Community Crypto: The Hurdles of Play-to-Earn Adoption

In this episode, YGG Philippines country manager Luis Buenaventura speaks with other crypto experts who have worked in the Philippines about digital transformation and crypto adoption within the count

Community Crypto is a weekly show on CoinDesk TV, a media channel produced by crypto news site CoinDesk that covers market news. Community Crypto is hosted by “Bitcoin and Black America” author Isaiah Jackson, who explores how crypto is creating and impacting various communities around the world. 

In this episode of Community Crypto, YGG Pilipinas country manager Luis Buenaventura, together with Emfarsis director Leah Callon-Butler, BitPinas co-founder and editor-in-chief Michael Mislos, and Coins.ph co-founder Ron Hose, talks about crypto development in the Philippines and its influence on a global scale. 

The following is an excerpt from the discussion. Watch the full episode here. 

CoinDesk TV: Inside the Philippines’ Booming Crypto Community

Isaiah (5:51): We have had a few problems. We have the bear market, we saw the Ronin exploit that happened. What are some of the hurdles to adoption with some of these issues that happen with play-to-earn games?

Luis (6:05): I'm a big crypto believer, right? I've been in this industry for about eight and a half years now, so I've been trying to get Filipinos to look into crypto for a really, really long time. It's basically a pretty substantial chunk of my professional career, and Axie Infinity was the first time where they were literally beating my door down trying to get into crypto. So if anything, at the very least, it is a gateway into cryptocurrency and it was a gateway into cryptocurrency for at least a million and a half Filipinos just in the last couple of years. 

So that, to me, is a substantial net benefit already because it's opened up these doors. Now, because there are so many of these new entrants, you have to explain to them how this stuff actually works outside of play-to-earn itself. Now you've got the challenge of explaining, “Okay, so crypto goes through cycles. There are these winter and summer cycles, and they're for years and increments,” that most people don't understand why their holdings are suddenly a substantially different number from what they were in 2021. 

But that's kind of crypto life, and so part of — I would say the biggest chunk of — what YGG does these days, especially now, is making sure that they understand what they're going through. There's a lot of education stuff going on for us. 

There are a lot of times where we do a lot of mentoring, coaching and things like that. Because the play-to-earn part of it itself is quite small now, it doesn't really have the kind of returns that it used to. But crypto itself, if you're a believer, then you think that the bear market is when the best products are built, because they're hardened by this season. We're big believers that if you can make it through this part, you'll actually be a much stronger crypto person in general.

You can watch the full episode on CoinDesk. 

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