Blockchain Gaming World: How Guilds Are Helping Build a Human-First Internet
YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon and LongHash co-founder Shi Khai Wei join Jon Jordan on the Blockchain Gaming World podcast to discuss how onchain reputation can take ad networks beyond faceless metrics.
Today, web2 advertisers serve up ads to users with incredible precision and accuracy. This comes at the cost of user privacy; the data that platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Spotify and TikTok train their algorithms on to recommend content to users is the same data sold to advertisers to power their targeted ad campaigns. For most users, everything they do online leaves a trace, and that data is sold to the highest bidder.
In a recent appearance on the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon and LongHash co-founder Shi Khai Wei sat down with host Jon Jordan to discuss the future impact of reputation on web3 gaming guilds, and the internet as a whole. Jon is a gaming veteran who has provided high-level coverage of the industry since 1999 for publications such as Edge and Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra). Since entering the web3 space, he has honed in on web3 gaming trends and news through his post as editor-at-large at BlockchainGamer.biz. He also holds advisory positions at Planet Mojo, Soccerverse, BoomLand, and more.
Supporting the largest gaming community in web3, YGG has always kept its focus on people. “No, we're not making our own game. And no, we don't have our own blockchain. We bring the human layer, the social layer, the group layer onchain,” said Gabby on the podcast. YGG does this through soulbound tokens (SBTs), which enable community members to have an immutable record of their web3 achievements and contributions that can be used to verify their reputation trustlessly.
Through YGG’s usage of SBTs, its community can be targeted by games, guilds and other opportunities where they could be a good fit based on their skills, accomplishments and experience. This is where the term “reputation cookies” stems from; like how advertisers use cookies in web2 to promote products, YGG uses reputation cookies in web3 to promote opportunities and communities.
The following is an excerpt from the episode. Shi Khai reiterates the importance of building toward Vitalik Buterin’s vision of a decentralized society, and how this structure can potentially solve much of web3’s vulnerability to bad actors. Gabby also revisits concepts he first shared with Decentralised.co around YGG’s reputation system, framing YGG and guild systems as human-first advertising platforms.
Listen to the full recording on YouTube.
Blockchain Gaming World: The future of guilds with YGG and LongHash
Shi Khai (28:38): I really want to bring in the idea of a decentralized society. Vitalik has written about this. I feel that there is such a clear cry for help in the industry right now, for reputation, and for decentralized society. So far what we have is some form of pseudonymous privacy. And basically, that comes with a permissionless nature.
But that also invites a lot of short-termism like rugs and Sybil attacks, and it makes the space almost hostile. It's very difficult to play long-term games with long-term people in crypto if you only have what we have right now onchain. You have to follow the offline relationships and Telegram groups. That’s why we’d go to so many conferences and meet people over the years. Because we need to figure out that social reputation in order to have those long-lasting relationships onchain.
Now, if we start to bring a lot of those reputation points, the engagement networks, the cookies onchain, now I can start to build this web of trust. Even without meeting you in person, I’d know — “Hey, you've been through this X number of years, interacted with these protocols, interacted with these people, spent this amount to purchase this kind of asset, right?” And that helps me build up the relationship. It also gives people something to lose. Like, if I do a rug right now, or if I just pump and dump something, I risk losing all of this reputation I’ve built up over the years. We're really pushing this, the balance of all crypto towards a long-term and cooperative mindset.
Jon (30:57): With my VC hat on, I sort of go, “So is YGG an ad network pretending to be a guild?” Maybe we should get rid of some of the guild stuff and just become a social network that's beyond games.
Gabby (32:01): There's something that you touched upon there, “an ad network pretending to be a guild.” I would like to think of ourselves as a very human-centric ad network, someone that actually values the individuals and cares about them, not as a faceless daily active user, but someone who has a reputation, who's part of a group, who likes something, who has certain skills. I think that's what the future of ad networks should be: valuing people for who they are and what they've done.
The problem with web2, in particular, is that they've really reduced humans to faceless metrics. If you're thinking about Facebook or Google, you're only thinking about cohorts, or even whole countries, as an aggregate. A person is basically reduced to, “What's your retention? What's your LTV (Lifetime Value)? What's your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)?”
In web3, what we'd like to do is bring back some of that face: “What have you done? What have you accomplished? What skills do you have?” and then matching that to your interests. So the value exchange is still the same business model as an ad network. You're matching someone who wants to do something with someone who wants to pay for it. That's the guild business model as well. Now, we're grouping people into interests, into skills, into reputation sets, and then bringing that into places where they can use that and where people are willing to pay for it.
You can listen to the full recording on YouTube.
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