In the summer of 2021, a college student in the Philippines named John woke up, opened his phone, and saw that the characters he had been “renting” from strangers had earned him $1,200 while he slept. That single morning paid more than he used to make in two months driving for a ride-hailing app. He cried, took a screenshot, and sent it to his mother with the caption “Ma, hindi na ako magdadrive ulit.”
I’m never driving again.
John’s scholarship was arranged by Yield Guild Games—YGG—the organization that quietly became the largest and most influential gaming guild in the blockchain world. What started as a handful of crypto natives buying Axies so others could play Axie Infinity turned into something closer to a global cooperative: thousands of players, hundreds of thousands of dollars in shared assets, and an entire economy built around the simple idea that if games are going to pay real money, the people actually playing them should own a piece of the upside.
The Problem YGG Was Born to Solve
When play-to-earn exploded, most of the value went to early NFT buyers who never touched the games. A single team of three Axies cost $1,500 at one point—more than the average annual income in many of the countries where players lived. Someone with capital could buy a hundred teams, rent them out on 30-day contracts, and collect half the earnings without ever logging in. The players did all the grinding and carried all the risk if the token price crashed.
YGG’s founders—Gabby Dizon, Beryl Li, and the mysterious Owl of Moistness—looked at that model and saw something that felt wrong. They had grown up gaming in internet cafés themselves. They knew how much time, skill, and love people pour into games. So they asked a simple question: what if the guild itself owned the assets and the players were the guild?
How It Actually Works
YGG is a DAO, which just means the treasury and the decisions belong to anyone who holds or earns the YGG token. The treasury buys NFTs across dozens of games—Axies, land in The Sandbox, starships in Star Atlas, cards in Parallel, farmland in Town Star, whatever is generating real yield today. Those assets are then distributed through two main systems:
YGG Vaults
Think of vaults as community savings accounts for each game. The DAO deposits NFTs into a vault, players apply for scholarships, and approved players (scholars) use the assets to play. Earnings are split automatically: usually 70 % to the scholar, 20 % back to the community vault to buy more assets, and 10 % to the manager who coaches and supports the player. Everyone wins when the player wins.SubDAOs
Once a game gets big enough, the players and fans of that specific title spin out their own mini-guild with its own token, treasury, and rules. The Axie SubDAO, the Guild of Guardians SubDAO, the Sandbox land guild—each runs like its own co-op inside the larger YGG family. The original YGG token still gets a small carry, but most of the value and governance stays with the people closest to the game.
Life Inside the Guild
Ask any scholar and they will tell you the same thing: YGG is not just free assets, it is community.
There are Discord channels where veterans teach new players the meta. There are leaderboards, tournaments, and weekly payouts in stablecoins so families can budget properly. There are even university programs now—YGG helped fund computer labs in rural areas so kids can study during the day and play at night.
I’ve watched mothers in Venezuela keep the lights on by breeding Axies, teenagers in Indonesia save for motorbikes by farming Splinterlands cards, and entire esports teams in Brazil fund their travel by running YGG’s Ember Sword guild. These are not edge cases; they are the everyday reality for tens of thousands of members.
The Token That Ties It All Together
YGG token has four real jobs:
Governance: vote on which games to enter, how big a scholarship program to run, or whether to co-invest with a new title.
Staking: lock YGG in vaults to earn a share of the profits those vaults generate.
Rewards: top scholars and managers receive bonus tokens on top of their revenue split.
Access: some of the rarest assets and SubDAO tokens are only available to YGG stakers.
It is not a meme coin that moons and dumps. Its value grows the old-fashioned way—when the games in the treasury make money and when new players around the world decide this is the guild they trust.
Why This Feels Different
Most crypto projects promise you’ll get rich. YGG promised something smaller and far more radical: a fair shot.
It does not assume every player will become a millionaire. It simply removes the biggest barrier—owning the assets—and replaces it with a system where effort and skill actually matter. Some scholars earn a few hundred dollars a month and treat it like the best part-time job they ever had. Others climb the leaderboards, become managers, and pull six figures a year. A few have even taken their earnings and started their own mini-guilds.
The range is wide, but the floor is real: no one is priced out because they were born in the wrong country or missed the first mint.
Where This Is All Going
The metaverse is not coming—it is already here, piece by piece, game by game. Hundreds of millions of people will spend thousands of hours in virtual worlds over the next decade, and many of those worlds will have real economies.
When that happens, someone will own the land, the items, the avatars, and the revenue streams. The question is whether that ownership will look like the old internet—where a handful of platforms and early VCs captured everything—or like something new, where the players themselves are the primary shareholders.
Yield Guild Games is the largest experiment we have so far in choosing the second path.
It is messy, loud, and occasionally chaotic the way any community of gamers should be. But every week it puts real money into real pockets in places the traditional gaming industry never bothered to reach.
And every time another John sends that screenshot to his mother and says he’s never going back to the old job, the experiment looks a little more like the future.
