Zima Red ep 108: Peter Ing - Guilds Are The Small Businesses Of The Metaverse
Primer: When play-to-earn guilds start to scale up with the number of scholars they are managing, they encounter problems. Enter Peter Ing and BlockchainSpace — they are developing tooling, automation, and financial services to help asset holders manage scholarships. In this episode of the Zima Red podcast, he shares with host Andrew Steinwold about the nuances of the various types of guilds in the space.
Background
Have been in Philippines for the last 10 years
Came to set up a research hub in risk data management to monitor controversial companies around the world in terms of environmental, social, and governance performance
Went into FinTech and worked on mobile wallets
His landlord introduced crypto to him
They started a blockchain education hub
Got to know about Axie Infinity and the play-to-earn concept
Started BlockchainSpace
Getting Into Bitcoin
Heard about Bitcoin in 2013. Bought a few Bitcoin
Sold it in 2016
Got in touch with his landlord again in 2017. His landlord started an exchange in the Philippines
In 2018, he decided to dive deeper into crypto
Was working in a co-working space. Started hosting crypto meetups after office hours
Ended up working with his landlord
Meeting Gabby Dizon
Gabby came to their meetups
Gabby’s background was in gaming
They did not understand that play-to-earn is different from pay-to-win and free-to-play
Gabby was the first person who talked to him about Axies
“He [Gabby Dizon] was actually running a profitable breeding operation at the time. And I was thinking, this is bonkers. This is like completely crazy. And like, why would you want to breed these characters?”
- Peter Ing
Gabby gave him his first set of Axies
Back in 2018, the game was a web-based, auto-battler game
Participated in the land sale
“Land is something that was relatable to me, right at the time. And I just remember thinking, well, if I own this land, maybe I can rent it out in the future. You know, maybe I become a landlord, you know that would be kind of like a fun dream.”
- Peter Ing
Year 2019
Gabby was trying to launch Battle Racers
Gabby invited him to Pocket Gamer Connects
Got to meet the people that are leading the industry today
Deciding To Build BlockchainSpace
In 2020, it was a turning point for Axie Infinity:
Saw a livestream of someone playing Axie Infinity
Received a Discord message where someone expressed interest to buy his Axies
The buyer used the Axie in an eSports tournament
“That was the breakthrough moment. Like, that was the point where it was, holy crap, I literally just sold this guy this game assets, right? And he's now playing with it in the tournament, like right now.”
- Peter Ing
Started digging more into Axie after that
A few months later, the team released the SLP token. They needed it to control the breeding of Axies
One guy in the Philippines was earning a living by playing Axie Infinity during the COVID lockdown
Leah Callon-Butler wrote a massive story and it became viral
BlockchainSpace
History
They started off as a guild
Was managing his own scholarships and experienced various pain points
Reached out to developers to build a community management tool called the Axie Academy Discord bots
The bots would display the earnings of the different players in the community
Other scholarship heads approached him and he made the code public
Went from 100 Discord server downloads within a week to 4000 Discord servers today
Started asking Axie scholarship owners if they require other tooling
Started building guild infrastructure
High Level View
Play-to-earn space is driven by micro-guilds — small/medium enterprises comprising of people with disposable income from $10,000 - $15,000
Micro-guilds need support
BlockchainSpace provides infrastructure to help these micro-guilds
They help connect micro-guilds to macro-guilds like YGG, Merit Circle, etc.
Macro guilds scale by either acquiring, partnering, or investing into micro-guilds
BlockchainSpace tracks the performance of the micro-guilds and benchmark them
Their Products
Community management — their Discord bots track earnings for gamers and provide dashboards for guild owners
Payroll services and automated messaging
Their next product is an insights dashboard. Will be able to filter by both geography and guild
What Are Some Interesting Insights They Have Come Across?
Micro-guilds are the ones that drive the play-to-earn industry
People have the misconception that the largest guilds are the ones who drive the space
Why Are Micro-Guilds Not Teaming Up With Larger Guilds?
People who start up a scholarship business tend to come from developing markets
To them, the average investment from the range of $5000 - $15,000 is quite affordable. Hence, they do not need to be under someone else’s banner
Micro-guilds are more sensitive to profit and loss
Macro guilds have a longer time horizon
Getting Into New Games
New games are coming out with scholarship models embedded within them
The earnings for Axie Infinity has started to dip and guild owners are looking for alternatives
Currently speaking to a number of games that are coming into the market
Introduction of guilds to games may not be sustainable:
Games attract guilds by giving them starter kits to try out the game
If there’s no stickiness in the game, guilds will game-hop to chase the highest yields
They will be building yield trackers for the different games
Trying to help games keep the value within their ecosystem
Consequences Of Everyone Targeting The Best Yield
Already seeing this happening
When CryptoBlades launched, people came in to farm the rewards and quickly exited the system, resulting in its crash
Expects more of such cases in the future
A lot of games are not focusing on building their core communities. Instead, they come up with marketing to capture the market
Axie Infinity has shown the importance of community building
How Do Guilds Handle The Changing Meta In Games?
💡 Often times, games have a certain meta: e.g. fire monsters are weak against water monsters, etc. Games will shift their meta for balancing reasons.
The larger a guild gets, the harder it is to adapt to the changing meta
The meta will always have a premium to it and will only last for a certain period
For large guilds, their aim is to find balanced teams
Micro-guilds are able to adapt quickly to meta changes
Axie Academy And Sandbox Academy
Axie Academy is their scholarship program
The purpose of the academies is to show guilds how to run the business model
Their Gitbook goes into detail about setting up a scholarship program
Grand 5-10 Year Vision
Be part of the core infrastructure of the open Metaverse
For people to see them as:
The Guild data bank
Financial services to help people scale up their businesses
Single Favourite NFT
His DystoPunk
It’s built by some CyberKongz community members
They are yield-bearing NFTs. Each day, they generate CREDS, which could be used to upgrade the NFTs
Most Controversial Thought On NFTs
Not all macro guilds are going to make it in this space
Will Large Guilds Specialize Or Enter Every New Game That Pops Up?
Larger guilds have large treasuries and their strategy is similar to early stage venture capital
There will be a limited window for investing in the early stages of games and not all games will be able to survive
Guilds need to build a sustainable model or they will fail
If He Could Snap His Fingers And Change One Thing In The Space
To be able to speak to Andrew Steinwold anytime
Who Does He Look Up To And Why?
Most of the NFT gaming founders and Andrew Steinwold
NFT Ecosystem In 3 Years
It will go mainstream
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