DWF Chats: Building During the Crypto Winter and the Future of On-chain Reputation in Web3
In this podcast, YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon shares how the Philippine Web3 Festival sent a positive message to the space despite unfavorable market conditions. He also talks about the role of on-chain
DWF Labs is a global digital asset market maker and multi-stage web3 investment firm. They have offices in Switzerland, Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and the British Virgin Islands.
Gabby joins Stefano Virgilli, the Business Partner for PR & Media at DWF Labs, for a brief chat to introduce Yield Guild Games to the DWF audience. They talked about the recently concluded Philippine Web3 Festival, how YGG is navigating the market downturn, and the importance of the Guild Advancement Program (GAP), YGG’s achievement-driven community token distribution protocol that rewards members for their contributions to the guild.
The following is an excerpt from their chat. Listen to the full recording on the DWF Labs YouTube Channel.
DWF Chats Ep10: Gabby Dizon, YGG
Stefano (00:15): You just came back from an event, and I heard it was a great event. I also heard that the Philippines is doing fantastic in terms of promoting web3 culture and GameFi. Maybe you want to tell us your experience and what you can sense from the Philippines and from the rest of the region.
Gabby (0:39): We co-produced an event in Manila called the Philippine Web3 Festival. The Philippines has been something that a lot of people in crypto have heard of, because it was where a lot of people started playing Axie Infinity and using it to earn money during the pandemic.
This led to the spectacular rise of Axie and guilds such as YGG. We wanted to showcase this for the rest of the industry because while most people have heard of it, a lot of people haven’t been to the Philippines — a country where the population has been positively affected by crypto and web3 gaming.
This is why we decided to co-host and produce the event with our friends at BlockchainSpace to show people the optimism of the user base here in the Philippines. It had a three-day conference that was very well attended, an Axie Infinity tournament with a $120,000 prize pool, we even had Apl.de.Ap of the Black Eyed Peas not only talking about his NFT project but also performing.
We saw over 2,000 attendees. Despite the market conditions, the mood was very upbeat and optimistic because people can see that web3 gaming will be a catalyst to the adoption of crypto.
Stefano (2:13): Yeah, definitely. The industry needs players and leaders like you guys as we need a lot of good messaging at this point in history and crypto because bad news is everywhere. But there are not many that decide to come up and stand for the good news. There is also a trend that whenever there is bad news, many projects decide to step back and stop talking to the community. Whereas what you guys are doing is really encouraging because you are seeing business as usual despite the market conditions.
Is it because you live in a country where people's lives have been impacted positively by GameFi, or is it because you have a long-term vision for the industry? Can you describe for our audience your vision for the next three to five years in terms of GameFi, the metaverse and web3?
Gabby (3:09): We started YGG because we wanted to give anyone, anywhere in the world, access to economic opportunities via web3. You don't have to be in a major city like San Francisco, London or Singapore with the opportunities available in web3. You could be anywhere from a province in the Philippines to somewhere in rural Brazil. That vision remains true today. So in the past two years, we've grown quickly through the guilds that we have around the world. We now have guilds in Southeast Asia, India, Latin America, Brazil, Japan, Korea, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.
Now it's time for us to build on top of that and see what else we can do for the community. Like enhancing their skills and building their reputation. So we're building a software platform that will enable people to form their digital identity and reputation. The first example of this is what we call our Guild Advancement Program (GAP). In GAP, people can perform quests in different games. Right now, there are around 12 partner games participating. So people can perform quests in these games, and at the end of a three-month season, we check on the quests if they were completed successfully. Then, people get a reward, usually a token or an NFT.
Sometimes, they get an achievement, and these achievements are Soulbound Tokens. Meaning, they are non transferable. These are proofs of achievements that they have done in the web3 sphere, and of course, they are minted on-chain as an indelible mark of these feats.
This is really important because I think the next phase of crypto will be all about people’s web3 reputation. In things like yield farming, we didn’t really segregate between useful people or people who were just there to extract money. I think reputation will go a long way towards separating who is most useful in guilds and in other communities.
You can listen to the full recording on the DWF Labs YouTube Channel.
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