Issue #04: Token and community, ft. Gabby Dizon from Yield Guild Games
Does token drive community or community drive the token? 🤔
gm, everyone! We're back from our long hiatus! 🙏
TDLR; The past few months were crazy! Jun has been busy making ice cream scoops at the Gelato, while Louise is always packed with all Stacks-related things, especially in bringing it to the multi-chain universe!
Now, we're back and ready to roll again, and our main topic for today's issue is token and community. What better way to answer it by bringing the one and only Yield Guild Games! Wait, that YGG? Yes :)
But before we dive in, we would like to thank each and every one of you for making 2021 so special to us. We hope you’re safe wherever you’re reading this, and we wish all of you and your loved ones Happy Holidays!
Does token drive community or community drive the token?
Which is which? This story is much bigger than a token; it is about human psychology, and how we value things is shifting because of blockchain technology. We particularly like to believe that it is the first time in history, we are redefining what "value" means: we can re-think about our macroeconomics: (1) what does our community stands for, (2) what defines it, (3) what is its nature, (4) how does it interact with contributions. These are some of the concepts that we can reconstruct in our space.
Crypto and blockchain literally change the word community with programmable money
Now, can we say that a blockchain project — whatever it's a protocol, a yield aggregator, or an AMM, is powered by the community?
Let's take a look at Yield Guild Game (YGG) for an example. YGG is a play-to-earn gaming guild for investing in NFTs assets used in the metaverse and blockchain games.
The goal of YGG is to "bring yield farming to game economies while adding value to these virtual worlds by developing the content and economy of these games." — The YGG team
YGG was born right before the NFT summer and had a huge successful token sale back in July. Currently, YGG has over 92k community members on Discord, with more than 143k followers on Twitter. YGG is literally built for the community by the team led by Gabby Dizon, Beryl Li, and Owl, who are pioneers of the play-to-earn movement in the blockchain gaming space — and of course, they're blended into the YGG community, too.
Gabby and his YGG gangs sparked a new paradigm with their passion for creating the biggest virtual economy, starting with Axie Infinity. A little bit unconventional, right? But it works; at some point in our childhood, we all wanted to be game-master, and YGG, together with Axie, made it happen.
We're living in a time where you can say you're a game master. 🧙🏻♂️ And blockchain gaming took it a whole new level by lifting an entire community out of poverty.
Q&A with Gabby Dizon
Since early 2010, Gabby has been building a community around gaming and has seen what’s working what doesn’t. We chatted with Gabby about YGG and how they built their community in this web 3.0 era.
Read on👇
1) What's your secret sauce in community building?
You have to care. And talk to your community a lot. When you make decisions, you have to share the reasoning behind them. And admit when you're wrong.
2) How did you get the first 100 community members at YGG?
The first community members came from our friends at the Axie community, so it was pretty easy for us to build an early community. Then community members that were interested in other NFT games joined as well.
3) What do you think of this - product first or community first?
You can build a community first, but they have to have a reason to exist.
4) Any words of advice for community builders reading this?
Nothing replaces on-the-ground commitment, it's not magic.
We always say building communities is no rocket science. And you might think the bar of building a gaming community is low as long as you have a juicy reward program. The truth is as simple as it can get. But as Gabby said, lots of groundwork need to be done.
YGG story proves it, being the biggest play to earn gaming guild in the space. And the future of crypto is shaping faster more than we could imagine as the community intersects clearly with NFTs, DEFIs, DAOs, and DIDs.
We did break down all the nitty-gritty of community building in our previous issue go check out "How to build a crypto community from scratch", hope it helps, and feel free to share feedback with us.
Remember, token = protocols + economic incentives + networks schemes.
Well, that’s a wrap for our 4th edition.
See you in 2022!
-Jun & Louise