other assets also have a significant number of transfers:

#1730 has been transferred 20 times for 2 sales.
#626, 19 times for 3 sales.
#216, 18 times for 4 sales.
#308, 17 times a sale.
These few NFTs show abnormally high activity compared to other NFT transfers. NFTs transferred 1 to 5 times represent 4,114 transfers or 89% of total transfers.
Conclusions from the DigiDaigaku Analysis

What can we conclude from this data? Our first analysis of DigiDaigaku mentholization published on social media last week highlighted the profits generated by the different buyers of this collection. However, the USD indicator alone can be misleading and after a month of DigiDaigaku mentholization, we found it necessary to be more precise about this collection.

Although mentholization was free, its stealth aspect, which is reserved for a small group of individuals, calls into question its supposed accessibility. Despite the August 9 entry price of more than $12,000, the utility of the DigiDaigaku Genesis is still not shown on the project’s website.

Therefore, it is difficult to continue talking about free. In light of the collector’s license that is very restrictive and greedy in its data collection, it is difficult to know what anyone really owns..!

With no real utility and a team still being formed, it seems the interpretation of the ‘Free to Own’ model is the subject of heavy speculation. Gabriel Leydon explained the possibilities offered by the airdrop received (the Spirits), but it will surely be necessary to have a lot of patience before being able to fully test the promised adventure game.

This is a project that has exhibited the importance of analyzing data to get a complete picture of your current and past behavior and your true community.