YGG announces Onchain Guilds

Deploying on Base

The first news to come out of Yield Guild Games’ YGG Play Summit, which is being held in Manila, comes direct from YGG itself.

It’s announced what it’s calling Onchain Guilds, which — to me — seems to be something between a guild and a DAO but fully onchain.

YGG calls them “digital gaming communities”.

In terms of featureset, they will enable groups to run treasury wallets, mint NFTs and access project management dashboards driven by individuals’ onchain activity.

Onchain Guilds will deploy on Coinbase’s Ethereum-based L2 Base and its creator Jesse Pollak was on hand for the launch.

In some sense, then, this looks like a logical progression of what YGG has been doing since 2021 using a mixture of web2 and web3 technologies. The point of operating on a L2 like Base is that everything — or at least all important things? — can be put onchain.

Base transactions typically cost $0.01, which isn’t nothing if you’re doing a lot of them, but Dizon said in BCGW #167 that YGG wasn’t going to launch its own blockchain.

“I think it’s really stupid that everyone is looking to pivot to their own L2 or L3. Everyone is trying to sell their own block space. We’re not selling any block space. We’re looking to fill up block space with people and with actions going onchain.

So no, we’re not making our own game and no, we don’t have our own blockchain. What we do is we bring the human layer, the social, the group layer onchain. We get people to form groups together and then do things, do actions together, play games together onchain.”

The announcement of Onchain Guilds is the fulfilment of such comments.

Of course, in terms of why YGG is looking to launch such a protocol, that’s obviously not just for its own benefit. It wants to expand its reach. Onchain Guilds will enable that as it means external communities will be able to plug into its existing Guild Achievement Programs, which reward gamers for playing specific games.

Quite how the YGG token will fit into the business model remains to be seen. It’s currently live on Ethereum and Ronin and presumably will be launched on Base.

In other related news, YGG and Immutable have signed a strategic partnership that will see Immutable games plugged into YGG’s GAPs and Immutable’s Passport wallet integrated into its tech, presumably including Onchain Guilds in future.

Immutable will also front-up $1 million-worth of prizes for activity in its games.

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Calendar

• Fableborne’s Season 3 starts — 20th November

• Super Champs’ CHAMP token goes live on Base — 20th November

• MapleStory Universe starts its second pioneer test — 20th November

• Off The Grid’s $600,000 All Stars invitational starts — 20th November

• Pirate Nation’s Season 2 reward claim opens — 21st November

• Aavegotchi’s play-to-airdrop event for Geist L3 starts — 21st November

• STEPN is attempting to break the world record for “most users to complete a remote one-mile distance in 24 hours” — 23rd November

• Wild Forest WF token pre-sale starts — 3rd December

• The Sandbox Alpha Season 4 ends — 17th December

Funding news

• Gaming guild KGeN (Kratos Gamer Network) has announced an ecosystem funding round worth $10 million, taking its total funding to $30 million. It was led by Aptos Labs with participation from Polygon and gaming DAO Game7.

The round was based around KGeN’s forthcoming token, assuming a fully diluted value of $500 million. The previous funding round had a FDV of $150 million.

The investment will be used to further scale KGeN’s activity. Although headquartered in India, it also has growing audiences in Brazil and Nigeria and across MENA and southeast Asian countries. To-date, it claims to track almost 11 million gamers with over 3 million MAUs, processing almost 200 million gamer attributes through its Proof of Gamer engine.

Oh No, Not Another L3 news

• Parallel Studios has confirmed it’s going to launch its own Primechain via the B3 gaming blockchain, which is built on Base. Its ecosystem includes the PRIME token and games such as TCG Parallel — which are on Ethereum — and forthcoming AI-sim Parallel Colony, which was going to be on Solana but presumably isn’t now.

Build Back (NFT Business) Better news

• Having launched its ERC721C standard, Limit Break has made its Creator Token Standard 4.0 and Payment Processor 3.0 permissionless for deployment on any EVM chain. These are the latest components in its campaign to provide tooling to enable NFT creators to control the business uses of their assets.

Creator Token Standard 4.0 enables creators to block transfers of their NFTs and freeze accounts, as well as enforcing royalties, minimum and maximum pricing and KYC requirements.

Payment Processor 3.0 enables bulk order signing of up to 1,024 orders from a single signature, adaptive protocol fees, as well as various UX features relating to gas fee and use of wrapped tokens.

Of course, purists will point out that such controls add strongly centralized features, but Limit Break says these are required to ensure creators can be justly rewarded for their work.

Next up, Limit Break says it will be extending these concepts to tokens with its ERC20C protocol.