The Open Metaverse Podcast by Animoca Brands: YGG Leading the Rise of Web3 Reputation

In this Open Metaverse Podcast episode, YGG Co-founder Gabby Dizon joins Mehdi Farooq, Senior Tokenomics Analyst at Animoca Brands, talks about how the guild is leading the rise of web3 reputation.

The Open Metaverse podcast is led by the tokenomics team at Animoca Brands. The program is designed to be the go-to source for breaking news, deep dives, and lively discussions on everything metaverse and web3. Animoca Brands, a Deloitte Tech Fast winner and ranked in the Financial Times list of High Growth Companies Asia-Pacific 2023, is a leader in digital entertainment, blockchain, and gamification that is working to advance digital property rights and contribute to the establishment of the open metaverse.

In this episode, Gabby Dizon and Mehdi Farooq, Senior Tokenomics Analyst of Animoca Brands, discuss the significance of reputation and achievement systems in web3, and their potential to differentiate community members and create new opportunities for web3 users.

The following is an excerpt from this episode of The Open Metaverse podcast by. Watch the full recording on YouTube.

EP9 The Rise of Web3 Reputation: YGG Leading the Charge | The Open Metaverse Podcast Animoca Brands

Mehdi Farooq (19:05): When I was reading your Community Report for Q4, I saw that there were very interesting badges based on users' gamer persona. For our audience, can you give specific examples of the badges so they have a better view of what these badges consist of, and how you guys are leveraging this system?

Gabby Dizon (19:25): There are over 100 achievement badges in the last season. These were across not only the different games that were part of the program, be it Axie Infinity or My Pet Hooligan, Thetan Arena, etcetera. But it also consisted of non-game tasks that you had to do within the length of the season which is three months.

There's different quest systems that we're seeing around the web, but a lot of them are built around very mechanical tasks — follow this Twitter account, join this Discord server, and then it will give you rewards. We didn’t really like that because it didn't give any form of real retention to the player base. People were just clicking on something and getting a reward. So that's why we set up the Guild Advancement Program (GAP) to be three months long. And that's why you only get achievements after the end of those three months.

So when you get a Soulbound Token (SBT) achievement, we want that to actually mean something. Because having that SBT in your wallet has to be meaningful for that marker to mean something. That achievement is meant to be a future acquisition marker or part of the reputation that you're building within web3.

Mehdi Farooq (20:38): Yeah, that makes sense. Even though I'm very bullish on web3 reputation, one mental exercise is to ask the question, “So what?” In your view, what will web3 reputation unlock? Will there be reputation based governance? Will there be reputation based minting and airdrops? What are some of the applications that you are seeing with this reputation layer that YGG is building?

Gabby Dizon (21:18): So let's back up to web2, and what really changed internet advertising forever — internet cookies. You had a lot of things that you did within the internet that were stored in cookies. These are made available to Facebook, Google ad networks, and that enable them to hyper target you with offers that they felt like were relevant. Then, this enabled Facebook and Google to grow to the multibillion dollar behemoths that they are today. 

Cookies aren’t available in web3, because we have wallets, not people. That's why a lot of governance or access has been around yield farming, “Who has the most money?” We believe that's really not ideal. We want people to build the reputation, because you want to give access to either your tokens through NFTs, or through your community, and target them based on what characteristics that you want.

This is why achievements are very important. We believe that a well designed achievement system allows you to differentiate between the members of your group, your guild, your DAO, and then be able to give them access to governance rewards based on how they're contributing or what they've contributed. Either it's money or it's by doing work. 

I think this is one of the great unsolved pieces of web3. We focus too much on the liquidity of money. But I think that reputation is just as important if not more important in the long term. And there are so many projects that tried to solve for liquidity of assets, but they're still very scarce projects in terms of reputation.

You can watch the full podcast on the Animoca Brands YouTube Channel.

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