Web3 Guilds: The Rebirth of Organized Work
Humans have been forming guild-like collectives to protect their economic interests since the days of the Sumerians.
It’s a system that has survived (at least in part) the collapse of numerous empires, kingships, and rulers. However, despite their long history, guilds have struggled to maintain their relevance and utility in recent times.
Web3 guilds — the latest iteration in the organizational structure’s lineage — promises to change that.
But what exactly are web3 guilds, and what makes them so different from their predecessors? Before we explain, it’s worth taking a quick trip down memory lane to better understand what guilds are and where they came from.
An Abridged History of Guilds
Post-classical guilds — which are what most people picture when they hear the term “guild” — were associations of artisans and merchants that oversaw the practice of certain crafts and trades. They first emerged in Europe during the Middle Ages as a means of regulating competition and protecting professional interests; as they grew in popularity, guilds became a major source of education, training, and employment due to their specialized structures and monopolistic influence.
Sounds great, right?
Not for everyone.
While guilds helped establish common information/practices as well as a framework for acquiring skills, membership was often severely limited to reduce competition. Moreover, scholars argue that they concentrated resources to the politically powerful minority, and negatively affected innovation by hindering free practitioning and free trade. This, experts contend, is what led to their eventual decline.
What if instead, guilds weren’t focused on regulating and restricting, but sharing and empowering? What if they weren’t controlled by the politically powerful, but by the people? And what if they weren’t based on geographic boundaries, but the vast expanse of the Internet?
These are just a few of the questions that web3 guilds are beginning to explore.
What is a Web3 Guild?
Although there is no one single definition for what a web3 guild is, they’re generally considered to be a collective of crypto-enabled developers, designers, and thinkers that share resources (be it knowledge or labour) in the pursuit of a common goal.
In a way, you can think of web3 guilds like craft-specific DAOs where members work together and contribute to projects. As they do so, they earn financial rewards/equity in the organization in the form of tokens.
While it’s certainly early days for guilds on web3, this isn’t the web community’s first attempt to establish guilds on the Internet.
In 1999, Advogato — a hybrid between a social network and an open source development guild — launched in an effort to unite against Microsoft’s growing influence. Unfortunately, Adovgato decommissioned its server and shut down in late 2017, with some placing the blame on the platform’s potentially faulty trust metric.
The reasons for Advogato’s failure could be many. However, if the downfall of Advogato was due to a flawed trust metric, perhaps this is one of the reasons why web3 guilds (which are built upon blockchain’s trustless system) are making the resurgence they are today.
The Web3 Guilds of Today
To date, web3 guilds have typically taken the form of decentralized service providers like Raid Guild.
However, we’re beginning to see a departure from skeuomorphic guilds into uncharted territory with things like Play-to-Earn (P2E) gaming guilds.
P2E gaming guilds are unique in that instead of bringing together people to work together on projects, members of P2E guilds like Guildfi and Yield Guild contribute by playing blockchain-based games (e.g., Axie Infinity) together; sharing earnings, rewards, and crypto knowhow in the process.
It’s no doubt the P2E model will sound strange, if not impossible, to many.
“How could people earn income playing games? That’s not work. It’s too good to be true!”
However, the P2E model has existed for decades — albeit often illegally.
Take Diablo 2, the cult-classic action RPG developed by Blizzard Entertainment, for example. Originally released in 2000, Diablo 2 went on to define the hack-and-slash genre and popularize the concept of “farming” for rare virtual items. Although technically against the game’s Terms of Service, Diablo 2 players have long been able to purchase in-game items for real money through illicit online marketplaces.
Thanks to a recent remastering, Diablo 2’s black market economy remains as strong as ever. A cursory glance of unofficial online marketplaces for the game reveals a smattering of virtual swords, helmets, and trinkets — some of which sell for hundreds of dollars a piece.
But Diablo 2 is just one example of a game with an unsanctioned marketplace. There are far more where that comes from.
Ultimately, what NFT-games like Axie Infinity (and by extent, the P2E gaming guilds that form around them) are doing is legitimizing P2E gaming — a model that has long been relegated to the underground.
If guilds can legitimize new crafts, they can create new economies. The question then becomes, what crafts do humanity need most?
The Future of Web3 Guilds
In Terry Pratchett’s beloved fantasy series Discworld, the fictional capital city of Ankh-Morpork is home to roughly 300 different Guilds — ranging from the Clockmaker’s Guild to the Dog Guild (which according to the Discworld wiki, “[controlled] scavenging rights, nighttime barking duties, breeding permissions and howling rotas”).
Though entirely fictional — and clearly, rarely serious — there may be a seemingly unlikely parallel between the Discworld universe and web3’s.
That is, that the only limit to the kind of web3 guilds we create is our imagination.
What about a guild for music producers, where members contribute by sharing how they create certain sounds and effects? The downside is copycats; the upside is entirely new genres of music.
Or a guild that reinvents secondary education by open-sourcing information and creating roadmaps for career development? If university textbooks couldn’t keep up with the pace of innovation a decade ago, they certainly can’t now.
There’s so much human potential that web3 guilds can unlock, and we’re only beginning to scratch the surface.
Web3 Guilds: What’s Old is New Again
With the advent of blockchain and cryptocurrency, guilds — once an obsolete vestige of feudalism — are being re-defined as a vehicle for economic and social progress. Free of the technical and social shackles that plagued their forerunners, web3 guilds have an opportunity to accelerate knowledge transfer, democratize wealth creation, and spur new economies.
While it remains to be seen whether or not web3 guilds will succeed in doing so, any concept that survives as long as guilds have is worth paying attention to — especially when they re-emerge in the zeitgeist of innovators.
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