PlayDino - In-Game Economy, Tokenomics and Token Presale

Challenge

PlayDino is a Telegram-based game with a player base in the tens of thousands. The game itself existed, but everything around the money did not: no tokenomics, no in-game store, no protection against exploits, and no way for early supporters to buy in. The presale page that did exist rendered badly, carried a long list of bugs, and was not connected to a contract at all, so the button did nothing.

Decision

I took ownership of the whole economic layer: tokenomics and vesting schedules, liquidity controls, the in-game store and IAP, and the anti-fraud and anti-cheat side that keeps all of it honest. The presale was treated as a product of its own rather than a landing-page form, a small dApp that reads live contract state and submits real transactions.

The Build I Inherited

The starting point was the previous developer's version: the stock Chrome dino sprite dropped into a Telegram mini app, with a skin shop, a referral screen and a leaderboard that rendered the game canvas instead of a leaderboard. It ran, but there was nothing in it to come back for. I took the initiative to rewrite it into something presentable and actually worth playing.

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aA🔒t.me/dinorunnebot/

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ММенюШМагазинРРефералыИЗабег

Inherited Telegram mini app - scrollable browser preview

The Freelancer Pass

The next version, the presale landing, was ordered from an Upwork freelancer. I ran that engagement: onboarding, writing the tasks, tracking progress and the retrospective afterwards. What came back was a usable base rather than a finished product, so the decision was to keep improving it rather than ship it as delivered (the debugging pass below is part of that).

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aA🔒playdino.fun/

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DPresale

Presale landing - scrollable browser preview

Implementation

The economy side covers vesting schedules, liquidity controls and anti-fraud safeguards, an in-game store with In-App Purchases, and end-to-end full-stack infrastructure behind it: payment gateway integrations, transaction flows and backend services that carry real-time economic operations. Real-time monitoring and anti-cheat systems detect and block fraud, exploits and abuse automatically instead of waiting on a manual report.

The presale frontend talks to an Ethereum/EVM-compatible smart contract through wagmi and viem: view functions for live state, transactions for the purchase itself. Participants see total raised, the cap, stage timers, progress and their own contribution; they buy with ETH or USDT with exchange rates and fees calculated on the fly, including automatic swaps through liquidity aggregators where the payment currency calls for it. Wallets connect through MetaMask and WalletConnect, and participation is confirmed from contract events surfaced as frontend notifications.

The unglamorous half mattered as much: input validation, contract error handling, gas fee management, transaction status updates, participation history and a layout that holds up on a phone. Alongside the build I ran code reviews, mentored engineers and took part in hiring decisions.

Presale Site Debugging

The early version of the presale site rendered inefficiently and carried a pile of bugs, a broken 3D model among them. This is the debugging pass: the problems were diagnosed and fixed, and the presale form was wired to the blockchain so it actually did what the button promised.

Character Model QA

The character model came back from the developer with defects. The flicker is visible on the second and fourth frames of the loop. The model went back for rework rather than into the build.

Skin Production Line

A brainstorm settled the shape of the skin catalogue: several tiers that differ in both quality and price, so the store has something at every level of commitment rather than one flat list. The skins are voxel models built for the game's own 3D voxel engine, which makes each one a modelling job rather than a texture swap.

Three developers were hired for it and put on a fixed loop: creative brainstorm, then modelling, then debugging, then acceptance. Nothing entered the store without passing the last step (the flickering model above is what a failed acceptance looks like). More than 20 skins came off that line.

Three of them: an entry-tier skin in an early version, a Star Wars skin, and a Mario skin shown twice, before and after its animation pass.

Sticker Pack

The dino cast also shipped as a sticker pack, 19 stickers used to give the game a presence in Telegram chats outside the app itself. Click any of them to open it full size.

Outcome

A working presale with multi-currency support, transparent status tracking and an interface a non-crypto-native player can get through. The economy and anti-cheat systems run under 10,000+ concurrent users, with fraud and exploit attempts caught automatically.