A Reality Check on the TLRPG Economy

The recent decision to lock "free rewards" after the bonus battle pool was introduced was a necessary move to stop players from draining the buyback pool the moment tokens were distributed. It works as an emergency brake, but it doesn’t fix the core issue. I’ll try to break down the main economic risks still present before the Web3 transition makes them harder to deal with.

1. Years of Locked Supply Are a Ticking Sell Pressure

The decision to lock "free rewards" prevented players from draining the buyback pool immediately, but it created a different problem: a growing stock of TLRPG that hasn't been spent or cashed out yet. Every locked token is a deferred exit. When the Web3 transition happens and those tokens become liquid, the market will absorb years of accumulated sell pressure all at once, or in waves if released in tranches. Either way, the supply hitting the market will far outpace any organic demand at the current formula price. Players who waited years to exit are not going to hold through a correction, they'll sell. And releasing in tranches isn't really a solution either, it's just a slower version of the same problem, and frankly it's disrespectful to the people who invested time and money into the game. If the market tanks during distribution, they have no way out and no control over it.

2. The Token Price Has Never Been Confirmed by Real Demand

The starting price of €0.10 was set internally, not by a market. Normally a starting price only becomes legitimate once real buyers are willing to absorb supply at that level. TLRPG's price has been going up through the burn formula before any of that happened. The price looks good on paper but it's never been tested against what people would actually pay for it. When the token hits an external exchange, the market will run its own price discovery, and if there's a big gap between the formula price and real demand, the correction won't be pretty.

3. The Burn Formula Creates Artificial Scarcity, Not Real Scarcity

Real scarcity-driven price growth happens when more people want to buy or hold than sell. TLRPG's price goes up mechanically based on the burn formula, regardless of whether actual demand is growing. So the price reflects how much activity is happening in-game, not whether people genuinely believe in the token's value. Players spending heavily generates burns and pushes the price up, but those same players might have zero intention of holding long-term. A price pushed up by a formula without real demand behind it tends to collapse the moment it meets an open market.

4. The Recirculation Loop Undermines Real Scarcity

Right now TLRPG is mostly bought from the platform and immediately spent on in-game purchases. A portion gets burned, but the rest flows back into the supply pool. The token keeps circulating through the system without ever really leaving it or being accumulated by players who believe in it long-term. This creates the effect of an almost endlessly recirculating supply, because after every purchase the TLRPG returns to the platform minus the burn fee. Without genuine accumulation there's no real holding pressure to support the price when the listing comes.

Proposal: Fix the Foundation Before the Web3 Transition

Introduce a player-to-player marketplace before any external listing. Instead of the platform being the only seller, let players trade TLRPG directly with each other. The platform takes a 5% transaction fee, which also creates natural friction against rapid cash-outs. More importantly, this is the first real price discovery the token would ever have. Whatever price stabilizes in this internal P2P market should be the actual debut price on external exchanges, not a formula output.
Release locked TLRPG into the P2P market, not into the buyback pool. Once the internal market is running, unlocking the locked tokens into a functioning supply/demand environment is far safer than releasing them as sudden cash-out pressure.
Make the burn rate supply-sensitive. The price impact of burning should scale with how much TLRPG is still in circulation. Heavy spending when supply is abundant = minimal price increase. Heavy spending when supply is genuinely scarce = bigger increase. This makes the burn mechanic reflect actual scarcity instead of just activity volume, which is a much more defensible model when people start seriously looking at the tokenomics.

Why This Needs to Happen Now

The Web3 listing is the point of no return. Once TLRPG is on external exchanges, price discovery happens fast and publicly, and a token priced by a formula rather than real demand will get repriced by the market immediately. Institutional investors know markets well, and they won't touch a token with an artificially set price, they're the ones who actually move prices, and they base decisions on real fundamentals. The locked rewards crisis was a warning. The time to fix the structure is now, while there's still room to do it on our own terms.