Economics Design: Scaling Communities Through Product Design
Gabby joins Economics Design’s Blockchain Economist, Lorenzo Martin, in a Twitter Space to discuss how building the right products drives worldwide growth in web3.
Economics Design is a leading provider of tokenomics services, specializing in optimizing tokenomics strategies for long-term success in web3 projects. The team develops and monitors market designs, embeds incentives, and tracks their efficiency to improve long-term sustainability. They offer tokenomics auditing, economic modeling, tokenomics design, and tokenomics outsourcing. Led by Lisa JY Tan, the group aims to design sustainable economic structures that produce robust stable outcomes and improve transaction efficiency within the ecosystem.
The Economics Design team hosts monthly Twitter Spaces sessions that feature leading builders in web3 to discuss everything under the tokenomics umbrella. In the session for the month of June, Gabby Dizon joined Lorenzo “Enzo” Martin, Economics Design’s resident Blockchain Economist, to discuss two key mechanisms in YGG that enable its consistent growth — its regional guild partners and the Guild Advancement Program (GAP). They also talked about the recent decentralized rebranding and what it means for YGG guild members.
The following is an excerpt from the Twitter Space where Enzo and Gabby discuss the differences between scaling companies and scaling communities, the challenges of growing a community, and how shifting the focus toward designing good products eventually leads to community growth. Listen to the full recording on Twitter.
Mechanism Design In Gaming Guild Ecosystems
Enzo (13:30): Mechanism design is the creation of rules that agents within an ecosystem abide by. And YGG has developed a lot of mechanics within its ecosystem, making it one of the successful gaming guilds in the space.
I would like to talk about a few of those mechanics in particular. First, let's talk about your guild partners. One of the growth opportunities for YGG is the establishment of guild partners within YGG. Can you share with us the thought process behind expanding the organization through the creation of these guild partners?
Gabby (14:15): If you think about growing and scaling communities, growing them is very different from growing a company, for example. Think about a large company, like Google, that probably has hundreds of thousands of employees around the world. How do you start expanding in one country? The executives decide it's time to go there, the budget is drawn up, a country manager is named, and then you build out your employees, and they start doing work there.
Growing a community is very different. It's very bottom-up. And we knew that, when we started YGG — a lot of the early growth happened in the Philippines — we knew that guilds would go worldwide. It wasn't just the Philippines where people were interested in utilizing NFT assets in virtual worlds to own or earn these assets. We thought the best way to scale was to work with localized communities that could also do top-down community management. It wouldn't work for us to hire country managers and do it in these countries. We wouldn't be able to move fast enough. That's where the guild partners concept started. We worked with different entrepreneurs from around the world who wanted to build a YGG model from within their own region.
We've partnered with different guild communities around the world, including the rest of Southeast Asia, India, Latin America, Japan and Korea. And then there were internet-native communities that wanted to form a YGG presence across several successful games, notably, games like League of Kingdoms and Splinterlands. They created a governance model around this, and then we created two game-specific subguilds: YGGLOK in League of Kingdoms and YGGSPL for Splinterlands.
Enzo (16:46): How does each regional partner operate within the wider YGG cluster and how do they interact with each other as guild partners?
Gabby (17:00): They operate independently, but we can work together as an ecosystem. For example, if a game wants to have community members in different geos around the world, we can work together. The way we scale this is towards the products that we are working on. It’s really hard to scale community. And of course, you need good community leaders. But another way to scale is via products, specifically, via the questing system we are working on.
If we give community members reputation, different interesting things to work on, interesting quests to do, then it's easier for us to coordinate people’s behavior from all around the world. That's the beauty of crypto. If you can create rules that can serve as coordinating mechanisms, then you can minimize the management overhead.
You can listen to the full recording on the Economics Design Twitter.
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