Not Boring Founders: “X-to-Earn” and the Evolution of YGG

In this podcast, Gabby Dizon and Packy McCormick discuss what “X-to-earn” is and how it onboards non-gamers to the Metaverse.

Not Boring Founders is a segment on the Not Boring podcast featuring business, Web3 CEOs, and builders. Not Boring is a media and capital venture firm that produces content on business, strategy, technology, and Web3. Its founder, Packy McCormick, hosts the podcast and also writes about business strategy, community, technology, and real estate in the semi-weekly “Not Boring” newsletter. 

In this episode, Packy and YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon talk about how the guild will develop and cater to non-gamers. One proposed solution for this is “X-to-earn,” where tasks are gamified and people are given ownership for their contributions. 

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

Not Boring Founders: Gabby Dizon, Yield Guild 

Packy (9:53): What’s YGG becoming? It sounds like you’re evolving it to widen the scope of what you’re doing at Yield Guild Games.

Gabby (9:58): Yes, definitely. Now, we have a lot of people who are coming in and playing games, but it's not just games that you want to do in Web3 or, broadly, the Metaverse. There are people who want to use different forms of creativity to have their own contribution. It can be someone who is, for example, a community moderator, it can be someone who's an artist making NFTs, or it can be someone who’s into lore.

We're realizing that what we're doing in play-to-earn can be more generalized into what we call “X-to-earn,” or contribution in exchange for ownership, which I think is the central idea apart from playing. Playing is great because there are two billion gamers around the world that get onboarded into Web3 very easily, and then kind of have them learn crypto at the back end. 

But now, how do you target the rest of the class of creators and contributors that have something to bring in — people like yourself, for example, with your writing — and have them also own a meaningful stake in whatever they're creating in Web3?

Packy (11:04): How do you think about going after those two billion gamers out there, versus going after any other people? Is it just that the family members of the gamers are asking to get involved and are not gamers? What was the impetus and how do you decide where to focus your attention?

Gabby (11:08): The first expansion that we did was into these geographical subDAOs. Now there’s YGG Southeast Asia, India, LATAM. There's going to be more YGGs around the world. Where we're heading is that we're starting to collaborate with what we call “workDAOs,” or DAOs that are doing X-to-earn, and when we’re saying “X-to-earn,” it’s like learn-to-earn, create-to-earn and move-to-earn.

We’ve had some very interesting examples of these DAOs that are coming up that are not using games, but are actually using gamified mechanics to turn different forms of creative work into DAO mechanics. I think this is the natural evolution of where Web3 is going — in the “contribute for ownership” kind of economy. 

Packy (12:08): Can you walk us through examples — without going into specifics because I know it’s early — but what partnership like this might look like with an existing brand that has a community that is super engaged?

Gabby (12:20): For example, let’s take move-to-earn because STEPN is something that’s become really popular and we invested into something called Genopets, which is also a move-to-earn application.

There are people who like to move, people who love to run and people who like to do different types of physical exercise, and you can create tokenomics around this so that there is an ecosystem where assets are being bought that contribute to an economy and people are contributing by doing the thing that you want to incentivize.

Maybe it’s running, maybe it’s like Pokémon Go where you’re moving somewhere and battling other players. It’s using these game mechanics that you have in play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity and transposing that into other types of networks. 

You can listen to the full discussion on Spotify.

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