Blockworks Empire Podcast: How YGG Manages the Value It Creates

In this podcast, Gabby Dizon discusses how value is created within YGG.

Empire is a podcast by Blockworks, a financial media brand that delivers breaking news and premium insights about digital assets. Their editorial content, newsletters, podcasts and events provide investors with critical analysis and information about such assets. 

Releasing two episodes each week, the podcast features interviews with top crypto founders to get the real stories that aren’t shared elsewhere. On Mondays, they interview investors and builders of Web3, while on Fridays, podcast hosts Jason Yanowitz and Santiago Roel Santos review top stories and narratives in crypto.

Jason is the co-founder of Blockworks and a board member of Dynamic Communities, a consulting agency that helps people and businesses through content, events and analysis. Santiago is a Web3 investor and occasionally writes articles on different topics for his Substack page, “Obviously.” He is also a former investment banker at J.P. Morgan.

In this episode, co-founder of blockchain and Web3 think tank Salad Ventures, Felix Sim, and YGG co-founder, Gabby Dizon, talk about the future of play-to-earn, gaming guilds and tokenomics. They also discuss how guilds would provide core infrastructure in the evolution of Web3 games.  

The following is an excerpt from the discussion. Listen to the full podcast episode here. 

The Future of Play-To-Earn Gaming | Felix Sim and Gabby Dizon

Jason (17:34): I'm curious, when someone hears “you put value in and you take value out,” how do you manage that balance? Who wins and who loses in these systems? A lot of times, people think in win-lose terms. I tend to think a lot of what is happening with Web3 is win-win. But, curious, is there anyone here that is losing? 

Gabby (17:55): That's a really good question. I think there's also a lot of narrative right now, for example, about scholars being extractors, and honestly, I really hate that narrative. They're assuming that if you're a scholar coming in and you're being provided an asset, you're taking money out and you're not contributing anything to the network. 

I really push back against that narrative because, first of all, I think most of the really good guilds — and you can see this from the focus of Salad as well — are into education. Most of the people that you see are coming in, they're educating people, not just to play Axie and take money out. They’re using crypto, Web3, owning their own assets. That's the basics of personal finance.

Some of the best people that are working in our guild started out as a scholar. We're doing mass education on Web3 and I think that's something that Felix and I can both agree on. And of course, if you have a virtual economy, there needs to be more money coming in and coming out. I think this is the field and tokenomics in play-to-earn that is still evolving with the SLP model and the volatility. 

What most people don't really understand about the volatility of reward tokens is that there is always going to be an order of magnitude, more trading volume on the token on the speculation side, rather than what your game economy can take. That's just the fact of crypto. No matter how well designed your game economy is, there's going to be more volume on your token if you do your job well. 

Take a look at SLP for example — you can probably only take so much, maybe a few million dollars per day volume on breeding, but there's a $150 million a day trading. And that’s just a fact of crypto. So now there's a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing, “Who's extracting money?” but it's actually all just tokenomics to me, in the same way that DeFi tokenomics are changing. And of course games have to be fun — you have  to put more money in and take more money out. But we are learning tokenomics that are going to evolve over time, and with every new game that comes along, we're actually seeing this improve bit by bit. 

You can listen to the full discussion on Spotify. 

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