This episode of W3B’D was recorded LIVE from the Metacrafters Launch Party in Manila, Philippines. Host Sheila Lirio Marcelo is joined by Gabby Dizon, of YGG (Yield Guild Games) to discuss gaming and learn to earn concepts in crypto and the important role that the Philippines has played in the movement. Follow them as they spontaneously engage with a few crypto-curious audience members too!
Show Notes:
Host:
Sheila Lirio Marcelo, Co-Founder & CEO of Proof of Learn and Founder of Care.com
Guests:
Gabby Dizon, Co-Founder & CEO of YGG (Yield Guild Games); and Tessa Valdes, Crypto Curious Audience Member; Arci Muñoz, Crypto Curious Audience Member
This podcast is being provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as investment advice.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 00:00
Welcome to the W3B'd podcast, the newest source for the crypto curious that unblocks the mystery of blockchain and teaches you the A to Z of NFT's. I'm your host, Sheila Lirio Marcelo, an entrepreneur, educator, founder of Care.com, and CEO of ProofOfLearn. My first venture disrupted Web1 and grew with Web2. Now I'm out with another mission-driven adventure of learning and growing in Web3. Crypto is a big, exciting, and, to many of us, a bewildering world. Let's explore it together. We created this podcast to simplify and celebrate the ins and outs of the new economy, and decentralized web. On each episode of W3B'd, I'll guide a conversation between someone who's been to crypto land and someone interested in going there. You can think of me as your bridge to the metaverse. I know you'll enjoy the ride. And yes, we'll explain what the metaverse is too. And my dear friend Gabby Dizon founder and CEO of YGG is here with me tonight.
Gabby Dizon 01:11
Thanks, Sheila. This is such a special moment.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 01:13
Super excited that this is live here in Manila, Philippines where I was born and raised. Now, Kevin, my co-founder right before this event, because we're recording it live here in Manila, introduced me but this is not about me, Gabby, I'd love for you to describe what brought you into Web3. What inspired you to do crypto, and your whole background? I think I'd love for you to share it with this audience because it certainly inspired me.
Gabby Dizon 01:40
Sure. So I'll give a quick background on myself. So I was born and raised here in Manila. I graduated from Ateneo. And I got into game development in 2003. So I was actually part of the team that made the first game ever to come out of the Philippines then. And I've been part of the game industry ever since. I started a game studio called altitude games in 2014. So we were making mobile games then for iOS and Android phones. In 2017, I started getting into blockchain, friends of mine had gotten to bitcoin before. But the primary use case was remittances, which didn't really do anything for me as a game developer. But I heard about the new blockchain called Ethereum. And Kevin earlier was talking about smart contracts or programmable money. Now, if you've played different games, you know that there are very complex economies inside of games. And the idea that you could program money using solidity, the programming language of Ethereum was very compelling to me. So we started researching about Ethereum and solidity programming in 2017. And while we were doing that CryptoKitties came out in late 2017. So CryptoKitties, they popularized the non-fungible token or the NFT instead of having fungible tokens like Bitcoin or Ethereum, where it's really like one unit of Ethereum is the same as the other a non-fungible, a nonfungible token stored a unique asset on the blockchain. So it was a cat that had different unique traits. So now you could store unique items on-chain. And I thought that this had huge implications for games. Now I can put game items on the blockchain, and have people actually own them, and be able to trade and sell them, and use them. So I have been very deep into NFTs since early 2018. And in October 2018, I discovered this game called Axie Infinity. So when I started playing Axie, there were less than 500 people around the world, playing it at this time. And I just started playing battling, breeding, collecting, along with all of the other stuff I was doing on-chain. And in 2020, while I was playing the game, I noticed that there were a lot of Filipinos that started playing and coming into the Axie infinity server. A lot of these players were coming from the provinces in the Philippines such as Cabanatuan City, Davao, Batangas, a lot of them are always W's in Dubai, Korea elsewhere. And what brought them in was that in the early part of the lockdown, a lot of these people were stuck at home, didn't have any income and they were desperate for any means to make money because it was the start of pandemic, and they didn't have any earnings back then. And then they found this game started playing when you play Axie infinity and win a game, you earn this token called SLP, which is a token that is rewarded in-game, people converted this to Ethereum and Ethereum to Pesos. And they realized that the economic opportunity they have then was actually greater than some of the jobs that they have before the pandemic started. So this is an eye-opener and it brought a lot of growth to Axie infinity and to crypto gaming. A lot of the growth of Axie came from the Philippines and from the provinces in particular. So this was very interesting because now you have ordinary people who are enabled by the internet to have a crypto wallet, who can participate in a global economy by playing video games. So this, this made the Philippines, the crypto gaming center of the world. And even though a lot of people here were playing, a lot couldn't afford to buy the empty price or the Axie NFT. So you have to buy these NFTs. And then it costs something like 10'000 to 15,000 Pesos for a team of Axies to play. And a lot of people who wanted to play and earn money couldn't afford it. So that's where YGG came in. We kind of scaled the concept known as a scholarship model. Essentially, we bought a lot of these NFTs and then lent them out to players for revenue share, so that these players did not have to bear the cost of buying the NFTs to participate in this global economy. So armed with this idea, I along with my two co-founders, Beryl, who's also from the Philippines, and Owl, who is an anonymous programmer, we started YGG, raised money from global investors, and we scaled the guild model. And from then, things really grew last year as crypto and NFTs grew, we saw Axie hit the peak of over 2 million daily active users, almost half of that player base was coming from the Philippines, we saw Philippines become the like NFT, and crypto capital of the world in terms of the user base, in terms of percentage of the internet population, it's estimated as high as a third of internet users in the Philippines own a CryptoWallet. So this is higher than anywhere else in the world. So now for the first time, we are leading the revolution in a new field of technology, a field of technology, which may not have started here. But the leading use case in the world is here and other emerging markets. And that's what YGG is about.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 06:51
Just truly inspirational. I have to say the reason I met Gabby was because I was actually.. I'm a venture partner at a private equity firm called New Enterprise Associates headquartered in the United States. And we started investing in crypto. After Care.com, we sold in February 2020. My husband and I, Ron, decided that we would start investing in crypto, but then I joined NEA and started to also professionally looking at crypto companies. And I was doing diligence on a company called Axie Infinity. And then my husband pointed out that the reason for Axie Infinity’s success was due to the founder and a very clever entrepreneur named Gabby Dizon, who was actually helping the Philippines. That is what actually got my attention when my husband said, this amazing man is a social impact entrepreneur. You heard my background from Kevin at Care.com. Some things spoke to me and I haven't even met Gabby, right. And so we met at NFT New York. But what inspired me was this video that Kevin described. That a grandmother, probably I don't know Lola Virgie, but she's probably undereducated, right? I don't know how far she went in school. That she had figured out how to download a crypto wallet, purchase Ethereum, purchase NFTs, play a game, and make income. And I have to thank, by the way, in the audience today is theYGG community managers who make it happen every day by educating and guiding all across the Philippines. So that these scholars. But let's make sure these scholars can actually take advantage of the game. I want to unpack it. Because I think part of W3B'd and what I do is to try and explain to people this vision that you have Gabby, of, I remember when we met in New York, you said, Sheila, you even said it to my husband Ron who was soooo passionate. He's like, oh my god, you guys are gonna be great friends. You're like you want to take a billion people. Your vision is across the globe in underdeveloped economies to take advantage of Web3. Please, I want you to describe this from your heart. Just describe it because this is a global audience listening to this podcast of your vision for the metaverse.
Gabby Dizon 09:14
Yeah, so crypto has been around since 2009, with Bitcoin and 2014 with Ethereum and these blockchains are like global permissionless anyone can buy into them. And the people who have bought into these tokens as early as 10 years ago, have typically done well. But the problem is that you have to have money to buy in, right, so even like that it takes away most of the world that does not have access. So this global permissionless technology that democratizes value in money throughout the world, like you still need to have money to buy-in. And we want to democratize that access so that anyone in the world can join but particularly people in developing markets such as the Philippines, such as Indonesia, such as India, such as Brazil, and that's where YGG comes in, we buy into the NFTs of these play to earn games like Axie infinity, like Sandbox, like CryptoUnicorns, and then we lend them out to our player base. And so they can do their play to earn. So people can participate in these economies, using their time and their skill to earn value that can be converted into crypto and ultimately back to fiat. So we've had we've seen great success in the Philippines, where we have a lot of our community managers who are here teaching the community, the scholars in their own area in different places in the Philippines, how to work with crypto, so it starts by learning how to play a video game-like Axie but along the way, you learn about cryptocurrency, you learn how to install a crypto wallet, you learn how to exchange one token from the other, you learn how to use a crypto exchange like Coinbase, or Binance to cash out. So you're actually learning a lot of key skills along the way. In a community environment. We have really good community managers, who are also content creators like Coco over there, who help teach the community, how to learn more about crypto and really be educated. So it's not about people learning how to speculate this token because maybe the token's value is going up or going down. It's about being educated in this new world of like global finance that is happening around us.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 11:28
So let's really unpack this play to earn because there are probably listeners out there globally, who think gaming? How could you really learn because you use a lot of words about learning onboarding on to Web3? Why through a game, Gabby?
Gabby Dizon 11:47
So there are estimated at least 2 billion gamers around the world. And I guess for the ones that are older here, people see their, their children playing a lot of games. But what you don't realize is that there is a lot of concepts of learning in these games, it might be socializing, learning how to coordinate in groups, because a lot of the kids including my own do a lot of their socialization in virtual worlds like Minecraft, or Roblox, or through their, like friend, Discord servers, but also they're learning economic concepts from these games. They're learning about digital scarcity, for example, supply and demand, being able to swap one token for another. So these are the things that my son learned as he was playing Axie infinity, and learned these economic concepts at the age of 12, that I didn't learn until I was in college. So when learning is interest-based people really want to learn whether it's something that a subject that is for them at the particular grade level or not. So you see that these subjects are being ingrained into these kids younger and younger, because they're introduced by video games.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 12:55
Okay, so I have two sons. They're 30 and 22. They're sort of beyond Gen Z. What advice because you talked about your son, what advice would you give parents as you think about... because I remember being very strict. I mean, with Ryan, my 30-year-old, I said no TV during the week, sorry, love, you know, but he got to enjoy on weekends. And then Adam started to play video games. Ryan didn't think that was fair. But I even created limits. How should parents think about this new world of Web3 and gaming? And what, what would you advise? Because where is this generation going?
Gabby Dizon 13:34
So I talk a lot about this with my siblings who have children who are kind of teenagers, as well. And first of all, I think you have to be naturally interested in what your kids are doing. Don't be afraid, because they're in front of the computer all day long, they might actually be learning something as well. So you have to be interested, ask them what they're doing, ask them what they're learning. Second is that there is a very rich opportunity to learn a lot of new concepts from these games that they're playing, whether it's socialization, whether it's learning about money, learning about NFTs... I've heard of some kids here in Manila, who have gotten good at NFT trading and actually made money for themselves. And yeah, my son who has bought NFT's played Axie infinity. My daughter likes to draw art and she's released her own art NFTs as well. So just be interested and kind of lean into this technology. And I think you will learn something as well while the children are learning.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 14:30
That's great. A very good friend of mine, Leslie Cruz, who I just had lunch with the other day, her son is 11 years old, Pedsy, Pedsy is here. Pedsy already knew what NFT was and he's only 11. Right? The fact that the kids are really driving this sort of interest understanding tokenization and incentives. So let's unpack Gabby because there's again a global audience and I want to create the A to Z of to NFT's, like, play to earn, why? Why is this so important for kids to learn about incentives and understanding trading and all of this at this early stage in gaming?
Gabby Dizon 15:14
So if you've played any kind of video game, you know that incentives rule the world, people have objectives they play depending on what their goals are, they reach these goals. And now with crypto, we're able to incentivize behavior, using crypto either tokens or NFTs as rewards. So in the future work will look less like I'm employed for life with one job that looks out for me. And people will have a portfolio of things that they like to do that may earn them value, maybe in the term, in the form of tokens, or NFTs. They may be part of a DAO, which is a new way of organizing people in crypto that is kind of different from a company. So the nature of work is changing itself. And it won't look like how we are used to working in the last 20/30 years.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 16:06
Yeah, so DAO, again, I'm an unpacking it as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. And it's a group that comes together and organize through community decisions around whether it's a company or whether it's a nonprofit or an overall idea. So as we think about the scholars, specifically of YGG and your focus around developing economies, how do you recruit to get a billion across the globe?
Gabby Dizon 16:39
So we're a very community-centric group. And what we started in the Philippines, which we've done in other places around the world, is that we rely heavily on our community managers to help recruit the scholars or community members from their respective towns or cities. So right now, for example, in this room, we have community managers from places like Baguio, Batangas, Cebu, Davao, and they are the ones that teach this these concepts of how to play games like Axie how to install a crypto wallet, how to protect yourself from volatility in the crypto markets. These are things that our community managers take the time to teach their, their community. And from the Philippines, we've done this in different areas around the world. So we launched YGG through Southeast Asia last year covering Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, we launched IndiGG which is YGG in India, HolaGG in Latin America based in Brazil. So we've expanded this community concept and then now doing this around the world.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 17:44
So when you go to a rural area, how do you explain to someone what crypto is?
Gabby Dizon 17:51
So we start with the game. So the concept of play to earn is that you start by playing the game and then you learn things as you go along. And a lot of these people they may not be studying or they may not have a job, but they probably know how to play a video game. And that's the beauty of it. You set the barrier to entry very low, where you don't have to learn very fancy concepts. If you know how to play a game you can be part of the community. You start learning as you go along and then you get interested in the other aspects because if we lead with here's how to install a crypto wallet a lot of people will be intimidated.
Find the Para Sofiya and Nicola Campana going and Mahira peon, but if we start them with a video game or, Mugla Rocha Munna, Nikita, Cannon para tapas, Totoro Ancheta homebuy no cash out Yan.
English Translation 18:24
Oh this is not for me, I don't know how to do this, it's too hard. Then say, 'just play for a bit, earn some money then I'll show you how you can Cash out,
Gabby Dizon 18:32
To pesos, then people become interested. And yeah, that's that's how we do it.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 18:42
That's very hard. I'll translate it later, he was saying is very hard. And you can actually gain pesos because this is global podcast. we'll translate it later, we'll make sure we do that overlay. But in general, if we're thinking about incentivizing children early, under-educated early, and I've always had this assumption, again, I'm going to emphasize that gaming can be a powerful motivator to learn something complicated. And for years, honestly, I assumed that gaming was bad. I assumed it's an obsessive behavior. I have my own two sons. And it's really opened my eyes to see the power power of gaming, that it can actually create incentives to advance people. So now let's move to the concept of X-to-earn. So Gabi tell me your vision of X-to-earn.
Gabby Dizon 19:45
So YGG scaled the concept of play to earn? The idea is that you're doing an activity that will earn you tokens that have value, but this doesn't have to be just limited to playing games, you can do different things in Web3, where people are doing all sorts of passionate work. Some people are content creators, shoutcasters, eSports athletes, and you're able to earn value as long as what you're doing has value to the community itself. And this is where concepts like learn to earn come in, if you can play to earn, why not create to earn, why not move to earn, why not learn to earn. And I think that education that is gamified that is incentivized is going to be one of the largest economies that we will have in the web3.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 20:37
If we ever earned the right, Kevin and I and my other co-founder, Lauren Tornow. To make this company huge. I want to say on this podcast that you, my friend, inspired me from the bottom of my heart, in a hotel room in New York, with Nix Nulato Nix. Are you paying attention here? He purposefully wore shorts tonight, so I wouldn't call him on stage Nix, you're hearing me, Nix and Gabby in a brainstorm with my husband, Ron Marcelo. And I heard Gabby's vision and I said, Well, I'm not really a play to earn gal. But I'm certainly focused on education, Gabby, and I brainstormed, learn to earn. And I want to say thank you, my friend, because I am here today pursuing a different dream to help people because of you. Thank you for that.
Gabby Dizon 21:26
It's my pleasure seeing this from the very beginning.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 21:28
Thank you. Thank you, thank you. And then the next thing I said to Gabby and Nix, and to Ron. Ron looked at me, he's like, what? You're coming out of sabbatical to do what? Because Gabby's, like, who's gonna run this company? And I said, I will. But I need someone who's an incredible co founder. And of course, Nix and Gabby said at the same time, literally
Gabby Dizon 21:28
Shipped off to Kevin.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 21:31
So Kevin, my co-founder, and it just from there, we built.. we are building ProofOfLearn. So very excited. So thank you, my friends. So speaking of gaming, speaking of inspiration, we are on discord for metacrafters.io. And because we're in the game world, I am instructed by my team that I have to read this out, believe it or not, because there are lore hunters on discord. And there are quest solvers. The key to the fifth quest because we, we literally embed easter eggs that they have to go find, can be found in the articles poster, who shared the metacrafter and why YGG partnership announcement. What is the last name of that poster? You're probably wondering, Sheila, what the hell are you talking about, we have an embedded easter egg in discord. And the reason this is important is because you should all visit the discord for metacrafters.io because tonight, you get to get on a chance to be on the allow lists of an NFT drop that we are planning to drop, a very special Genesis block of metacrafters.io.
Gabby did a great job representing the crypto confidence side of our discussion tonight. And before I left the stage at our special recording for Manila, I had two new friends join us to talk about their journeys into the Metaverse. Tessa Valdez and Arci Muñoz are eager to learn more about crypto and they ask us great questions about getting started.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 23:39
Tessa, come. She has no idea that I'm even doing this and then Arci, are you here? Oh my gosh. Come here. Come on. Come on up. Come on up. Not that I was expecting this. Let me tell you why I'm doing this. Please have a seat. Okay, Gabby. Didn't even know they're coming up. Okay, come scoots good over. Okay. Hello. You like the future? You do look like the future we just met. Oh my gosh, okay. This was not planned. The reason is my podcast W3B'd is about the crypto curious to the crypto confident. Okay. Wow. Don’t worry, don’t worry, this is gonna be super comfortable. This one was crypto confident. Right? So tell me from learning tonight, what do you think about Gabby's talk? What were you inspired by?
Tessa Valdes 25:09
I'm just inspired that in spite of everything, all your success and all your, it's like coming back home giving back which is for me at this time at this age of this is global global oneness, and that you're giving back to the Philippines. And we so need people like you right now and giving opportunity for those that don't have it. It's just something that wow bless you guys, and we are, you know, whatever we do in the world, we just want to give it back and I'm so happy that given the opportunity, all that you're saying, it's giving a name to gaming, which I thought you know, now I'm gonna look at my kids and say, Hey, it's okay that you play.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 25:58
You know Tessa, I'm gonna give you a special avatar on the game. You're so inspirational.
Tessa Valdes 26:02
I think you should make me an anime something something.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 26:05
So cool! Okay, Arci, how are you inspired by this evening?
Arci Muñoz 26:09
So I'm just really glad I got a call from them them me up earlier. And he was like, Yo, Arci, I need you tonight. I was like, for what? So there's this event about crypto, meta! And we're, I've heard of this several times before. But I really don't know how to enter or to start. But I've been hearing about Axie, my brother has been doing it. And I've been telling my mom Marcy, there's no, it's not bad. You know, gaming is not really that bad. Because sometimes, I spend a lot of time like, in my entire day in my Nintendo Switch. But, you know, so thank you, because we really need this, you know, thank you for educating us. And I'm really looking forward to learn more about this. And to start with..
Tessa Valdes 27:10
Can I just say something? It's what what I really picked up is, I thought that we are too late into the crypto game. And that, you know, it's one of those the people that got in first. And any anytime that you come in now, you're on the losing side already. It's too risky. It's something that you should have done it five years ago, but from what I'm hearing,
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 27:33
It's not never too late.
Tessa Valdes 27:34
It's never too late.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 27:35
It is still in the early stages. Okay, so Gabby, what would you advise the two of them who are now crypto curious of what steps they need to take to get into this world.
Gabby Dizon 27:46
So I can help help some friends as well. Download a crypto wallet, get your first Ethereum or Solana and buy your first NFT and get your own crypto domain name. Yeah, definitely. I can help with that.
Tessa Valdes 28:01
Okay, can I go to your house tomorrow?
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 28:03
Uh, we will, we will make sure we switch telegrams we’ll make sure we go step by step. We're building tutorials on ProofOfLearn.
Gabby Dizon 28:10
Kevin’s gonna help me. Yeah.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 28:13
Kevin's gonna help. Okay, and so, any questions that you guys have for us?
Tessa Valdes 28:19
Yes. So now you're saying that this program, we're not too late? Is there like a basic 101 wherein you can just go to the website and, and like, you know, it's nice that you can handhold us to this, but what about somebody else that you're trying to reach out? What is the first thing? What are the first three steps?
Gabby Dizon 28:37
So YGG is actually creating content. Our head of Philippines Luis is here, and he's actually creating content on how to get started with crypto.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 28:48
Luis where are you? Where is he? You should wave.
Gabby Dizon 28:51
Oh, yeah, Luis is creating content on how to crypto 101.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 28:56
And we are too on ProofOfLearn.io and we'll make sure we partner and that you can go and basic things on how to download a wallet. what's, what's a custodial wallet, what's a noncustodial wallet, all of that and demystifying pretty much crypto.
Tessa Valdes 29:14
If you can make it as easy as a dating site, then you know, I'm in.
Arci Muñoz 29:20
Really interested in this. So my friend already we had a talk about so she asked me to download Binance. Is that helpful?
Gabby Dizon 29:33
Yeah, Binance is an exchange where you can get your crypto so you can cash in with pesos and then buy Ethereum for example.
Arci Muñoz 29:40
And then I can buy because you you said I should start buying my NFT?
Gabby Dizon 29:46
Yeah.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo 29:48
So Binance, FTX, CoinBase a lot of that but the fact that these two brave women came up here today, Tessa decked out in the metaverse, Arci who loves games. The reason I asked her here was she was like, when is your game coming out Sheila, super excited about it. They're surprised to even be up here. But they're up here. This journey. It's worthy to spend your time, worthy to spend your time, I came out of sabbatical and probably early retirement to go pursue this world of web3. Because one of the things and you heard from Gabby and I is it that it can help millions if not billions of people. And so if there's a step that you can take to make a difference, not only in your own life and to not fall behind, it's to take a step for someone else. And that's the power of learning. No pun intended on ProofOfLearn to go take that step because you can make an impact in someone's life. And with that, thank you my friend. Thank you, Tessa. Thank you Arci. Thank you so much. Have a great evening everyone and enjoy everyone. And with that Javi. Let's turn on the music. Thank you so much.
This podcast is being provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as investment advice.