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A protocol called Fake World Assets became the second-highest-earning application on Ethereum in late July. It was built by two developers. The TL/DR is: It’s Gacha without a physical asset to redeem.

Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

1) What is FWA? 🎰

2) How it Works 🔧

3) The Data 📈

4) Cards, or Anything? 🃏

FWA stands for Fake World Assets.

The name is a wind-up of 'real world assets', the label tokenised collectibles platforms use for the Pokémon and sports cards sitting in their vaults.

It’s a sub industry that Sporting Crypto has covered in depth. Courtyard, Collector Crypt, Phygitals and Fanatics have built a real economy selling randomised packs of vaulted, graded cards, with the NFT acting as the digital receipt for a physical collectible in a warehouse.

FWA uses the same mechanic, creating a gacha experience native to Ethereum.

For the uninitiated, Gacha is the Japanese capsule-toy mechanic that went on to power most of mobile gaming in Asia. You pay a fixed price, you receive one randomly selected prize from a pool, and the fun is in not knowing which one. Here the prizes are NFTs, the randomness comes onchain from Chainlink VRF (Verifiable Random Function), and their docs describe the whole thing as "an onchain, randomized NFT acquisition protocol".

It launched on 3 July 2026, built by Token Works, a self-funded two-developer team who go by Adam and Teto, and relaunched on new contracts on 20 July. Within about a week of the original launch, the FWA token rose from a market cap of roughly $475,000 to $38.8 million, per Odaily.

It arrives in a period of depression for the crypto market, and near non-existence of an NFT market. Blue chip NFT collections trade at a fraction of their 2021 peaks, with NFT sales totalling $5.6 billion for the whole of 2025, and monthly volumes have been ~$300 million in 2026.

The pool has two sides.

Depositors supply the prizes. They list NFTs into the pool, each paired with an amount of ETH backing. That backing does two jobs. It sets the odds of the NFT being drawn, and it funds what the FWA call an "irrevocable standing bid", an offer to buy the NFT back at 85% of its backing that the depositor cannot withdraw.

‘Pullers’ pay the acquisition price for one random draw. The price is the expected value of the pool plus a 5% surcharge, with the Chainlink VRF fee charged separately. The odds run inverse to the backing, so you are far more likely to pull a lightly backed NFT than the CryptoPunk.

By late July 2026, the pool held more than 1,500 NFTs, CryptoPunks included, per The Defiant.

And when you pull something you don't want, you sell it straight back for 85% of its ETH backing, instantly. You keep the NFT or you take the ETH. The 15% spread and the surcharge get split between depositors, the protocol and rewards.

There are guardrails. Buyers can set a maximum price and slippage bounds before they draw, and any overpayment refunds automatically.

Most people take the money. Per Odaily, 82.3% of early pulls were sold straight back.

There is also, of course, a token. $FWA could not be bought on the open market at launch; indeed, the most interesting aspect of the $FWA protocol token is that it cannot be bought directly (per Odaily). To acquire this token, you must genuinely play the NFT gacha machine.

Token Works calls it loss-to-earn. You lose the pull and get paid in the house's token. The memetic energy is clearly strong with this project.

And the depositors are the house. Every acquisition fee pays them a share. One CryptoPunk sits in the pool backed by 276 ETH, and per Odaily it earned its depositor 12.7 ETH in fees in just over a day, without ever being drawn. With around 74,000 draws made at that point, the odds of anyone pulling it were tiny. If someone does pull it, they either keep the Punk, and the depositor loses it, or they take the 85% exit and the depositor gets the Punk back.

In the first four days after the relaunch, FWA saw roughly 2,000 ETH ($2m) of volume across 90,000 transactions, including around 35,000 pulls, per Crypto Briefing.

Fees hit $152,000 on 21 July, $369,000 the next day, then $536,000, then $1.11 million, and a peak of $1.63 million on 25 July, per DefiLlama.

Protocol revenue that day hit $447,604, which briefly flipped Collector Crypt, the Solana platform that has led crypto gacha since late 2024 and recently crossed $1 billion in lifetime volume. Their CEO Tuom Holmberg came on the podcast in July 2026, when they hit $100 million in weekly volumes. Collector Crypt have accumulated $64.6 million in fees since launching in late 2024, per DefiLlama.

By 28 July, The Defiant had FWA as the second highest-earning application on Ethereum, with $167,869 in daily revenue. That put it behind only Sky, the rebranded MakerDAO, at $464,303, and ahead of Aave, Uniswap and Lido.

A month in, cumulative fees have passed $8.6 million. A caveat on that number. DefiLlama counts fees, which for FWA include the depositors' share, so it sits closer to a casino's hold than it does to revenue. The protocol's own cut is around $1.9 million.

Typically, the tokenised colletibles companies we’ve covered on Sporting Crypto have had RWAs (physicals) behind the inventory in these digital packs.

Courtyard sell randomised packs of vaulted Pokémon cards. Collector Crypt do the same on Solana. Beezie run gacha claw machines for vaulted collectibles. Fanatics Collect tapped Phygitals for onchain packs.

Panini, on the other hand, do have digital-only NFT packs - but they are not repacks; rather, they are primary IP. I covered their $10m sales month in last week's newsletter.

The story the tokenised collectibles platforms tell is about the cards or the physical inventory being sold. Provenance, grails, vault operations, the collector who wants the physical thing shipped.

Courtyard peaked at $78.4 million in a single month last August, with the tokenised collectibles sector hitting $114.5 million at its top, and weekly trading card revenue across Courtyard, Collector Crypt, Emporium and Phygitals reached $7.5 million earlier this year, up 200% year on year. This year the platforms have driven $115 million in fees between them, with the monthly total rising from $8.6 million in January to $23.7 million in June.

July 2026’s fee numbers are consistent with that. The card platforms' combined fees fell to $15.2 million in July from $23.7 million in June.

So I have been asking myself whether the cards were ever the point. What drives the demand, and what is the moat?

The gamified experience of not knowing what you’re getting for your spin, roll or rip is clearly a consumer behaviour that is trending one way.

There’s a lot made of millenials or genz having short attention spans and needing a constant drip of gratification via the means of scrolling any social platform. But gatcha experiences have created something weird and funky. The gamification (or gamblification) of unknown gratification.

With all that in mind, Building Courtyard's PSA relationships, seller network, vault operations takes years and many resources.

But on these platforms, there is a throughline. Most pulls sell straight back on every gacha platform, backed or unbacked by physical assets. Beezie's CEO Andrea Miele told me on the Sporting Crypto podcast that the buyback is the business.

Instinctively, my first thought when I saw FWA catch fire was that it would take share from the tokenised collectibles platforms the way prediction markets took share from memecoins and crypto spot trading. I don't quite know if that analogy holds true, but prediction markets and memecoins share the same wallets and the same risk appetite, hence the reallocation of volume.

Indeed, I’m sure some of the card tokenised collectibles' platforms' growth has come from people who have never held crypto, and FWA cannot onboard them. But the overlap is the crypto-native audience, whilst marginal, could be a high-velocity, deep-pocketed slice of card platform volume, and that is probably what FWA competes for. And that slice might be people who are much more willing to spin $10k on the machine than your average collector. So thin or not as a number of wallets, it will be interesting to see if there is any volume drain here into this weird, funky new protocol.

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