The Value of Web3 Reputation
Yield Guild Games (YGG) recently published a Concept Paper outlining its vision to enable web3 guilds all around the world to organize, scale and monetize, by establishing their operations on YGG’s Guild Protocol. With this, the Guild Protocol is a platform to aggregate gamers and guilds with verifiable skills and connect them with YGG’s over 100 partners to be able to access economic opportunities based on their talents.
At the core of YGG’s vision is the concept of web3 reputation. As a method of proving expertise in the decentralized world, web3 reputation is built by accumulating a blockchain-based record of a person’s skills, achievements, and meaningful contributions. They demonstrate their capabilities by doing onchain activities such as completing tasks, earning rewards, and demonstrating leadership in decentralized communities. Unlike traditional resumes and references, that are self-reported and difficult to validate, web3 reputation is based on verifiable credentials that can be trusted without third-party verification.
In YGG’s ecosystem, web3 reputation can be used to unlock opportunities, as the Guild Protocol is specifically designed to match players with proven skills with partners or projects in need of their talents.
Soulbound Tokens as the Building Blocks of Web3 Reputation
A positive reputation is one of the most valuable assets a person can build. In web3, reputation goes beyond a simple resume; instead, it makes it possible to provide proof of our skills and accomplishments in a completely trustless manner. Unlike traditional industries that rely on documents validated by centralized institutions to confirm identity, web3 reputation is earned through real, measurable actions that are recorded openly, transparently and permanently.
Reputation is especially crucial in web3, where bots can exploit virtual economies and block genuine players from earning rewards. Bots automate tasks, disrupting gameplay and driving down the value of in-game assets. A decentralized reputation system helps solve this by ensuring only real, verified players can participate, making it much harder for bots to gain an unfair advantage. This protects the economy and ensures rewards go to skilled, legitimate players, preserving fairness and value in the ecosystem.
Non-transferable NFTs — known as soulbound tokens (SBTs) — have become key to decentralized identity solutions. Because they are transparently recorded onchain, SBTs can be easily verified by anyone using a standard blockchain explorer. Additionally, since they cannot be traded, the holder of an SBT must be the person who genuinely earned the achievement that it represents. This ensures the credentials associated with a token are authentic and cannot be easily manipulated or faked. These traits have made SBTs a powerful solution for establishing credibility and giving users the tools to build their web3 reputation.
Since 2022, YGG has issued achievement badges to its community in the form of SBTs, to recognize and reward in-game excellence as well as community contributions. Each season of the Guild Advancement Program (GAP) presents a new set of quests to the YGG community, creating avenues for community members to showcase their skills and explore the growing roster of games within the YGG ecosystem.
With SBTs as its building blocks, YGG has created a decentralized reputation system for the participants of its questing platforms such as GAP. These SBTs serve as the Guild Protocol’s “reputation cookies,” allowing gamers and guilds to discover new opportunities across the YGG ecosystem based on their onchain activities — just as internet cookies provide users recommendations based on their browsing activity.
“The vision for YGG was always about connecting our community with learning and earning opportunities in web3,” said YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon. “Giving our members a way to build their web3 reputation through questing was the first big step to achieve this. Now we’re scaling it even further so that anyone who joins a guild can have access to opportunities that are matched to their groups’ skills.”
Establishing Reputation Through Questing
On the business side, YGG-issued SBTs make it easy for YGG’s partners to effectively target and appropriately incentivize the audiences that are most likely to be interested in trialing or learning more about their project. The reputation that YGG questers earn over time gives partners immediate access to a filtered list of individual gamers as well as guilds of all sizes that can be identified for their competencies. As such, each user’s collection of SBTs serves as their Metaverse resumé.
For instance, the YGG Game Testers Program awards game testers with SBTs along with other token rewards for participating consistently in the program. The most diligent game testers receive an achievement badge granting them the status of Elite Game Tester, which gives them priority access to exclusive and limited-time game testing offers from the program’s partners.
YGG achievement badges are also issued to community members who demonstrate value-adding, collaborative behavior. Since the earliest iterations of GAP, community quests have motivated participants to showcase their skills in content creation, community moderation, and game testing, along with giving them additional incentives to attend online and in-person YGG events. This recognition helps reinforce positive behavior, encouraging members to continue their meaningful contributions to the community.
A Decentralized Society
Through the YGG Guild Protocol, communities across web3 are empowered to mint their legacies onchain and gain access to more opportunities together. Organizing into an Onchain Guild gives groups of players the ability to build their reputation as a singular entity, making it possible for YGG to match them with rewarding activities best suited for their skills and attributes.
The YGG Guild Protocol stands to equip all kinds of communities, in web3 gaming and beyond, with the tools to grow and scale. Web3 reputation is the linchpin that makes this possible. After years of connecting people to the best opportunities available in web3, YGG is now empowering leaders within its network to do the same for their respective communities.
Download the YGG Guild Protocol Concept Paper to learn more about why web3 reputation matters.
Learn more about Season 7 of the Guild Advancement Program (GAP).
Join the YGG Discord and follow YGG on X for future updates.
