The Role of Guilds and YGG’s Vision in the Evolving World of Web3 Gaming

1/ In this fireside chat at REDeFiNE TOMORROW 2024, Gabby Dixon @gabusch, CEO & Co-founder of @YieldGuild, discussed the evolving role of guilds in the world of Web3 gaming with Gareth Lai @0xGareth from Impossible Finance @impossiblefi.

2/ Gabby shared his background in the gaming industry for the last 20 years and how he discovered NFTs through CryptoKitties. He also talked about the rise of play-to-earn with Axie Infinity and how it led to the formation of guilds.

3/ Guilds became a way to match people who had NFT assets with those who had the time to play the games. YGG saw this opportunity and decided to scale it by providing technology, platform, and community.

4/ The Web3 gaming space has evolved with more quality titles launching this year. Guilds facilitate socializing, playing together, and doing activities together in Web3, even without the scholarship programs.

5/ YGG built a quest and reputation system during the bear market to highlight opportunities in partner games like Axie, Pixels, and Parallel, and bring their community to them.

6/ The Guild Advancement Program is a community-led questing program where players receive rewards and reputation in the form of soul-bound tokens (SBTs) for completing quests. SBTs serve as a badge of achievement attached to the player's profile.

7/ Gabby sees reputation as one of the keys to solving the problem of distributing rewards in Web3, as it helps identify genuine players and their specializations.

8/ Web3 esports differs from traditional esports by aligning incentives across the entire ecosystem - the game, players, and fans. Token ownership in Web3 helps achieve this alignment, which was harder in Web2.

9/ YGG's partnerships with blockchain protocols like Ronin and Base are aimed at bringing players and promoting quality titles in the ecosystem. Their approach is multi-network, starting with the players' interests and then matching them with content and underlying blockchain networks.

10/ To build long-term commitment, YGG prioritizes bringing communities together, giving them quests to do together, and building reputation. Monetary rewards through tokens come at the end.

11/ YGG ensures players own their data, and attestations live in their wallet. Zero-knowledge attestations reveal user behavior without personal identities, focusing on what's important for the ecosystem.

12/ YGG's new vertical, "Future of Work," explores opportunities for people to earn crypto outside of gaming, such as through data sharing, AI labeling, and other tasks in the growing gig economy.

13/ The ERC-6551 token standard allows NFTs to become containers with their own wallets, enabling new gameplay elements. Projects like Feature Primitive and Parallel Colony are innovating around this concept.

14/ Gabby believes we are in an explosive cambrian stage for Web3 gaming with various attempts at tokenomics and asset ownership. There are many ways to participate, not just through play-to-earn.

15/ YGG teaches essential skills like content creation, community management, and game testing to enable people to contribute their time and skills to the Web3 economy, even without significant financial investments.

16/ Later this year, YGG is releasing "On-Chain Guild," a feature that puts guild identity on-chain, containing a multi-sig, guild badge, and member list. This enables guild-based quests, competitions, and rewards.

17/ YGG's upcoming initiatives include expanding its Guild Advancement Program to feature more games and evolving its platform to combine questing and reward systems from games, blockchains, and YGG itself.