The pseudonymous founder of onchain trading card platform Fantasy.top, who goes by "Travis Bickle," is pushing back against allegations from early angel investors who claim the team stopped communicating and refused to process refunds. The dispute centers on an unexecuted token generation event and a platform whose revenue has declined more than 90% from its peak in May 2024.

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What Happened

Angel investors who backed Fantasy.top's $600,000 pre-seed round are publicly labeling the situation a "soft rugpull," a term used by blockchain security researchers, including analysts at CertiK, to describe projects that do not conduct an outright exit scam but instead quietly wind down their commitments to investors while the project technically continues to operate. The Block first reported the dispute on March 11, 2026. Travis Bickle has disputed that characterization, though the full text of the founder's response was not publicly available at the time of publication.

The investors who put in early money include Santiago Roel Santos, formerly of ParaFi Capital and now running EON Capital and Roca Capital; Bryan Pellegrino, the CEO of LayerZero Labs; the NFT figures known separately as money (also referred to as dingaling) and gmoney; and Ryan Selkis, founder of Messari. Institutional backers in that round included Alliance DAO, Manifold Trading, and Fabric Ventures.

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Background: A Fast Rise and a Faster Fall

Fantasy.top launched on the Blast network on May 1, 2024, turning crypto influencer culture into a fantasy sports game. Users bought NFT cards representing roughly 250 prominent accounts on X (formerly Twitter), including Three Arrows Capital co-founder Su Zhu and NFT personality Frank DeGods. Card scores tracked the real-world engagement those influencers generated online. Featured influencers received a 1.5% commission on card trading volume and 10% of pack sale revenue, giving them a financial reason to promote the platform. That financial incentive also created conditions in which some users actively gamed influencer engagement metrics, complicating the platform's reliance on organic activity tracking.

The launch generated extraordinary early interest. Before mainnet went live, more than 18,000 wallets deposited over $56 million into the protocol. By May 2024, the platform was generating $924,000 in daily protocol fees and briefly ranked among the top ten crypto protocols by revenue globally, with $10.6 million in total fees generated through its peak period.

The numbers deteriorated quickly after that initial surge. By June 2025, monthly revenue had fallen to approximately $200,000, a decline of roughly 93% from peak levels according to available reporting from DL News and Brave New Coin, though the precise figure depends on how peak monthly revenue is defined against total cumulative fees. Active users declined from a high of around 21,500 to roughly 2,000. The collapse was not unique to Fantasy.top; sector-wide SocialFi deposits fell from a peak of $53 million to $16 million over the same period, following a pattern already seen with friend.tech and Stars Arena.

In December 2024, Dragonfly Capital led a $4.25 million seed round intended to fund a V2 update and AI integrations, with Manifold Ventures participating. That round came after a sharp decline in user activity and revenue that was already well underway, meaning sophisticated institutional capital was deployed into a platform already in measurable contraction. The team then migrated from Blast to Coinbase's Base Layer-2 network on July 15, 2025, citing lower transaction fees, access to a broader user base, and access to the Coinbase ecosystem as part of the strategic rationale. The team also launched a V3 redesign with an overhauled interface and rebuilt backend. No on-chain data or public reporting reviewed for this article documented a meaningful recovery in user activity or revenue following either move, with the caveat that DefiLlama data was not fully retrievable at the time of compilation.

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The Core of the Dispute: The FAN Token

Central to the investor complaints is a token called FAN. Users accumulated FAN points through gameplay, with the understanding that a token generation event would eventually convert those points into a tradable asset. As of March 2026, no FAN token has launched. For angel investors, token allocations at a discount are often one of the primary mechanisms for generating returns from early-stage crypto projects, alongside equity stakes, revenue shares, and SAFE instruments. Without a TGE, those allocations remain unrealized and currently illiquid.

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Why This Matters Outside the United States

The impact of this dispute extends beyond the named investors. India and Pakistan have emerged as two of the fastest-growing markets for SocialFi and GameFi participation. Users in those regions who accumulated FAN points through paid gameplay now hold illiquid assets with no clear redemption path. In economies where local currency inflation makes crypto earnings significant as supplemental income, an unexecuted TGE carries real financial weight.

In Africa, particularly Nigeria and South Africa, where GameFi platforms have attracted users as income supplements in tight labor markets, this outcome echoes earlier collapses like Axie Infinity in 2022 and friend.tech afterward. The Middle East and Africa region accounts for an estimated 5 to 10 percent of global SocialFi activity, which means trust damage from cases like this significantly impacts early adopters in high-growth markets.

A structural problem compounds the situation. Investors in regions including India, Nigeria, or South Africa who backed Fantasy.top through informal agreements or simple SAFE notes have almost no legal recourse if a pseudonymous founding team becomes unresponsive. Web3 projects with pseudonymous founders and globally distributed user bases operate without the kind of regulatory framework that would compel team communication or honor refund obligations, regardless of where those projects may be formally registered.

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What Comes Next

Fantasy.top still exists and its V3 platform remains accessible. Angel investors have publicly called for refunds and for the team to resume communication, though the team's specific response to those requests remains unclear. Without a FAN token launch or a credible recovery in user activity, this publication's assessment is that the gap between the team and its early backers is likely to widen.

The dispute serves as a concrete example of the risks attached to investing in pseudonymous projects where token allocations, frequently the central return mechanism for early backers, exist only as future promises and typically carry limited formal enforcement mechanisms. That structural reality is especially consequential for retail participants in emerging markets who lack the legal resources and institutional standing that the named angel investors in this deal possess.