Author: Zen, PANews
On the evening of March 31, the GUN token linked to the popular battle royale game "Off the Grid" was officially launched. As the core asset of the GUNZ blockchain under its developer Gunzilla Games, the GUN token caused a frenzy in the Binance Launchpool event, attracting more than 1.7 million participants, with a total staking amount of up to US$15.8 billion, a record high in nearly seven months.
This phenomenon not only made the market shout the slogan of blockchain game revival again, but also made GUN one of the most watched new coins in recent times. After the token was officially launched, GUN rose to $0.115, but began to fall after reaching its peak. According to Coingecko data, as of 6 pm on April 1, its token price was about $0.076.
Off the Grid is still not scheduled to be launched on the mainnet
Along with the GUN token, the GUNZ mainnet was quietly launched. However, the official did not make a big publicity for the launch of the mainnet, and the content published and reposted by its official X account were all related to GUN tokens. When you open the GUNZ Main Explorer , you will find that this is a "ghost chain" that seems to have little activity. This may be the reason why the official did not give too much exposure to the mainnet - the flagship game "Off the Grid" has not yet officially launched on the GUNZ mainnet.
Currently, players of Off the Grid are still interacting with the GUNZ testnet, and Off the Grid on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox has not yet switched from the testnet to the mainnet. As of April 1, more than 14.7 million wallets have been generated on the GUNZ testnet, with a total transaction volume of 490 million and a daily transaction volume of 2.5 million, which is basically between 2 million and 3 million.
In addition, the number of daily active users of Off the Grid is about 500,000, which is significantly lower than the peak of 900,000 reached when the game was first released, but it is already very rare in the context of the general downturn in the blockchain game industry. The unprecedented popularity at the time was mainly due to the fact that the game developer Gunzilla invited a group of well-known game anchors led by Ninja to promote Off the Grid.
There is no detailed information about the official launch time of Off the Grid. According to crypto media Decrypt, on March 31, in the GUNZ Discord server, Gunzilla Games' Web3 director Theodore Agranat told players that "we will now start migrating the game to the mainnet", but did not specify the estimated arrival time of the migration.
In addition, in an interview with the game media GamesBeat, Agranat also said that currently only 20% of "Off the Grid" is online, and it is only an early version. "We are very satisfied with our current performance in terms of entry, which has allowed our user base to grow steadily. With each update, our retention rate and conversion rate will increase," Agranat added.
GUN or “Super VC Coin”?
Gunzilla Games has so far raised two rounds of funding totaling US$76 million from investors including Republic Capital, Griffin Gaming Partners, Animoca Brands, Jump Crypto, Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund, and CoinFund.
In the last cycle, such star projects favored by VCs were easily popular among the public, but now they are often dubbed "VC coins" by the community. The native token GUN of the L1 public chain GUNZ is also facing such "interrogation". In particular, its initial circulation is only 6.05%, while the FDV is more than 740 million US dollars, which is a typical "high market value, low circulation".
According to the official white paper, the total amount of GUN tokens is fixed at 10 billion and distributed as follows:
- Private placement (37.8%): 3.78 billion GUN were sold to GUNZ partners through SAFT agreements between 2021 and 2024, divided into four pools:
- Private Equity Round A: 1.25 billion GUN (12.5%)
- Private placement round B: 2 billion GUN (20%)
- Strategic round: 500 million GUN (5%)
- KOL Round: 300 million GUN (0.3%) - allocated to top Web3 KOLs who support the project
- Funding (13%): 1.3 billion GUN for ecosystem development, partnerships, infrastructure development, and unforeseen operational needs
- Community Incentives (4%): 400 million GUN, allocated to early adopters, active community members, and TGE (Token Generation Event) promotions
- Liquidity pool (3%): 300 million GUN, used to maintain GUN liquidity in centralized and decentralized exchanges to ensure smooth transactions
- NFT Validator Staking (5.1%): 510.5 million GUN, locked in validator NFTs, used to mint in-game assets over time, reducing the circulating supply
- GUNZ Foundation (9%): 900 million GUN, allocated to the GUNZ Foundation to fund ecosystem expansion, governance, and infrastructure development
- Founders and Team (12.8%): 1.2805 billion GUN, reserved for the founding team and core contributors, and incentivized for long-term success according to the vesting plan
- Advisors (5.29%): 529 million GUN, distributed to technical advisory teams conducting blockchain research and development to enhance the GUNZ ecosystem
- Platform Rewards (10%): 1 billion GUN to incentivize gameplay, competitions, and in-game economic activities to ensure a vibrant player-driven economy
According to the token economics, the number of GUN tokens held by VCs and project teams will exceed 50%, and its private placement ratio is the highest among the projects recently launched on Binance. In addition, according to the GUNZ project report released by Binance on March 31, 2% of the total supply of GUN (i.e. 200 million) was allocated for liquidity/market making. The report also specifically noted: "The tokens have not yet been distributed to market makers, and additional address information will be provided later."
However, on-chain analyst @ai_9684xtpa detected that the suspected GUN market maker address had undergone a large-scale transfer at 3 a.m. on March 31, totaling 191 million tokens. Not only that, from the early morning of April 1 to 8 a.m., the token continued to carry out high-frequency small-amount sell orders, with an average of about 10 transactions per second, each transaction amounting to about $6, equivalent to selling about $216,000 worth of tokens per hour. The analyst later added that the above situation may also be that a large user who participated in Launchpool set up a robot to automatically sell coins. According to calculations, if the large user triggers the BNB reward pool hard cap and mines for 3 days, he can indeed get the corresponding 32 million tokens.
What are the uses of $gun that is not airdropped to players?
"We launched a game and mainstream players commented that they only played Off the Grid. So we thought the right thing to do was to develop enough games to be listed on Binance, the world's leading exchange with 250 million users." Theodore Agranat said that they believe they have launched the largest Web3 game project ever and the largest Web3 AAA game ecosystem.
Whether Web3 games are the largest in scale may still be a matter of discussion, but GUNZ’s incentives for players are definitely the most unique - players did not receive token airdrop rewards. With the official launch of $GUN tokens, Gunzilla will destroy the testnet tokens, but players’ minted weapons, prosthetics and other items will be migrated from the testnet to the mainnet, and players will eventually be able to take the items out of the game and sell them on OpenSea.
In terms of token utility, $GUN will be used to access the GUNZ platform, which provides blockchain-native infrastructure for game developers, as well as to purchase in-game items from the in-game marketplace, pay for custom items, and consumables. In the future, Gunzilla plans to add other games and projects to the ecosystem, and the utility of the GUNZ ecosystem and its tokens may also grow accordingly.
"Our goal is to provide the best, most immersive, most engaging gaming experience." Agranat said their real goal is to provide entertainment to players and they don't intend to try to change anyone. "What we're trying to do is, we're trying to say, 'This is better. We're creating something. This is how you own your assets.' Now, if you want to understand how to set up a wallet and actually own your assets, self-custody, you can. Even if the service is shut down, you can keep it, and then you can sell it on OpenSea. But it's still about how we provide the best gaming experience, and we use Web3 tools to provide players with a better experience."
