Settling the Digital Nation: Why We Bought $100k of Virtual Land
Yield Guild Games made two major announcements last Friday — first, we announced a purchase of 88 plots of Savannah land in Axie Infinity. Then later that day, The Sandbox announced our acquisition of a 12x12 ESTATE in its public LAND sale.
Our mission here at YGG is to bring players into the Metaverse. Part of that mission involves investing in the economic future of these virtual worlds while helping our guild members earn a living.
We believe that the future of work will be increasingly virtual, and jobs will be found inside games that have open economies. Yield-bearing virtual land is important to our theses, but why did we choose to spend $100k on these two non-fungible token (NFT) land estates from Axie and Sandbox specifically?
Axie Infinity
Axie Infinity is well-known for pioneering of play-to-earn with its Small Love Potion (SLP) token. The in-game resource can be earned by winning games in the Arena. The token supply expands with every win, and is burnt whenever it’s used to breed Axies.
It’s a great way to reward and attract players, but it is meant strictly as a utility token. The token is merely tied to breeding Axies, intended only to control the inflation rate that is a typical problem in breeding-based NFT games.
Which is why we’re interested in the AXS governance token, which has been designed to allow players to truly own the game and benefit from its upside.
The interesting detail about AXS is that in the white paper, the Axie team has allocated 54 million of the supply to its play-to-earn initiative. In the first year alone, 25.65 million AXS will be unlocked and made available to players as part of its play-to-earn initiative.
The team envisions the AXS rewards to be available via the following activities:
- Competing in the arena and winning matches.
- Winning tournaments.
- Interacting with and tending to your land plots.
- Using the Axie Infinity marketplace.
- Breeding Axies.
- Using future Axie products that haven’t been announced yet.
At the current price of $2.09 per AXS token, there are $53.6 million dollars worth of AXS that will be available in the first year of play-to-earn alone.
While there are different activities planned for the rewarding of AXS tokens, we believe that a significant portion of the AXS reward will be available via land gameplay. The market cap of all lands in Axie Infinity is currently at $39 million, with much upside for growth if the bulk of AXS is distributed via land gameplay. This means that guild members that are participating in different forms of gameplay have a chance to earn a significant portion of the AXS rewards that are allocated for play-to-earn.
The Sandbox
The Sandbox is an open play virtual world, similar to Roblox, with user-generated content that can earn its governance token SAND or valuable tokenized game assets such as Gems and Catalysts. From its blog, LAND owners will be able to do the following activities:
- Secure desirable locations from the finite amount of LAND in The Sandbox
- Participate in gameplay in The Sandbox
- Host games or experiences on your LAND
- Earn SAND by hosting gameplay or renting the LAND
- Organize contests and events on your LAND
- Participate in metaverse governance
We’re very aligned with the Sandbox’s vision of rewarding user-generated content, so we invested accordingly. This is the guild’s second acquisition of LAND within The Sandbox, with the first being a 6x6 ESTATE.
With these LANDs, the guild intends to construct its Metaverse headquarters in The Sandbox. We intend to be able to host gameplay that will enable not only players, but content and ASSET creators to earn from the experiences built on top of the guild’s real estate holdings.
Settling Virtual Worlds
We believe that Axie Infinity (AXS) and Sandbox (SAND) will be a crucial component of the play-to-earn Metaverse, and we will be investing heavily in more assets that our guild members can earn from in the near future.
Interested to learn more? Head over to our Discord server and join the guild!
