Yield Guild Games Unveils Next Chapter: Transforming from Guild to Protocol

Yield Guild Games, once the largest guild in Axie Infinity, is evolving into a guild protocol, providing infrastructure for all guilds to thrive on-chain and in-game. With tokenized credentials, asset and role management tooling, and deep integrations into blockchain games, Yield Guild aims to empower guilds with the necessary resources to succeed. As the gaming industry embraces guilds, Yield Guild is leveraging its experience and strategic partnerships to build the infrastructure that will enable guilds to scale and contribute to the growth of the Web3 gaming ecosystem.

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As Yield Guild Games' co-founder Gabby Dizon recounts, the organization's aspirations extended far beyond being a mere guild. Its mission was to foster unity, collaboration, and growth among diverse crypto gaming communities. It simply had to commence its journey from somewhere.

"The primary challenge for any nascent platform is garnering attention," he elucidated to Decrypt's GG. "For us, the long-term path to achieving our goal was to establish ourselves as the preeminent guild. And we accomplished this with Axie Infinity."

Axie Infinity's monster-battling, token-earning paradigm gained immense popularity during the 2021 crypto and NFT bull run, propelling play-to-earn gaming to the forefront. Yield Guild Games, as the industry leader in "scholarships," had already established a viable business model by lending gaming NFTs to players and receiving a portion of their in-game earnings.

Andreessen Horowitz and other venture capital powerhouses provided funding, while the notorious crypto exchange FTX even "sponsored" Axie players in the Philippines and beyond through Yield Guild. However, this particular economic model proved unsustainable, and no other crypto game matched Axie's meteoric, albeit short-lived, momentum.

Undeterred by the relentless bear market, Yield Guild continued to invest in assets for various games, develop infrastructure to empower regional sub-DAO organizations, and anticipate the arrival of a new wave of high-quality crypto games.

Now, with the emergence of Pixels, Parallel, and others, Yield Guild Games is poised to unveil its next major evolution: the transition from a guild to a guild protocol.

What does this entail? Yield Guild aspires to serve as the foundational infrastructure upon which all guilds can thrive, both on-chain and within games. Imagine tokenized credentials and tools for asset and role management, seamlessly integrated into blockchain games, enabling players to not only carry these structures into game worlds but also collaborate on quests and reap collective rewards.

"Envision it as the guild system from World of Warcraft, but abstracted and implemented on-chain," Dizon explained.

We are witnessing the initial manifestation of this concept in Pixels. As the most popular crypto game at the moment, Yield Guild is once again strategically positioned to not only capitalize on this opportunity but also facilitate the success of others.

And Gabby Dizon himself is on hand to guide you through Pixels. Yield Guild is the official guild partner of Pixels, the immensely popular social farming game built on the Ethereum scaling network Ronin—the same network that underpins Axie Infinity. And indeed, Dizon's cheerful, 16-bit avatar is available to assist you in understanding the game's guild system, which became operational this week.

Pixels' guilds are designed to be a transformative force, with founder Luke Barwikowski recently informing Decrypt's GG that he envisions these on-chain gamer collectives enhancing the game's competitive landscape and facilitating resource distribution within the game world. Dizon also mentioned the introduction of large-scale quests that only guilds will be capable of completing.

Discord servers are ubiquitous among gaming guilds today, and some may even maintain a central wallet for shared assets. However, there is a lack of a standardized tech stack for managing such groups, and while numerous blockchain games incorporate guild integrations to varying degrees, these integrations can differ significantly. Pixels' integration is comprehensive and may herald a new era for the industry.

Dizon views gaming guilds as the "small-to-medium enterprises of Web3"—and in his estimation, they are in dire need of robust infrastructure to scale.

Yield Guild has weathered the Axie boom days of ad hoc guild and scholarship integrations, enduring both the hype and the subsequent downturn of the early play-to-earn premise. Armed with this experience, the company is now building the foundation for other guilds to flourish through transparent, modular, and interoperable on-chain assets and tools.

Yield Guild Games has amassed a substantial collection of in-game NFT assets across various titles over the years, and Dizon believes this can complement the protocol.

Imagine staking varying amounts of YGG tokens to borrow NFTs, with more valuable assets requiring a larger stake, thereby representing both an investment in and commitment to the protocol. Dizon envisions the protocol evolving to establish a "credit rating" system for guilds over time, based on their propensity to honor revenue-sharing agreements and refrain from absconding with assets.

Yield Guild has already introduced features such as quests and achievements for various games, but its on-chain infrastructure is still under development. The on-chain guild format will include a multisig wallet for each guild, along with NFT badges and an allowlist that defines roles within the gaming organization. This is expected to be launched in Q2 2024.

In addition to its integration with Pixels, Yield Guild has made several other recent moves, including a strategic investment from LongHash Ventures. On Thursday, Yield Guild introduced its YGG token to Ronin and conducted an airdrop to reward Ronin (RON) stakers who utilized its network validator.

As Yield Guild endeavors to build the infrastructure that will power the next generation of crypto gaming guilds, it is also collaborating closely with game studios, providing guidance and developing content to assist new players in their learning and success. They are demonstrating how guilds can support games, challenging the notion that such organizations exist solely to extract value.

"The scholarship narrative in Axie Infinity was so prevalent that people assumed, 'Oh, these guys are just extracting value from the ecosystem,'" Dizon remarked. "But that was often not the case, based on what I've observed with the guilds we collaborate with."

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.

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