Every Friday morning, one message still hits my phone before anything else.
It’s from one of my earliest scholars in Manila. Same format every time. A wallet screenshot. A short note underneath. “Salamat, boss. Rent paid.”
We started working together in 2021 with a two-hundred-dollar Axie loan. Back then he was playing off a borrowed laptop, splitting time between night shifts and grinding SLP. Today he runs a small guild of his own, about thirty players, most of them people he grew up with. I don’t manage him anymore. I don’t need to. That’s the part most people miss when they talk about YGG.
The token trades quietly now. Mid-single cents. Down on the day, drifting week to week like everything else. If you only look at the chart, it’s easy to write the whole thing off as another relic from the play-to-earn era.
But the guild is still paying people.
TVL hasn’t exploded. It doesn’t need to. What matters is that revenue exists, and it’s coming from players actually playing. LOL Land alone has generated millions in real income over the last few months, and that money didn’t vanish into emissions. It flowed back into the treasury, into buybacks, into grants, into new experiments.
Most of GameFi promised exits. YGG built continuity.
What YGG Actually Became
YGG isn’t really a gaming guild anymore. It’s a coordination layer.
Games are still the entry point. Quests are still the hook. But the system underneath has evolved into something broader. It tracks contribution. It rewards consistency. It carries reputation forward instead of resetting it every time a title loses momentum.
The big shift happened quietly this year when the Guild Advancement Program was reworked. Quests stopped being about raw hours and started being about skill. Reputation became portable. Scholars could move across games without starting from zero.
That changed behavior immediately.
Players stopped treating games like disposable jobs. Some leaned into optimization. Others into community roles. A few started learning tooling and development through guild-funded programs. I’ve watched kids who started breeding Axies end up writing Move contracts on Sui, paid the whole way by guild stipends.
That’s not a funnel. It’s a flywheel.
Roots That Still Matter
People forget how grounded YGG’s origin was.
It didn’t start as a vision for Web3 gaming dominance. It started during lockdowns, when a handful of people realized idle time and digital assets could intersect in a way that actually mattered. Loans weren’t charity. They were structured risk. Splits weren’t exploitation. They were incentives.
That mindset never really left.
Today there are sub-guilds operating across dozens of countries, each adapted to local realities. Mobile-first groups in Africa. More structured setups in Brazil. Casual night-shift grinders in Southeast Asia who log in for thirty minutes after work.
YGG never tried to flatten that diversity. It built tools that let it exist.
The Protocol Behind the People
The quiet strength of YGG is the Guild Protocol itself.
Sub-guilds can spin up treasuries, define quest logic, track contributions, and manage payouts without reinventing the wheel every time. Reputation sticks. Leaving one guild doesn’t erase years of work.
That matters more than tokens.
It’s why guilds don’t collapse the moment incentives dip. People stay because history stays with them.
And increasingly, those tools are being used outside of games. Data labeling. Community moderation. Creator collaborations. Same quest logic. Same reputation rails. Different outputs.
Publishing Changed Everything
The turning point this year was when YGG stopped waiting for developers to throw leftovers at guilds.
Instead, it started helping games launch.
Not with hype, but with players. Testing. Retention. Early liquidity. Revenue sharing that didn’t rely on emissions. LOL Land was the proof point. It didn’t explode overnight. It grew steadily, supported by a player base that already trusted the guild.
Revenue came in. Burn mechanisms kicked in. Buybacks started to matter.
That’s when the token finally stopped feeling like a liability.
About the Token, Honestly
YGG’s tokenomics are still imperfect. Emissions are real. Vesting has weighed on price for years. Anyone pretending otherwise hasn’t been holding.
What’s changed is balance.
Revenue exists now. Buybacks are funded. Burns aren’t symbolic. Sub-guild creation consumes tokens. Publishing fees recycle value. For the first time since the early days, circulating supply isn’t just drifting upward.
That doesn’t guarantee price action. It guarantees survival.
Why I’m Still Here
I’ve shut down sub-guilds before. I’ve watched games die. I’ve had to tell people there wasn’t another quest coming.
YGG is still here because it didn’t pretend the model never broke. It adapted. It accepted that not everyone wants to grind full time. It built for people who show up consistently, not endlessly.
The messages I get now aren’t about token prices. They’re about milestones. Someone moving out. Someone funding a course. Someone starting their own group.
That’s not a bull market story.
That’s infrastructure doing its job.
I’m still managing a guild. Still approving loans. Still watching new players turn small digital wins into something real.
YGG doesn’t promise meteors anymore.
It promises that if you show up, the system will still be there next week.
And four years in, that promise has held.
#YGGPlay
