Pioneering Play-to-Earn w/ Gabby Dizon (Co-founder ‪@YieldGuildGames‬ )

From Ethereum, I found CryptoKitties, which didn't invent, but it popularized NFTs, the non-fungible tokens, which are unique assets on chain.

And that was where I had an aha moment where this maps perfectly to game items.

I started playing Axie Infinity in 2018 when it was a very small game before the rise of Play-to-Earn.

And it was a bunch of geeks who were gamers, who were into crypto, who were experimenting with these things.

And things didn't get big until the pandemic.

I think the pandemic really accelerated crypto adoption because everyone was stuck at home looking for ways to make

money.

And I was in the Axie community at that time.

I was breeding Axies.

And then what was known as the scholarship or lending system blew up.

And what was interesting about that is that it wasn't something that the Axie team invented.

It was something that the community discovered.

Because you own your own assets and then you can lend them to other people.

There were, of course, people who owned a lot of assets and there were people who had a lot of time but didn't have any money.

And there was kind of this matching by the community where some people who had a lot of assets said, okay, let me lend some assets to you.

And then you can play them for me.

And then whatever you earn, we can split the earnings.

So that was how Play to Earn was invented.

And what I really love about it is that the community invented it.

The unique thing about YGG is that we had community market fit from day one.

And the challenge we had after that was like what product to put on top of it.

So a lot of people start with a product idea, then search for product market fit, pivot, et cetera, then try to build a community afterwards, right? And we had the community early on.

But the problem with having a community is that it doesn't scale unless you have a product on top of it.

So how can you build a product that services the community, that allows the communities to grow? And that's what we've been on the search for since day one.