GuildFi, aiming to plug a gap in the thriving cryptocurrency industry, launched in 2021. Within a year of operation, GuildFi has seen tremendous growth in multiple aspects, namely but not limited to, a growing community, partnerships, supporters and backers as well as continuous enhancement of the platform and its features. This article aims to outline the major accomplishments that we feel GuildFi has achieved this year as well as a brief look into what to expect come 2022 and beyond. As we dive into the successful aspects of 2021, we have split the section into the following key parts and provided key statistics in relevant sections to outline the magnitude of GuildFi’s growth:
- The rise of guilds, play-to-earn and metaverse
- How we got started?
- Invested round & $GF token
- Game Partnerships
- The bigger picture — more than just a guild
- 2022 and Beyond
The rise of guilds, play-to-earn and metaverse
In late June, seemingly every single Crypto Native worst nightmare seemed to yet again be reignited — the crypto bear market. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies more broadly had a massive crash in prices followed by an extended period of low volatility.
Little did everyone know, a new cryptocurrency sector would emerge from the ashes and reignite the cryptocurrency bull run. This new cryptocurrency sector, arguably a new paradigm, is the play-to-earn gaming sector.
The flagship asset that ignited this reversal in the crypto markets was Axie Infinity. Axie Infinity is a trading and battling play-to-earn game that allows players to collect, breed, raise, and trade creatures known as Axies, which are also digitized as NFTs.
However, a common problem identified despite the rapid growth in Axie Infinity and, more generally, play-to-earn gaming is the inability for newer users to participate due to the large initial investment required. As a consequence, the Guild model was introduced whereby assets held by a singular entity (the guild) are lent to players (scholars) who then play the game. The rewards earned are then split between the scholars and the guild, as agreed.
Although the traditional Guild model is in its infancy, there are several other opportunities that we saw in the rise of the metaverse and cryptocurrencies more broadly. Therefore, GuildFi has focused on creating a Guild model which is community based, or that of an open and community-driven Steam, which has since been coined Guild 2.0.
GuildFi aims to create an interconnected ecosystem of games, NFTs, and communities, to maximize players’ benefits and enable interoperability across the metaverse.
How we got started?
The GuildFI journey started early in 2021. After having seen the tremendous growth of Axie Infinity in the Philippines, there was an air of inevitability that Thailand would be next. Based on this, the founders of GuildFi decided to start a self-funded guild strictly within Thailand.
Shortly after, GuildFi started gaining traction in the play-to-earn gaming world alongside other leaders.
However, as GuildFi and the industry progressed, the potential of the entire industry was apparent, particularly the opportunities available. This resulted in GuildFi deciding to pivot from being a guild, to a Guild 2.0
The first innovation, of many, that GuildFi focused on was ezHub, which is part of the GuildFi Tools Zone. EzHub aims to aid both players and managers in their gaming journey by providing the go-to repository. EzHub was actually formed even prior to the inception of GuildFi in April, but has since gained tremendous traction where there are now over 120,000 registered users and 25,000 daily active users.
As time progressed, the vision of GuildFi continued to evolve. One of the key pivotal points of our journey that allowed us to further grow was our partnership with Alpha Finance Lab, one of GuildFi’s compatriots. The partnership involves GuildFi being onboarded into Alpha Finance Lab’s launchpad program. This results in Alpha Finance Lab, a leading project in its sector, acting as a consultant for GuildFi. The partnership was announced on the 15th of November.
Investment round & $GF token
Similarly, another key pivotal point of our journey was the very successful seed round raise. GuildFi raised a total of $6m on the 11th of November 2021. The raise was lead by some of the biggest crypto investment funds in the space, DeFiance Capital and Hashed, with several other investors also participating in the round such as Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, Animoca Brands, Dapper Labs, PlayVentures, Coin98 Ventures, and Skyvision Capital. In addition to participating in the raise, these said funds have also helped us tremendously advising our project thus far.
Following the successful seed fund raise and partnerships, we decided that the next logical step, with our community in mind, would be to issue a governance token for the GuildFi ecosystem. Therefore, GF, the governance token for the GuildFi ecosystem was issued on the Ethereum mainnet. The GF token accrues direct value from the GuildFi ecosystem.
To assure that the launch of the GF token was fair, we launched the GF token through a Token Launch Auction (TLA) format on Copper. From this, GuildFi was able to fundraise a record-breaking total of $139.6m.
Furthermore, having completed the community fundraising, GuildFi announced another key part of our ecosystem, the GuildFI Treasury Zone. The GuildFi Treasury Zone allows us to manage our money appropriately and effectively, investing in different parts of the cryptocurrency ecosystem with the aim to conserve capital and grow the fund.
Furthermore, promptly after the TLA was completed, an attractive and flexible staking program was introduced for community members to earn even more GF tokens on GuildFi. The staking program was extremely successful and, at the time of writing, sees more than $45 million worth of GF staked at an average APR of 481.98%. This validates the community’s long term trust in GuildFi’s vision going into 2022 and beyond.
Game partnerships and early investment
In addition to the key moments outlined above, there were also several partnerships with other games and guilds that also allowed us to evolve to become the second iteration of gaming guilds, the Guild 2.0. For example, GuildFi has partnered with multiple, unique and exciting games with arguably the highest growth potential in the play-to-earn space, namely:
- Big Time
- Pegaxy
- Axie
- Thetan
- Cyball
- Sandbox
- Nyan Heroes
- Sipher
- Summoner Arena
- Syn City
More information regarding our partnerships can be found in detail on our Medium page.
The bigger picture — more than just a guild
Along with all the partnerships and investors, the GuildFi platform itself has also scaled and grown tremendously since starting just 4 months ago. This can be clearly seen by looking at key stats from the key pillars of GuildFi’s ecosystem namely — Gaming Center, Tools Zone, Guild Zone, NFT Zone and Treasury Zone, which has been illustrated in the GuildFi Ecosystem image below.
The Gaming Center continues to attract users and keen interest with:
- 150,000+ GuildFi ID created as their Metaverse passport
- 1,000,000+ quests completed and claimed
- 10+ games onboarded
Tools Zone has seen a growing in active users:
- 120,000+ users who sign-up to use Axie tools on EzHub
- 25,000+ daily active users (DAU)
- 600+ guilds are using EzHub for scholarship management
- More tools are coming for our game partners
Guild Zone has so far recruited:
- 3000+ scholars
- 30+ coaches
- An additional 20,000 players on the waitlist
Then NFT Zone is just getting started:
- Completed its first Triple IGO with CyBall and Binance NFT which saw an oversubscription rate of more than 2000%
- Many more IGOs are coming soon as we start working closely with our game partners
In total, GuildFi ecosystem has more than 300k users worldwide, who are ready to jump into quality games, participate in interesting campaigns and get a variety of benefits from our ecosystem. That is a good start isn’t it ?
2022 and Beyond
In spite of the extreme growth that the GuildFi ecosystem has experienced, there are still several aspects of growth to look forward to in 2022. We have earmarked Game Discovery, part of the GuildFi’s Gaming Platform, to have massive growth in 2022, as an increasing number of play-to-earn games launch into the market.There are already more than 10 games listed, including some of the more well known games, and some that have yet to be launched.
Furthermore, the other zones and aspects of GuildFi will also continue to reinforce the gaming platform that users interact with. There will be continuous NFT drops through our NFT Zone from our continued partnerships with different games, as well as further integrations with other guilds in the Guild as a Service and Guild Network aspects.
In addition, through staking GF token, you will also be able to accrue value from the entire GuildFi ecosystem.
We would also like to take this opportunity to thank our wonderful community for their support. GuildFi would not be where it is today without each and every single one of you. We are extremely grateful for our community and are excited to bring you along for the GuildFi journey!
2022 will be our year, we will rock like never before.
