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Today on Lightspeed, we’re looking at how you can kickstart your own drug empire. By that, I mean earning WEED tokens in the viral Addicted.fun game on Solana.

Inside ‘Addicted,’ Solana’s latest P2E game

In his bestseller book On The Edge, prediction analyst Nate Silver wrote about the unsettling psychology behind slot machines.

The algorithms of slot machines are designed such that gamblers are guided on a “smooth ride to zero” so you don’t notice you’re losing as you get there.

You pull the lever a hundred times at $1 a spin. Every so often, you win $95.

“Aha, I’m getting the hang of it!,” thinks the slot player. 

But said player is already $5 in the hole. Until they’re thousands of dollars in the red.

Crypto’s play-to-earn games follow a similar psychology.

Consider Addicted.fun, a cannabis growing game that’s been buzzing on Solana. 

The loop is simple:

1. Pay an upfront 0.5 SOL fee to start.

2. Your goal: Earn WEED tokens (which you can later sell).

3. To earn WEED emissions, you must raise your marijuana farm’s “Grow Power.”

4. Raising “Grow Power” takes WEED tokens, so you need to spend money to buy loot boxes.

5. The player with the most WEED gets the most Grow Power, and earns the most WEED emissions.

Early players get a head start when the token is cheap and competition is light. Latecomers are essentially schmucks: They chase a token reward that’s increasingly diluted, harder to win and more prone to selloffs.

You can see that realization in price action: WEED’s market cap slid to about $3.2 million from $80 million earlier this month.

Addicted is not that much different from the play-to-earn games of yesteryear, such as Axie Infinity. 

I say games, but anyone who’s been in crypto for a while knows these are really speculative financial products wrapped in pseudo-gameplay. The more interesting question isn’t whether these are “real” games, but why they keep working.

Part of the answer is that losses don’t feel like losses, at least not initially. 

Watching your WEED counter tick up feels like “productivity,” similar to the slot player who revels in the occasional jackpot.

The true P&L only crystallizes later, when players start abandoning their weed farms and the token bleeds.

“I’m still earning WEED,” the remaining players tell themselves — right as they gently begin that “smooth ride to zero.”

Play-to-earn games excel at quietly deferring the math of negative expectancy beneath a drip of regular token rewards to keep the dopamine following.

Far from being dead, play-to-earn games will probably never go away. If you’re going to engage, you should probably treat them like the financial products that they are and ask one question upfront: What happens when the next player stops joining?

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Katana was built by answering a core question: What if a chain contributed revenue back into the ecosystem to drive growth and yield?

We direct revenue back to DeFi participants for consistently higher yields.

Katana is pioneering concepts like Productive TVL (the portion of assets are actually doing work), Chain Owned Liquidity (permanent liquidity owned by Katana to maintain stability), and VaultBridge (putting bridged assets to work generating extra yield for active participants).

SOL ETF inflows:

The REX-Osprey SOL ETF saw a record high in daily inflows yesterday at $27 million.