Our Investment in Avocado Guild
Today, we are excited to share that Hashed invested in the $18 million Series A round of Avocado Guild. Avocado Guild, the fastest growing gaming guild with automated scholar management services, currently stands at the forefront of the guild-driven crypto gaming and metaverse ecosystem.
Context
The rise of crypto gaming, also known as GameFi (a compound word of game and finance to delineate gaming platforms with aspects of financial services including but not limited to earning), has fueled the growth of gaming guilds and vice versa, creating a virtuous circle within this crypto gaming realm.
Despite the massive influx of gaming guilds into the aforementioned ecosystem since early last year, Avocado Guild has outpaced peer gaming guilds with its swift integration of in-house, full-stack automation tools to onboard and retain a large number of elite scholars at an unprecedented rateacross various regions, particularly in Southeast Asia.
In layman’s terms, scholars are players who essentially borrow in-game NFT assets to generate yield for guilds and themselves, of varying revenue sharing mechanisms, by playing crypto gaming platforms, such as Axie Infinity and Thetan Arena.
In a nutshell, Avocado Guild has evolved into the biggest guild in GameFi in terms of metrics including, but not limited to, the daily number of onboarding scholars.
Our Investment Thesis
A. We firmly believe Avocado Guild is becoming the leading guild in crypto gaming
The guild model is fairly simple: a guild hires managers to recruit scholars so as to lend the in-game assets acquired by the respective guild. As scholars are the core monetization channel for this model, it is of utmost importance that the process of onboarding and tracking scholars is simplified, automated and rigorously validated.
Besides the sheer number of scholars registered, the key metrics to look for in-depth are 1) retention rate of elite scholars, 2) yield/revenue per scholar, 3) quality of gameplay of each scholar, and 4) efficiency of in-game asset utilization by guild’s scholars.
For these metrics to be evaluated thoroughly on a real-time basis, a well-planned scholar management system and automation tools are necessitated.
Avocado Guild has not only generated one of the highest revenues in 2021 across all major guilds, but also has highlighted on crafting and constantly improving the aforementioned infrastructure and tools for scholar management.
B. Strong team with high execution speed that resembles the growth of Southeast Asia’s crypto sector
The Avocado Guild team, led by serial entrepreneur Brendan Wong, has shown a high level of execution speed throughout last year.
In spite of being a latecomer to this space than other major guilds like YGG, Avocado has evolved into one of the largest guilds in a short matter of time.
It has proven viral across social media platforms in Southeast Asia, namely Facebook, becoming the go-to-guild channel for many new users in the Philippines.
As widely covered in mass media, the Southeast Asian crypto gaming market is growing exponentially, and a team that can quickly adjust to this ever-growing GameFi landscape and market is the pivotal key to sustainable growth of a guild.
Concluding Thoughts
Hashed is always striving to back the most creative and forward-thinking founders in Web 3 and specifically in the gamefi and metaverse sectors. We are pleased to collaborate with the Avocado Guild team to accelerate its growth within the GameFi realm.
