BasketbAlgo pays TINY to HOOP/ALGO voters in its push for a Tinyman farm slot

2026-08-19

nft · gaming · defi · tinyman · discovery · web · algorand · updated

A Reward Drop, Visible in the Ledger

On the morning of August 16, the Algorand account behind HOOP — the in-game currency of BasketbAlgo, an NFT basketball management game running since 2022 — pushed TINY tokens to more than twenty wallets in a matter of minutes. That same day the project's X account announced the drop in four words: 'TINY rewards sent to HOOP/ALGO Voters!' It was the payoff of a campaign the game has run all summer inside Tinyman, Algorand's main [decentralized exchange](/glossary/decentralized-exchange "A peer-to-peer marketplace built on Algorand where users can trade ASAs directly from their wallets without relying on a centralized intermediary (lik"): get the community to vote for the HOOP/ALGO liquidity pool, then reward those voters out of BasketbAlgo's own pocket. The entire exchange is legible [on-chain](/glossary/on-chain "Describes transactions that are recorded and permanently stored on a blockchain ledger, making them publicly visible and tamper-resistant."), which is exactly the point of building the game where it is built.

BasketbAlgo is a management sim played with NFTs — unique digital items whose ownership is recorded on a blockchain rather than in a company's database. Players collect athlete cards, train them, field a team, and compete for payouts. The site's pitch is 'true digital ownership': the card in your wallet is yours to hold, trade, or put in a lineup. The cards and the currency are Algorand Standard Assets (ASAs), a built-in mechanism that lets anyone issue tokens directly on the chain's base layer — no smart contract required for a simple token, and no issuer standing between two players who want to exchange one. That matters for a game whose prizes are small: a tournament payout on Algorand costs fractions of a cent and finalizes in a single round with no forking, so a 20-HOOP prize can be settled on-chain for less than the cost of the Discord message announcing it. The homepage banner's 'Lightning Fast, Quantum Secure, Low-Cost' is marketing, but the first and third adjectives describe real mechanics.

The Roster: 666 Cards and a Quiet Market

The fixed roster of 666 player cards was minted in September 2022 by a creator working as MetaGrat, a handle the project still tags on X. The set trades on Downbad, an Algorand NFT marketplace where each card carries Overall, Power, and Speed ratings. The current listing describes a compact collector economy: 87 unique owners hold the set (13% of cards), only seven cards are listed for sale, the floor sits at 199 ALGO (about $16), and lifetime marketplace volume is roughly 24,700 ALGO (about $2,000), with a 5% creator royalty on each sale. The set is almost entirely off-market, and the typical owner holds several cards — consistent with a game that asks you to field a team of five.

Gameplay splits between Discord and the web. The Discord side holds the competitive scaffold — five formats, all playable, the site notes, 'even with just 1 player NFT.'

Concept	Real-World Implication
Weekly tournaments	1v1, 3v3 and 5v5 single-elimination brackets; winners and losers both earn HOOP
P2P challenges	Head-to-head matches with HOOP on the line, winner takes all
HOOP Shot	Streak-based 3-point shooting; claim anytime, miss once and the run resets
Ballers Royale	Solo survival, 'only one to survive and claim the crown'
Summer League	Regular season plus playoffs, a calendar that carries the game through the year
Discord access	All modes reachable in Discord with a single card
HOOP Slide	30-second browser puzzle: reach the rim for 2, the 3-point zone for 3
Undisclosed modes	'A surprise mode is brewing...!' and 'Another web game is on the way.'

The web side is newer. HOOP Slide, flagged NEW on the homepage, has its own page: arrow keys or swipes slide the ball around defenders, reaching the rim scores 2, the green 3-point zone scores 3, and a reset button restarts both score and timer. The page tells players to connect a wallet to save a score; the leaderboard's rewards are unspecified. One practical problem sits over the whole Discord offering: the only Discord link on the homepage still points at discord.gg/aFWEhxJNEa, and an invite lookup returns 'invite not found or expired' — the venue where the site says its tournaments are played cannot be reached through the site itself.

The HOOP Economy, Measured

HOOP has a fixed supply of 100 million units at six-decimal precision, created by the address behind the NFD name hoop.algo, which also holds the asset's manager and reserve roles. The on-chain record puts sizes on the site's claims. On Tinyman the listing is verified but thin: about $1,083 of liquidity, $2.92 of volume in the last 24 hours and $42.34 in the last seven days. A second DEX, Pact, lists ten HOOP pools — every one of them with $0 locked. One wallet holds 14.5% of the entire supply; the creator account holds about 1.0%. Whatever the homepage's 'All game income distributed to holders' means, the numbers behind it are small enough that any meaningful trade moves the price.

None of this is dormant. The token's ledger shows transfers as recently as August 19 — a run of 20-HOOP payments to a series of distinct wallets, plus a top-up of roughly 21,700 HOOP into the HOOP-ALGO pool's reserve. The economy is being touched in real time, today.

The Campaign: A Farm Vote, Paid in TINY

The August 16 payout is one piece of a larger mechanism. Tinyman runs a monthly governance vote in which holders of TINY (Tinyman's own token, an [ASA](/glossary/algorand-standard-asset "A built-in mechanism that allows anyone to create and issue new tokens (like stablecoins, utility tokens, or NFTs) directly on Algorand's base layer, ") in its own right) choose which liquidity pools should receive farm rewards — extra TINY paid to the liquidity providers of the winning pools. The pools with the most votes, the top 60, are selected each month, with 80% of rewards distributed by community vote and 20% going to fixed pools; voting opens on the 20th of each month and runs seven days, per Tinyman's docs. A pool that ranks high enough becomes a farm, and the LPs who deposited HOOP and ALGO into it — receiving pool tokens in return — earn from it.

The community tracker for the current cycle (26) shows HOOP/ALGO sitting ninth with about 0.4% of the total vote, behind a field topped by Botsy/ALGO. BasketbAlgo's own sweetener, the TINY it pays to voters, sits on top of whatever farm rewards the pool earns if it makes the cut.

Chart: Tinyman cycle 26 pool votes: HOOP/ALGO's field (millions of votes)

The campaign extends into the wider ecosystem. A July 3 post told holders of Donkey DAO, another long-running Algorand NFT community, to 'grab some HOOP, LP them and get juicy LP rewards from Donkey DAO!' A July 24 post is a single imperative — 'Vote for HOOP/ALGO!' — and MetaGrat himself shares the Tinyman Voting Tracker with the same call. The account also posts its weekly tournament schedule, most recently a July 16 edition, alongside basketball news. By the numbers on X — about 1,060 followers and 1,348 posts since joining in July 2022 — this is a small community, but an organized one.

The Gap Between the Pitch and the Numbers

The caveats are substantial, and one of them cuts against the campaign itself. The team's own account holds roughly 374,000 units of the HOOP-ALGO pool token — making it the pool's largest liquidity provider, a position in the same market it is spending TINY to steer voters toward. That is not misconduct; it is the structure of a project whose revenue, if any, is undisclosed. Every economic promise on the homepage is self-reported: where game income comes from, what the treasury holds, whether anything is audited. 'Active game play since launch' and community voting carry no published user counts to back them. The 2022 launch also predates the current domain, registered only in February 2025 — a gap consistent with a migration, though the site documents none, and its About and HOOP pages resolve to bare titles.

Set against that, the counter-evidence is concrete and current. The ledger shows payouts the same day the X posts announce them. The token moved this morning. A new browser game sits on the homepage, and the community is being organized, week after week, around a single vote. For a 2022-era NFT game on a small chain, that combination — alive, paying out on-chain, and still campaigning for a farm slot — is the story. The economy may be measured in tens of dollars a week, but it has not stopped, and it is paying its players in a way anyone can verify.

Source

Source: https://basketbalgo.com