It’s good to see more forward-thinking guilds are thinking strategically about their long term business model.
As Merit Circle puts it in its most recent Treasury Report…
“We can’t stress enough that merely focusing on gaming operations as a gaming DAO is an unsustainable way of approaching the future. Therefore, we are determined to build products that are resilient to any market condition.”
One aspect of this is that almost by default, the best capitalized guilds have effectively become blockchain game ETFs. This is not necessarily a good thing.
Now positioned as an general investment play, including DeFi yield mechanics, as well as being game studio (live with Edenhorde) and a guild with scholars, Merit Circle currently has around $115 million-worth of crypto and NFTs, including investments in over 55 games.
More focused on scholarships, AvocadoDAO’s $36 million is spread across 46 projects although the only live-at-scale games are Axie Infinity, CyBall and Pegaxy, all of which are experiencing strong token price declines.
Meanwhile the smaller Play It Forward DAO says it has around $6 million in assets while bemoaning that its PIF token’s market cap is now less than $1 million.
And it’s this sort of disconnect that’s going to be the issue for many guilds.
If/as the wheels fall off current projects in the blockchain game sector, so most prior investments will trend to zero; something that will be combined with an unravelling of the concept of guilds as some sort of magical global UBI distribution process.
At that point, the value of most existing guilds tokens will also decline to zero, not withstanding any underlying asset value the guilds may own because guild tokens are not structured to be investment-grade assets reflecting underlying assets. That’s a purely accidental coupling.
Once this confidence is gone, there can be no demand even for underlying solid assets because there’s no formal way to extract that value for guild token holders.
And this is the situation forward-thinking guilds need to ensure they never face.
Funding news
Canadian outfit Dapper Labs has announced it’s put together a $725 million ecosystem fund to kickstart developer adoption for its Flow blockchain, which is specifically designed for high performance games and consumer-facing entertainment apps.
As well as Dapper’s own investment arm, existing investors including a16z, Coatue, Union Square Ventures, Coinfund, Digital Currency Group and Cadenza Ventures also participated.
Dapper Labs raised $555 million during 2021 at a $7.6 billion valuation, something that hasn’t been fulfilled by user adoption since with only the NBA Top Shot NFT collection finding product market fit.
Despite that, Dapper says over 7,500 developers are working on products on Flow, although the Big Blockchain Game list only contains 12 projects on Flow, none of which are live or particularly high profile.
Jambo has announced a $30 million Series A round to bring blockchain to Africa consumers. The round was led by Paradigm, with participation from ParaFi, Pantera, Delphi, Gemini, Kingsway, Morningstar, Shima, Synthetix, GuildFi and many more.
A broad education play, Jambo plans to build a “web3 super app” that will include DeFi functionality and play-to-earn games. It will also launch its own AfricaDAO investment organization to fund local startups.
Partnership news
YGG has acquired $500,000-worth of NFTs in Wildlife Studios’ Castle Crush. The web2 mobile game (PC version in development too) is getting a web3 upgrade as maxed out in-game heroes will get the option to be ascended to the blockchain, becoming NFTs.
The game will also launch its ACS token on the Avalanche blockchain which NFT-holders will be able to earn via various activities when the upgrade goes live in the coming month.
Wildlife says Castle Crush has around 200,000 DAUs (including me) and 40,000 competitive players (me less so), who it hopes to onboard to web3.
Referral Rewards news
Blockchain gaming platform Gala Games is going all-out to build community with a referral program that will give away $4 million of its GALA token during May.
The rewards are given out as through individual games so if players of Town Star can generate ten playing referrals, they get the Feed Bot NFT, while players of Spider Tanks can enter the referral reward pool by generating six referrals.
Gala claims it gave away $2 billion of rewards during 2021, although it’s worth pointing out the price of the GALA token rose 70,000% during 2021, and has since fallen 88% from its November 2021 all-time-high.
C’est la vie!