CryptoVantage - Play to Earn & Crypto Gaming with Leah Callon-Butler & Beryl Li
CryptoVantage - Play to Earn & Crypto Gaming with Leah Callon-Butler & Beryl Li
Primer: Join Jennifer Sanasie, host of CryptoVantage, as she interviews Leah Callon-Butler and Beryl Li about the play to earn phenomenon sweeping across the world. Leah is the screenwriter and presenter behind the Play to Earn documentary while Beryl Li is the co-founder of Yield Guild Games, a behemoth gaming guild synonymous with play to earn. Find out from them how crypto gaming is changing the world, especially in lifting an entire community out of poverty.
Introduction to Beryl and Leah
Beryl Li
Co-founder of Yield Guild Games (YGG)
Gaming guild structured as a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO)
YGG invests in non-fungible tokens (NFT) that are used to play the games so that they can lease them out to the players
Leah Callon-Butler
Screenwriter and presenter behind the Play To Earn documentary; the director of the documentary is Nathan Smale
Lived in the rural Philippines, fell in love with the place
Always heard of how crypto can help people improve their lives - didn't see it until she came to the Philippines
Heard this story of a provincial community during the pandemic playing a complex blockchain game, earning an in-game token that can be cashed out for fiat
One can earn about 400 USD per month, which is a lot of money for those in the Phillippines even before the pandemic
The documentary serves to demonstrate how blockchain can change lives for the better
Barriers to entry
Leah
Axie Infinity can be pretty difficult to play
Not just mindless button mashing
It is strategic and people describe it as chess
Need to think through it if you want to be the top player to earn good money from playing
Definitely not button mashing…
Cashing out the earnings
This is the hurdle for most people because there are a lot of hoops to jump through
Play to earn game allows you to earn the crypto if you do not have the means to exchange it with fiat
When this was started, people have to go through a lot of steps to turn the in-game token, Smooth Love Potion (SLP) to become food on the table
Swap it through a decentralised exchange (DEX) like Uniswap
Change it to another major token like ETH
Send this to a regulated exchange like coins.ph, which is very popular in the Phillippines, to cash out
If you're unbanked, you can also send it to a cash-out centre
Even 7/11 outlets can be places to cash out
Huge adoption by the Philippines community
Beryl Li
She was part of the team at coins.ph
Never really told people that crypto is the infrastructure to move the funds for remittance
If more technical terms like blockchain, DeFi, staking, APRs and farming are used, they will confuse the community
People get turned off by all the multiple steps and the technicality of it all
With gaming, it's just farming but using time instead of assets like funds or cash or other crypto assets to earn in-game rewards
This concept is easier to understand for the community than telling them about staking
It's simplified DeFi in a sense - a good intersection between gaming and DeFi
Leah
It boils down to good incentive to go through the hoops
She's from Australia so people there have access to a good banking system with credit cards and loans and other financial instruments that are easily accessible
But in the Philippines, only 22% of the adult population have a bank account
Having a bank account also might not mean access to financial products that could change your economic status
Hence in the Philippines, people are actually incentivized to go and explore, to experiment with alternative financial products
FTX Sponsorships
Beryl
FTX sponsored scholars through Yield Guild Games (YGG)
💡 Players who have received the FTX scholarship represent 81 players from the Philippines, 25 from Indonesia, 10 from India, 15 from Latin America and six from Brazil.YGG breed these NFT assets that are used to play a game called Axie Infinity
You will need 3 of these axies to form a team in order to start playing
Cost $150 for a full team last year, but now it costs $1500 for the same team
Some of the people are out of jobs or do not have the savings to buy a team to begin playing and earning
So YGG will lease these axies out to them for free and take a cut - players get 70%, the manager who is responsible for onboarding the player gets 20% and YGG gets the remaining 10%
The simplest way to understand the scholarships is to see it as a non-collateralised loan
Leah
FTX had been spending a lot on sponsorship deals recently and these represent a good way to access a new market of users who are new to crypto
But the scholarship deal with YGG represents another end of the spectrum
The people sponsored here are not top elite athletes or influencers
Most of these people don't have the funds and hence have to start playing to earn in the first place
This deal flipped the e-gaming sponsorship model on its head to get to people at the bottom of the ecosystem to give them a transformative opportunity
"I feel like the sponsorship and what Axie Infinity is able to do for these communities, brings us back to the original crypto ethos. It wasn't for the rich and the famous, but it really was to be able to bring financial freedom to the people who need it the most. And that just warms my heart."
- Jennifer Sanasie
Breaking the poverty cycle
Beryl
"In the Philippines, we have a non-ending cycle of debt. So with Axie infinity, the rewards are actually more than the minimum wage. So the minimum wage would be $200. But with playing Axie infinity, they could earn up to $400 to $1,000, and they get to cash out. So that's a lot and they use it to pay back their loan and debt and they could actually start, you know, setting up their own business."
- Beryl Li
Noticed that players changed their mindset after playing the game
With no savings at all, most of these players actually experience for the first time what it is like to earn in-game rewards and choose what to do with the rewards
To cash out to buy food
Collect more and buy their own Axie team to play
Breed more Axies to lend to other people to start their own managing program
They ended up being entrepreneurs and investors themselves
Earning an amount higher than the minimum wage of $200 USD allows them to get out of the debt cycle
Yield Guild Games - A DAO
They had just become a DAO and a token sale that sold out in 30 seconds
45% of the token allocation is actually for the community
They are looking into airdropping it
There is a level-up system in YGG as well so that the more time that players play the game, the more YGG tokens they can earn
At the beginning of the DAO, the founders will make most of the decisions but as they onboard more stakeholders and also through the token sale, the decision will be passed down more to the community members
Anyone who holds the token will be eligible to pass proposals and vote on decisions affecting the DAO
Metaverse
Leah
Metaverse has become a buzzword now - even Facebook and other centralized entities are wanting a piece of it
We should be pushing for an open Metaverse that is interoperable and permissionless so that anyone can participate in it
Not those multiple Metaverses across multiple centralized platforms
Users or participants will want to have some digital property rights in the virtual world e.g. if they own a virtual land, they will want a proper certification to show their ownership
People will soon realise that they have quite a lot of value to claim in the virtual world
This is a progress that is happening over time
At the start of the year when they made the Play to Earn documentary, they made a conscious choice not to use the word NFT because nobody will understand what they are talking about
But after Feb and Mar, everyone knows what that is
"If you go back to the start of this year when we made the Play to Earn documentary, we made a real decision not to include the word NFT in it because no one knew what an NFT was. Fast forward to February and March, it was like the only word that people knew in their vocabulary."
- Leah Callon-Butler
Future in Relation to Crypto
Beryl
The pandemic accelerated the push to get everything online and a lot of physical activities will be shifted online - just need a good platform to do so
Will have more play to earn games coming out since Axie Infinity has proven the viability of such a model
Education could also be gamified
Shopping might be in the form of buying NFTs that can be converted into physical merchandise or traded in OpenSea
All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. Summaries are prepared by The Reading Ape. While reasonable efforts are made to provide accurate content, any errors in interpreting and summarizing the source material are ours alone. We disclaim any liability associated with the use of our content.