BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast: The Yin and Yang of AI and Crypto
Gabby joins Jeremy Au to discuss how crypto contributes to establishing verifiable digital scarcity in a future populated by AI-generated content.
The BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech podcast is SEA’s leading startup and venture capital podcast with over 50,000 listeners. The podcast features weekly debates about startup news and interviews with Southeast Asia's best tech leaders, which include Shiyan Koh, Managing Partner of Hustle Fund, Maria Li, COO of Tech in Asia, and Nir Eyal, best-selling author of “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.”
Serving as the podcast host is Jeremy Au, VC and Chief of Staff at Monk’s Hill Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in early-stage tech companies, primarily Series A, in Southeast Asia. Prior to Monk’s Hill Ventures, Jeremy was CEO and co-founder of CozyKin, a VC-backed ed-tech startup, which was acquired by Higher Ground Education and scaled across multiple cities in North America.
In this episode of the BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech podcast, Jeremy is joined by YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon, who shares how his childhood passion for games led to him developing the first Filipino-made PC game, Anito: Defend a Land Enraged, and later founding Altitude Games in 2014. He also talks about how his curiosity for creating virtual economies, stumbling upon CryptoKitties, and developing his blockchain game, Battle Racers, led to him meeting his co-founders Beryl Li and Owl of Moistness online.
In the following excerpt, Gabby outlines how YGG’s strategy evolved from being an asset lender to a more comprehensive platform that integrates quests, achievements and real-world applications like credentials. He also emphasizes how the growth of AI-generated content online has underscored the need for ensuring proper attribution, copyright, royalties and value distribution in the creation of content.
Watch the full recording on YouTube.
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast - Gabby Dizon: Founding Yield Guild Games (YGG), Web3, Gaming & Crypto Infrastructure and Generational Shift from Millennials to Gen Z
Jeremy (24:50): And I understand that YGG also has shifted its strategy as well, right? So how are you thinking about planning and building for the future?
Gabby (24:56): When we started, apart from the lending or scholarship program, we also bought a lot of assets in many of these games. So we have assets in over 50 games, whether it's NFTs or tokens. But two years ago, we started building what we think is some critical infrastructure that the web3 gaming space needed to be able to proceed. We started building a quest and achievement system.
Quests are basically “do something in a game and get the reward,” and the achievement system is the reputation layer. So achievements are underpinned by what we call soulbound tokens or non-transferable NFTs, which become your achievement badges for provably doing something within the game or within the community.
Obviously, reputation is important, whether it's personal reputation or online reputation with platforms like LinkedIn. And I think web3 reputation is very important as well. So there's something that we're building towards in the form of an achievement system. So that quest and achievement platform that we've been working on is the main product that we've been developing since a year and a half ago.
Jeremy (26:01): Insights from your previous products and your previous approaches and philosophies are embedded in this new product.
Gabby (26:07): There are still a lot of elements of game design. So even though at YGG, we're working with a lot of different games, we're not making a game ourselves but there's still a lot of gaming elements. Of course, all gamers are familiar with achievements, whether it's from your favorite game, from Steam, from Xbox, or from Apple.
Maybe people don't think of achievements in a way where they're more like credentials, similar to what LinkedIn is doing. But as people play more of these games and they get their achievements, they realize that these achievements actually get them special access. For example, if I'm very good at strategy games and a new strategy game comes out, that gives me a special offer to try out their game, and maybe there's a new item or it recognizes that I'm part of YGG or gives me special YGG items. Then they realize the power that these achievement badges will have.
Jeremy (26:56): Yeah. What do you think beyond that? I'm just kind of curious. Do you have any ideas about anything else you want to build?
Gabby (27:03): I think that as we go along in the future, especially with the rise and the advent of AI, there will be a loss of a lot of, I would say, what the current jobs are in the world. And if you look at it as a technology, it's a technology for unbounded abundance of content. AI can create more content than humans can ever make, and I think it actually underscores the need for digital scarcity even more now. You will need to have authentication on who is the first one that created this piece of content.
Where do you attribute the creation or if there is any copyright attached to it? Where would royalties flow, for example? Where does value flow for the creation of the content? So I think there's actually a yin and yang behind AI and crypto. I don't think that one technology is necessarily better than another, but I think as AI drives more and more digital abundance, you will need crypto for its ability to create verifiable digital scarcity.
Jeremy (28:04): Right. So I'm curious. AI seems to be a question in your head. What other questions do you have that you're trying to figure out now? What are the questions in your head?
Gabby (28:12): One of the biggest questions is, what will jobs 10 years from now look like? Will education, formal education, schools, and universities still matter? And if they don't, what will the jobs look like? Is there employment? Is it a never-ending set of gigs? Are there companies or are there just guilds or groups of people working online together? I think these questions are going to be more and more relevant in the next few years.
You can watch the full recording on YouTube.
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