How YGG’s World-Class Community Leadership Landed the New York Times
During the YGG Play Summit last November, Yield Guild Games (YGG) hosted the red-carpet premiere of Metaverse Filipino Worker (MFW). As a follow-up to the viral 2021 Play-to-Earn short film, MFW features YGG community members from the Philippines who discovered a range of different job opportunities and career pathways in Web3 gaming as an alternative to seeking work abroad. It shares an update on the lives of familiar characters from the original short film, covering some lessons they learned over the course of the last crypto cycle.
In MFW, there are two scenes that show YGG Esports Captain Disi and NFT X-Street founder JB reading about themselves in a New York Times (NYT) article by journalist Eli Tan. Published in March 2024, the article was inspired by content Eli had watched online from the 2023 YGG Web3 Games Summit and chronicles both JB and Disi’s journeys amid crypto’s resurgence in the Philippines. The story appeared online and on the front page of the NYT’s business section, reaching the publication’s 150 million monthly readers.
This coverage marks a watershed moment for the Filipino Web3 community, as the NYT is widely considered the gold standard of journalism across the globe. Since entering syndication in 1851, the NYT has influenced public discourse in the US and internationally through its rigorous investigative reporting and coverage of foreign affairs.
As part of his research, Eli traveled to the Philippines to meet with members of the local Web3 community. During his visit to Cebu, he met with YGG community leader, Superquests mentor, and Guild Advancement Program (GAP) Ambassador, Kookoo. In Manila, Eli joined a meetup arranged by the strategic communications advisory firm Emfarsis and got to know several key players.
At the Manila meetup, Eli spoke with Philippine Star tech editor and Anito Legends co-founder Jayvee Fernandez, BitPinas founder Michael Mislos, YGG Pilipinas Community Coordinator Kuya Kevs, ALLGUD guild founder Munchies, and more. Through these interviews, Eli learned about their history, their background in crypto, and what they had been doing since the crypto market came down from its peak in 2021.
Joniel Bon (JB) — NFT X-Street co-founder, former YGG Scholarship Manager
An IT practitioner of 15 years, JB first learned about blockchain technology in 2018 through Bitcoin. During these early years, he traded Bitcoin and Ethereum at low volumes but did not think much more of the technology beyond its potential as an investment.
It was only after he had learned about Axie Infinity in late 2020 that he realized there was so much more to blockchain than just trading crypto. Web3 gaming finally made it possible for users to be compensated for their time spent playing video games, and a community was quickly forming around this revolutionary new concept. Around this time, JB also met future YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon on Axie Infinity’s Discord server. Gabby had built a reputation as an Axie breeder, establishing himself as the go-to source for Axies among the game’s Filipino community. “There were just a handful of Filipinos on the Discord,” JB said in a follow-up interview for this Medium article. “I bought an Axie team from Boss Gab and it started from there.”
JB found success in Axie fairly quickly, supporting some of the Philippines’ first Axie Infinity players during the game’s early stages. Encouraged by these results, JB used the COVID lockdown as an opportunity to explore the new possibilities Web3 was opening up, putting his IT career on pause for the time being. That pause soon became permanent. After meeting JB, Gabby realized that the Axie breeding he was doing in his spare time could be much more than just a hobby. It had the potential to grow into a sustainable business model that could benefit everyone involved.
Unlike JB, many Filipinos borrowed Axies from Gabby instead of buying them, giving him a portion of their earnings as a way of showing gratitude. Gabby took this as a cue to scale up this venture, formally establishing YGG in December 2020. This enabled gamers all over the country to start playing Axie at no initial financial cost and would later be known as YGG’s Scholarship Program. The model provided beginners or “scholars” access to the NFT in-game items owned by YGG, and an advanced player would be assigned to mentor them as their Scholarship Manager. This guidance would help scholars maximize their token rewards from games, and they would often end up earning enough to purchase their own NFTs, “graduating” from the program and becoming Scholarship Managers themselves.
As JB took more and more responsibilities within YGG, he grew from being one of its earliest members into a full-fledged YGG Scholarship Manager. In this role, he lent Axie NFTs to dozens of players, helping to onboard and guide them along their Web3 journey.
Survivors of the Crypto Winter
At its peak in early May 2021, Axie’s in-game currency SLP was valued at US$0.36 according to CoinGecko. With most players earning between 150 to 200 SLP per day, Axie gave many Filipinos a much-needed source of additional income they could earn at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, SLP began to decline in value soon after. By the time the Crypto Winter took hold in early 2022, the SLP price had sunk to US$0.01. By May 2022, just a year removed from its all-time high, 1 SLP was worth less than half a US penny. These conditions challenged even the most dedicated players. It was the first time for many community members, including JB himself, to experience a full crypto cycle. “During that time, all I could see was the graph constantly going up. I had no idea about bull and bear cycles,” JB said. “So when everything started going downward, we were really shocked.”
With the market decline, many scholars ultimately let go of their side hustle. Meanwhile, others rallied together through the downturn, finding strength and purpose in their community. Playing Axie might have become a less materially rewarding experience during this time, but YGG’s most stalwart community members stayed put. As the Crypto Winter raged on, they’d joke around, work on their skills, and play Web2 games together while waiting out the storm. In an effort to better support the scholars that chose to stay, JB proposed to his fellow Filipino Scholarship Managers to merge their communities, setting up the precursor of what would later become NFT X-Street.
“We really struggled during the bear market. Our numbers really diminished. So from there, we tried to come up with another business model for our community, an additional opportunity for them to earn,” JB said. During this transitory period, JB experimented with giving his scholars beta-testing jobs for blockchain projects to help supplement their lost income.
The bear market also gave many Web3 gaming startups the opportunity to focus on building and growth. Web3 game development continued this time as developers hoped to be ready to catch the market’s next big surge. From 2022 to 2023, YGG’s ecosystem of partnered games continued to grow. After starting out with Axie as its sole partner in 2020, four years later, YGG now has over 100 game and infrastructure partners, 18 of which are currently playable Web3 games. This, in turn, offered a wealth of opportunity to JB’s community.
Aside from Axie relaunching with improved mechanics designed for economic sustainability, new titles such as the Web3 social and farming game Pixels began to pick up steam. In November 2023, Pixels became the first game on Ronin since Axie to cross 100,000 daily active users (DAU), reaching over 200,000 DAU during this time. By early 2024, Pixels broke the 1 million DAU mark. In light of the revitalized Web3 gaming space, JB eventually decided to name the group NFT X-Street — a nod to their constant pursuit of “X-to-earn” opportunities, and a reminder of their origins as gamers that played Axie to earn rewards. This new paradigm represents NFT X-Street’s readiness to take on whatever opportunities await them next in Web3. “We’re the survivors of the Crypto Winter,” he said.
The Future of NFT X-Street
In the early 2000s, the Philippines had a vibrant internet cafe culture. These “computer shops” enabled gamers to play the hottest titles like Counter-Strike, DOTA and Ragnarok Online with their friends by renting access to a gaming computer at a low cost. For those who spent their formative years in these IRL gaming communities, it was a common ambition for entrepreneurial gamers to one day operate their own internet cafe. Among this cohort of entrepreneurial gamers was JB.
With support from YGG and the Web3 gaming platform Treasure Hunt, in January 2024, JB was able to fulfill his long-held dream of opening an internet cafe, establishing a blockchain gaming bootcamp in Manila to give his guild members easy access to Web3’s latest and greatest releases.
Named after his guild, the NFT X-Street bootcamp is stocked with five desktop PCs specced with NVIDIA 4060 GPUs and ultrawide monitors. Through this modern setup, visitors will be able to play even the more hardware-intensive spectrum of Web3 games together and in person. “It’s really fun when you have your friends playing with you side by side. That experience is everything — when you go to computer shops with your classmates after school, playing games until midnight. The real bonding is there,” JB said.
Since it opened, YGG and NFT X-Street members have regularly visited the bootcamp to play Web3 games such as Nifty Island and Heroes of Mavia, earning around twice the Philippines’ minimum wage of US$11 a day, as cited in Eli’s article. Regulars also often bring their friends to the cafe to introduce them to Web3, which JB deeply encourages. The bootcamp has also hosted parties for a range of Web3 titles, including The Sandbox and MetaCene. Through the bootcamp, JB has been able to mentor and educate his community more directly, as well as onboard players into YGG’s questing platforms organically.
Down the line, JB hopes to expand the types of services NFT X-Street community members can provide. “It’s very ambitious. But in five years, we won’t just be a gaming community,” JB said. Envisioning the bootcamp as a Web3 office of the future, he hopes to continue training and upskilling his guild members to give them even more opportunities.
Ian Dela Cruz (Disi) — YGG Esports Team Captain
As Axie Infinity took off in the Philippines during the COVID-19 pandemic, YGG sought to further democratize access to the game by boosting its support for its growing pool of esports players and content creators. These community members would help mentor and guide new players, as well as showcase the nature of the game when played at the highest level.
By the time Disi joined YGG in late 2020, he was already a seasoned Axie streamer. Thanks to one of his viewers on Twitch, he was able to build a team of Axies that could compete for the top spot on the game’s leaderboards. During this time, participating competitively in the Axie ecosystem was prohibitively expensive for most Filipinos. A standard team of three Axies could cost upwards of US$1,000. A winning team was even more expensive. “One of my viewers was a big whale in Axie Infinity from Malaysia. They lent me competitive Axies to play with, and because of that, I was able to rise up the ranks,” said Disi in a follow-up interview conducted for this article.
Through his streams, Disi was discovered by YGG Pilipinas Campaign Director John Sedano and former YGG key opinion leader (KOL) Archer Perez. Soon after, Disi was invited to join YGG as a KOL, which gave him an opportunity to share his game knowledge with newcomers. His experience competing at the highest level of the game eventually compelled YGG to start its own esports team.
From Content Creator to Esports Captain
Over the next year, Disi would continue competing in Axie, along with hosting streams and creating educational resources for new players. Like JB, Disi saw his Web3 life take an abrupt turn in early 2022.
“I kind of expected the Crypto Winter would happen. I just didn’t expect it to happen so fast,” Disi shared … . Although Axie Infinity continued to be a rewarding experience for its top-performing players, interest in the game waned among the rest of its player base. With support from his teammates and the friends he had made in Web3, he strove to continue creating value for the YGG community through his video content, even as the bear market arrived in full force.
More recently, Disi has branched out into other Web3 titles besides Axie, spending more of his time competing in Parallel and playing Pixels. He also leads YGG’s esports team and is a major contributor to YGG’s content creation division, recently coming out with a series of video tutorials for Parallel. He has ventured into the world of shoutcasting as well.
Disi also used the YGG Pilipinas Roadtrip as an opportunity to share his love for Parallel, where he led live demos of the game and offered guidance to players in attendance. He was a mainstay of YGG Pilipinas’ nationwide tour, which wrapped up with a grand finale in Manila. Nearly 7,000 attendees gathered at these events across its run, giving Disi and his fellow KOLs a chance to teach newcomers about Web3 and celebrate their growing community with other Web3 gaming veterans.
Farming with Family
Disi has found more time to pursue other interests outside of gaming since his early days as an Axie streamer. After brainstorming with his brothers on how to invest their crypto earnings, they decided to follow in their family’s footsteps and start a farm. This decision would later align with Disi’s Web3 activities, as he found himself spending as much time tending virtual farmlands on Pixels as his IRL dragon fruit farm.
“Most of my relatives are farmers,” said Disi. “It’s natural for us to be interested in a game where you can virtually farm and potentially earn.” With Pixels’ compelling gameplay and vibrant community to support his efforts, Disi has been able to push forward YGG’s vision of enabling more people to benefit from Web3 gaming. “The younger generations are seeing this opportunity for themselves, and I’m just thinking that it’d be such a privilege in life to actually be able to know this kind of stuff early.”
Since its introduction to the Guild Advancement Program (GAP), Pixels has become one of the most popular games among YGG players. YGG has deepened its partnership with the game by helping develop its guild system and rolling out a Superquest in March 2024 to guide players through the new feature. In March 2024, Gabby and Pixels founder Luke Barwikowski also met up at Venice Beach, California, to discuss what building successful Web3 games looks like from a founder’s perspective.
The NYT coverage putting a spotlight on YGG community members like Disi has allowed them to share their success with their families in a more tangible way. “There was a time when my grandpa was interviewed by a news program about a decade ago. My whole family was so happy that he got featured on TV as a rice farmer,” he said. “Now it’s me getting featured on something, and it’s still related to farming. Having these roots with my grandpa and being able to experience the same thing was something I never expected,” Disi said.
Community as a Rallying Cry
In April 2024, Bitcoin surpassed its previous all-time high valuation of over US$64,000 from 2021, giving rise to a renewed global interest in crypto. This is especially true in the Philippines, with Eli noting the various crypto companies beginning to occupy billboards throughout Metro Manila. According to Chainalysis, the value of crypto transactions in the Philippines also increased by 70% from September to October 2023, reaching US$7.3 billion.
Today, the Philippines continues to lead the play-to-earn revolution. World-class events like the YGG Play Summit have further established the country as the epicenter of Web3 gaming adoption, where 30% of the world’s crypto-earning gamers are based, as reported in the NYT article.
With YGG’s player-first approach, its community has been empowered to thrive despite even the most catastrophic events in crypto. Through initiatives such as the Guild Advancement Program (GAP) and Superquests, YGG ensures that its players and guilds will continue to have access to life-changing opportunities and achieve long-term growth no matter the market conditions.
Driven by a community that whole-heartedly contributes their talents to build a flourishing ecosystem, YGG is more excited than ever to keep bringing emerging economies like the Philippines to the forefront of this technological revolution.
Read Eli Tan’s full article in the New York Times.
Watch Metaverse Filipino Worker: MFW.LIFE
