At the center was Gabby Dizon, a lifelong gamer and a pioneer in the blockchain space. He had seen gaming evolve from cartridges to online worlds, and in the early blockchain era, he saw something familiar yet transformative: people using digital economies to improve their real lives. In 2018, Gabby began lending his own Axies to players who couldn’t afford to buy their own — players who could grind and earn but lacked the capital. That small act, a mix of generosity and vision, planted the seed of what would become Yield Guild Games.
He wasn’t alone for long. By October 2020, Gabby had teamed up with co-founders Beryl Li — a fintech entrepreneur — and Owl of Moistness, a developer, and together they launched YGG with a mission that sounded almost poetic: to build a global community where anyone, anywhere could be part of thriving blockchain gaming economies.
From the very start, it felt like something people needed. Not just another crypto project, but a movement.
At first, YGG wasn’t a DAO in the abstract sense we talk about today. It was a real experiment in pooling capital to buy valuable in-game NFT assets — digital land, characters, tools — and sharing them with gamers who could earn from playing. That became known as the scholarship model: someone with capital (the guild) buys the NFTs; someone with time and skill (a scholar) plays; and the earnings are shared. Scholars could start earning without upfront cost, and managers in the guild guided them.
That model was born out of necessity, but it proved powerful. Real gamers with real financial pressure could get access to opportunity. And that brought real users into the ecosystem. They weren’t speculators; they were people earning dinner money, school fees, even supporting families. That emotional reality built more than a user base — it built a community.
I’m seeing how this early stage wasn’t easy. There were doubts inside and outside the team: could the play-to-earn model sustain itself? Could it scale beyond one game? What happens when the next token price crashes? But every time there was a challenge, YGG adapted. Instead of being a static guild, it began to evolve into a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) — one where holders of a native token could influence decisions, contribute, and share in the wealth of the ecosystem.
That token — YGG — is at the heart of this story. Designed as an ERC-20 governance and utility token on Ethereum, its total supply was capped at 1 billion, a number chosen to forge balance between growth and scarcity. Early on, 25 million tokens were sold in an Initial DEX Offering (IDO), and 45% of the supply was reserved to be distributed to the community over four years. Why? Because the founders genuinely believed that the community shouldn’t just play — they should own.
That allocation tells you a lot about the ethos: early believers, scholars, active participants, and long-term contributors weren’t just players — they were co-builders. The remaining tokens went to the treasury, investors, founders, and advisors in ways meant to align incentives over the long road ahead.
And as the DAO took shape, YGG began developing Vaults and SubDAOs — innovations that let token holders engage with the ecosystem in real, tangible ways. A vault isn’t just a staking pool; it’s a channel that reflects actual revenue streams — rental income from NFTs, yields from in-game assets, or partner token rewards — and lets the community choose exposure based on shared risk and reward preferences.
SubDAOs grew out of that same intuition: gaming isn’t one thing; each game, each region, each community is different. So YGG spun up smaller, semi-autonomous guilds within the larger DAO, each focused on particular games like Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, or specific regions like Southeast Asia or India. These subDAOs have their own leaders, wallets, governance tokens, and strategies — but they still contribute back into the central treasury and ecosystem. It’s a bit like a federation of micro-communities — independent yet connected.
And people came. Real players who couldn’t afford NFTs joined as scholars. Web3 natives joined to stake and govern. Investors — big names like Pantera Capital and Andreessen Horowitz — came in with millions of dollars in funding rounds that signaled confidence in the vision even through bear markets.
But here’s the emotional pivot: YGG’s story is not just about numbers and tokens. It’s about how communities found purpose. Seeing an idle nerd in Manila earn real income by playing a game wasn’t just marketing — it was a revelation about what digital economies could mean for people everywhere. Even as markets dipped, the community held faith that this was something bigger than price charts. I’m watching people talk about YGG in ways that sound less like traders and more like artists talking about their craft. That tells you something.
So what are the key numbers worth watching if you truly want to understand the health of this ecosystem? It’s not just token price. It’s active DAO governance participation, number and growth of scholars benefiting from assets, utilization rates of NFT assets owned by the guild, growth in vault deposits, and how many SubDAOs are thriving with active decision-making. When those numbers rise, it becomes clear that the guild is converting participation into sustainable economic activity rather than speculative churn.
There are risks, too — real ones. Play-to-earn models depend on active engagement and healthy game economies. If a game loses players or incentives dry up, the guild’s revenues can falter. That’s why YGG’s diversification into many games, its push toward reputation systems and actual DAO governance, and its innovation around vault structures aren’t just nice ideas — they are survival strategy.
If this continues — if real gamers and builders keep joining, if governance stays active, and if revenue sources stay aligned with community incentives — YGG could be more than a gaming DAO. It could be a template for how digital communities build shared wealth together.
Today, standing where YGG stands feels a bit like being on a mountain ridge with a vast vista ahead. There are storms, sure — token volatility, competitive guilds, shifts in play-to-earn mechanics. But there are also paths into new territories: deeper DAO tooling, on-chain reputation systems, expanded partnerships, and legacy gaming studios beginning to experiment with tokenized economies.
In the end, the thing that makes YGG inspiring is simple: it started with someone lending an NFT because he saw possibility in another human’s hands. That gesture became a community, the community became a DAO, and the DAO is now trying to redefine what digital work, play, and ownership can mean.
