Onchain Reputation Reveals Web3’s Most Valuable Gamers
YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon and Emfarsis director Leah Callon-Butler speak with LongHash co-founder Shi Khai Wei, along with D.co’s Joel John and Siddharth, on the essentiality of reputation in web3.
Taking cues from enduring web2 titles like World of Warcraft (WoW), web3 gaming has gradually shifted towards the model of rewarding loyal players. However, web3’s ideal gamer doesn’t just log a lot of hours in-game. The people most crucial to the growth of this new sector of gaming spend just as much time playing as they do participating in their communities. For the past few years, YGG has used soulbound tokens (SBTs) to identify — and reward — this class of player.
As conceived in a May 2022 whitepaper by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, SBTs were inspired by WoW’s Soulbound items — non-tradeable, non-transferable items that tell the stories of dungeon raids past. Recently, as part of its coverage mapping onchain communities, Decentralised.co published an in-depth article on YGG and how guild systems work. Joel John and Siddharth Jain wrote about how SBTs have enabled YGG and its subguilds to build a vast reputation network of high-value web3 gamers. Over the past few years, YGG has spent the bulk of its efforts stoking the interest of these high-value players through initiatives like Superquests and the Guild Advancement Program (GAP). The guild protocol has been able to consistently create instant demand for the web3 games it partners with through this network.
In a recent X Spaces stream, YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon and Emfarsis director Leah Callon-Butler were joined by LongHash Ventures co-founder Shi Khai Wei, along with Decentralised.co co-founders Joel John and Siddharth. They held an open discussion on the sheer power of reputation, citing its role as one of the core pillars of web3 gaming’s growth.
In this excerpt, Sid, Joel, Shi Khai and Leah all weigh in on the importance of reputation in web3, the potential future applications of SBTs, and the pivotal role SBTs may play in reclaiming the internet from bots.
Listen to the full recording on X.
YGG Spaces: The Future of Web3 Gaming & Onchain Reputation
Sid (1:08:19): If we funnel enough attention — both player and developer — on what can be made possible with SBTs, I think beyond targeting players to come in and participate in quests, there is a broad range of use cases that can be built around it.
The reason I say that is that we are going deeper and deeper into what web3 social can enable. I don't construe these SBTs to be limited to gaming, because there have already been experiments in terms of specific NFTs being awarded to gate experiences. Right now, this is something that takes it to the next level in bolstering player coordination.
So I'm very optimistic about the design space that lies out there. I think it's just a couple of great implementations away from capturing the imagination of developers to kind of use the SBT resources or the whole repository of this information to create something very unique and useful.
Leah (1:09:39): Joel also suggested that an open attestation and credentialing system like this could become the LinkedIn of the future, which is a really interesting idea because I think web3 people absolutely hate LinkedIn. Probably Gabby hates LinkedIn more than anyone! Explain to me: why do web3 people hate LinkedIn so much? And why would we need something like this web3 reputation system to fix it once and for all?
Joel (1:10:23): The problem with LinkedIn is that there's this pointless signaling that has very little to back it. So there are people posting pictures from hospitals saying, “Hey, I'm still working.” That's pointless signaling with nothing to validate it.
The advantage of an SBT-based LinkedIn is that if Sid comes to me and says, “I work with 10 clients,” and I have some way of proving that he's worked with these 10 clients, they're able to leave something onchain in his wallet, I don't need to validate any of those claims. It's already pre-validated. If I can find 100 wallets that have worked with 50 of the top protocols last year, I can tell them that there are XYZ new jobs available for them. That's a far more efficient system than the kind of stuff you see on LinkedIn.
Shi Khai (1:11:20): It's really about verifiability. There were cases where these Forbes 30 Under 30 guys turned out to be complete fraudsters because they completely fabricated their LinkedIn resume. Like, how do you know, right? Whereas if an SBT is always issued by the entity that runs the game or the platform, then it's a solid form of attestation.
And I'll go beyond professional endorsements. People don't realize it yet, but YGG’s onchain guild protocol is actually bottom-up proof of humanity. This is what we need. This is basically a decentralized world coin. And it's not just me saying it. Vitalik Buterin has written about this.
Sure, it can be super robust. From a top down perspective, do we want to depend on this one piece of hardware and always have to scan our irises? Or do we want to have this bottom up social network where, because I trust you and you trust her, and she trusts these people, and we all trust these institutions, we can form this web of humanity? Together we can do things, and together we can achieve things; we can be the counterbalance to how automation and our AI overlords might take over society.
You can listen to the full recording on X.
Read the full article about YGG and onchain reputation on Decentralised.co.
Follow Joel John, Siddharth, and Shi Khai Wei to learn more about how web3 functions from a founder and VC perspective.
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