Increasing MAGIC Token Supply by 50%, Pivoting to AI and DePIN: Treasure DAO's Reinvention

Author: Ku Li, TechFlow

Do you still remember Treasure DAO?

If you're a veteran crypto participant, you surely know this name that was repeatedly mentioned during the 2021–2022 gaming and NFT boom. Starting as a derivative of Loot, it quickly built a game and metaverse ecosystem on Arbitrum with MAGIC as the unified currency, once dubbed "Nintendo of Web3" by outsiders. To those who spent their days in Discord and OpenSea back then, names like Bridgeworld, Smolverse, and Legions were certainly familiar.

The early NFT market once contributed substantial trading volume, with the project's token MAGIC reaching a historical high of approximately $6.3 in February 2022.

Hearing about it now, many people's first reaction might be: "Is it still around?"

It is. But it may be seeking alternative paths. On November 4, Treasure released TIP-63 on its governance forum, proposing to establish a strategic growth fund of up to 173 million MAGIC tokens, accounting for roughly 50% of the current max supply (~348 million).

If fully issued, the total MAGIC supply will rise to approximately 521 million tokens (excluding additional staking emissions).This capital will be used to launch an entirely new Treasure DePIN network and drive the project's comprehensive pivot toward AI Agents.

Details of the Token Increase and Milestones

The MAGIC token increase will not be released all at once. According to the original proposal:

• 100 million will be minted to the Treasure Foundation on February 3, 2027, earmarked for network security budgets, institutional partnerships, market making, and development resources.
• The remaining 73 million will be tied to milestones of this newly developed network, with 7.3 million unlocked upon reaching each planned milestone. These advancements include completing audits, the official network launch, nodes reaching a certain scale, actual running AI Agents hitting 10,000, 50,000, and 100,000, and MAGIC staking ratios and token burn volumes meeting requirements.

The timeline is also fairly clear: the discussion period for the above proposal ends on November 18, voting runs from November 18 to December 2, and the network is scheduled to launch on March 3, 2027.

The proposal also authorizes minting 500 Legions Genesis NFTs for the DAO treasury, with 50 allocated to the Foundation for network staking and non-transferable. The network will also introduce additional staking inflation, with target annual inflation rates gradually decreasing from approximately 5% in the first year to 2.5% starting from the fourth year.

The proposal remains in the discussion phase. MAGIC has recently traded around $0.084–$0.085, with a circulating market cap of approximately $28–29 million, representing a drawdown of roughly 98.7% from its all-time high.

Common Paths After Narrative Disproof

In today's crypto industry, narratives being debunked is hardly unusual.

Sectors like gaming chains, metaverses, and custom L1s mostly failed to live up to early expectations amid liquidity retreats and cost pressures. Treasure itself actually walked this path of transformation before:

In 2025, citing operational costs and financial pressures, it shut down its custom chain, Treasure Chain—then publicly disclosed to cost around $450,000 annually—and ended its game publishing business.

Many projects don't end with a "clean exit"; instead, they choose to pivot toward sectors currently carrying higher narrative premiums; AI Agents and DePIN are among them.

Both AI Agents and DePIN remain tracks with high market attention at present. The former emphasizes autonomous agent execution and economic interaction, while the latter focuses on coordinating distributed physical resources.

Treasure's new design attempts to combine both. In simple terms, it aims to build a network capable of continuously running AI entities. NFTs held by ordinary users represent an AI Agent, while nodes are responsible for actually executing these Agents.

Nodes must stake MAGIC and specific NFTs to participate. As long as users continue to pay compute fees for these Agents, the virtual worlds or game states they maintain can persist, even if the original developers have departed. Agents pay stablecoins when using compute resources; a portion of these fees goes to the nodes, while the remainder is used to buy back and burn MAGIC.

The logic behind the proposal is that MAGIC evolves from a "gaming utility token" into a "network token," offsetting the increased supply in the long run through compute fees generated from Agent usage, staking demand, and burn mechanisms.

This essentially involves re-embedding the project into the broader wave of AI infrastructure, becoming a component within it, rather than attempting to independently construct a complete "gaming empire" again.

For such transitions, narrative appeal only explains short-term interest; what truly determines whether a project stays afloat in the AI wave boils down to observable metrics. Details such as the number of Agents, actual paid usage, node activity, fee revenue, and burn volumes are all aspects that need close examination moving forward. Pure narrative pivots no longer have much room for speculation;

After all, the industry has seen too many announcements of "pivoting to AI." Ultimately, only those projects that translate declarations into verifiable on-chain activities can hope to avoid being cast aside by the narrative cycle once again.

Finally, there is one sentence in Treasure's original proposal that reads with a touch of self-reflection:

It believes it hasn't abandoned the original idea from 2021, but merely found the execution layer that was missing back then. This perspective would likely elicit knowing smiles from most crypto readers. Whether it's truly right or wrong may only be judged once the network actually starts running.