The Credible Neutrality Play: YGG's Path to Becoming Essential Web3 Infrastructure 🏗️
To become truly indispensable, a protocol must transition from being a player to being the platform—a piece of neutral infrastructure that others build upon without fear of competition. This is the path from "guild" to "protocol." Yield Guild Games is making calculated moves toward this "credible neutrality," where its success is tied to the success of all builders in its ecosystem, not just its own direct pursuits.
Signs of this shift include: opening its vault infrastructure for other guilds or funds to use, providing its reputation oracle to third-party games, and acting as a transparent liquidity layer rather than a proprietary black box. I've seen early discussions about standardizing scholar credentialing—a move that would benefit the entire industry, with YGG at the center. By providing public goods that raise all ships, they cement their role as foundational.
For $YGG, this evolution would transform its value accrual. The token wouldn't just capture value from YGG's own activities, but would take a small fee from a vast universe of activity happening on top of its neutral infrastructure. It becomes a tollbooth on the highway of GameFi labor and capital. [METRIC: % of Treasury Revenue from "Infrastructure Fees" vs. "Direct Guilding" = X% (Source: Internal)].
Is credible neutrality and becoming essential infrastructure a more valuable long-term goal for YGG than remaining the dominant, but potentially resented, monopoly guild?
