Unchained Podcast: Crafting Next Gen DeFi Products with Yield Guild Games
In this podcast, Gabby Dizon talks with Laura Shin about the YGG token, its main utility within the YGG DAO, and the possible use cases for YGG NFTs in various game ecosystems.
The Unchained podcast with Laura Shin invites industry experts that are building the decentralized internet, to unravel what has led to the creation of this technology while also sparking interesting conversation on more serious topics in crypto, including regulation, security and privacy.
A former Senior Editor at Forbes, Laura Shin was one of the earliest mainstream journalists to cover crypto full time. Alongside Unchained, Laura also hosts the Unconfirmed podcast, a 20-minute show that offers insight into how the influential figures in crypto are reacting to the week’s top headlines.
In this podcast, Laura interviews Gabby Dizon, co-founder of YGG, where they discuss the YGG token and its significance as a governance token of the YGG DAO. They also talk about YGG products - such as the Founder’s Coin, Guild Badge and Sword and Shield NFTs - that will have long term value and utility within YGG as well as its growing roster of game partners.
The following is an excerpt from the discussion. Listen to the full podcast here.
How Yield Guild Games Is Revolutionizing the Future of Work and Investment
Laura (26:20): So, something else that Yield Guild Games did recently was introduce the YGG token this past summer. How does that work, and what effect have you seen it have on your community?
Gabby (26:32): YGG itself is a membership, governance and ownership token. So, let’s tackle all those three. Membership, in that, if you own YGG tokens, you have access to different things that only members of the protocol have. So, it starts very simply, like, with other people. There’s token-gated Discord channels where there are things that are only available to our players. Then, you’re able to get, like, exclusive NFTs as well. So, we have, for example, a guild badge that you can mint from our website that is free to mint. You just need to pay for gas, and that gives you access to certain things within the guild. So, that’s the idea for the guild itself, is that your participation in the guild gives you greater access to things that are not available to people who are not as participative.
So, we have the Founder’s Coin, we have token-gated Discord channels, we have the Guild Badge, the NFT Sword and Shield, and we’ll be integrating this across the different games and protocols that we work with, where you might need to have, for example, a certain NFT, maybe a YGG Sword, for example, to be able to enter a certain part of a game. And then, for governance, we’re working towards a progressive decentralization model, which means that slowly we’ll kind of open up more and more parts of YGG towards governance.
So, right now, we have subDAOs, which are like DAOs under YGG that represent, you know, a certain number of assets in the game. For example, we have a YGGLOK subDAO which contains our land assets in the game League of Kingdoms. It has its own token, and now there’s governance. There’s a snapshot page against it, and the players themselves are voting on how to kind of direct our assets or our guild in the game. What are they going to do with a yield? When are they going to play the game? How is the leadership set up? So, we’re letting the players do that, and we’re going to do this for another game, Splinterlands, as well.
And when it comes to ownership, just think of owning a token of YGG as having a slice of all of the activities we do, from the assets that we have to the activities that we’re doing, e-sports, tournaments, the fees that are being accrued from gameplay.
Laura (28:59): And just one question I wanted to ask about, when you were talking about how you could have a YGG Sword that gives you access to, you know, a certain part of a game, I mean, since you’re not creating the games themselves, would it be that in conjunction with the game developers that you develop kind of a special part of the game just for people with those special YGG assets, or whatever?
Gabby (29:25): Yeah. So, that’s the magic of composability in crypto, which is very hard to do otherwise, where I can have a game asset, or an NFT that I minted, then it has utility in a game that someone else developed. So, for these games, the draw for that is if they enable that functionality within their game, they get our users, our player community, who would be interested in going to their game to check it out, and this is the kind of composability that is actually very hard to do outside of crypto, because it needs a lot of meetings, handshakes, access to each other’s private databases, and crypto just enables this composability, wonderfully.
Laura (30:01): It’s so cool. It reminds me of those, like, pick-a-path books, that you used to read, well, at least I used to read as a kid, because basically, what it would be like is, so, the author writes the book, and then they have their own, different Choose Your Adventure endings. But then, you, the reader, could be like, hey, I have an idea for another ending, and basically propose that, and it reminds me of that. Am I right in thinking that it’s something like that?
Gabby Dizon (30:38): Yeah, it’s an act of co-creation and letting players have their own stories. And what that does, it gives them a greater sense of ownership in the game that they’re playing and the assets that they’re owning, and also with the guild-specific assets that are in the game. So, yeah, people just love it when there’s kind of content in a game that’s just for them.
Laura (31:01): Yeah, so, okay, I think it’s super-fun. I’m not even that into games, but I would want to do that. Alright, so, we’re going to talk a little bit more about the YGG token. So, you know, as you talked about, you distributed this YGG token earlier this year. How did you think about how to allocate that supply? I know that there’s a lot that goes into, you know, forming, like, kind of good economy and stuff like that, and obviously, with all these debates in crypto about things like fair launch coins versus VC coins, I’m sure there are a lot of opinions about how much different entities get. So, how did you guys think about that?
Gabby (34:14): Well, yeah, there’s definitely more than one way to do tokenomics, and for us, we developed our tokenomics very closely with the Delphi Digital team. You’ve had Yan Liberman on your show, and he designed both the AXS token for Axie Infinity and the YGG token for Yield Guild Games. So, one of the things we did, actually, was that we set aside 45 percent of the total supply of the token for player rewards, for play-to-earn rewards, so that our engaged player community can earn the tokens over a long period of time without needing to buy into it. So, you’re seeing a trend in DAOs now that value contribution over merely buying into a token, or financial speculation, and this is something that we really want to emphasize, people can have greater ownership of the guild with actions that are good for the guild itself. So, whether you’re a community moderator, you come up with a show, or you’re a top esports player within the guild, you have the opportunity to earn ownership in YGG itself without having to pay for it with money.
Laura (35:24): Yeah, well, I know that there is this, like, mining program. So, how does that work, exactly?
Gabby (35:31): Yeah. So, we call it a Community Mining program, and it just means that there’s a lot of different initiatives that allow you to earn the token, and we, the team, we set up initiatives where if you were in the esports team, you may receive a stipend in YGG tokens. If you win the tournament, you may be able to earn more. If you are a community helper, then you may be able to get tokens this way. So, yeah, so, we just try to identify the points where people are really giving value to the community, and we want to reward that.
Laura (36:03): And so, Yield Guild Games is also, of course, investing in its own tokens. And so, when the value of the treasury goes up, is there any direct correlation to the value of the YGG token, or are they just kind of separate, or how does that part work?
Gabby (36:23): I guess in the same way that you might view a balance sheet and kind of make up your mind about what a company may be valued. The correlation is not a hundred percent direct. Like, it’s not, I would say, done from, you know, an algorithmic perspective.
What we do is that we publish very publicly all of the assets that we own. We try to do that every quarter. It is like, here we have 35,000 Axies, and we have this many pieces of land. Here are the tokens that we’re holding, and here’s how much they’re worth. By the way, here’s all of the wallets for all of our different assets. And it just gives people a very clear idea of what we do, what assets we hold, and they can make their minds on how much that is worth, right? Like, we’re not going to tell them that a token is worth a specific amount of money, because that’s not what the token represents for us. It’s about, like, really being an owner and participant in the guild. But yeah, we just publish this information as publicly as possible, so that people can kind of derive their own assumptions on how much the guild treasury itself is worth.
You can check out the full podcast on Spotify.
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