Brendan Wong - How Gaming Guilds Are Built

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What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear. Hey, welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Today we're diving deep on the concept of guilds and the play to earn gaming space once again. This time, we're talking with the founder of the largest gaming guild in the space. Right now. I'm talking about Avocado Guild and Brendan Wong. This conversation is a really, really fun, interesting conversation. He's probably one of the most articulate people we've talked to on the subject. Like his breakdowns and his explanations of his thoughts are just so well thought out and so clear. If you're wondering what guilds are and what it's all about. You've heard us talking about guilds and play to earn gaming and you're kind of still a little bit unclear about what all of this means. This is the episode to listen to. This is probably the best broken down episode we've done, specifically explaining what guilds and play to earn really are, what the pros and cons are, where they've been and where they're headed. I want to thank our sponsor for this episode. This month's sponsor is Rev Racing. It is a killer game. Think like Gran Turismo, but blockchain, where you actually own the cars that you're racing. We've had some time to play the game. It's a really, really fun game. The NFTs are fairly inexpensive. Right now you could get in for three, four bucks, something like that. So it's pretty inexpensive to get in. So check out Rev Racing.com to learn more about game. You're really gonna love it. We really had a good time playing it. Also, make sure you're subscribed to us on YouTube. Pretty much all of the content we're making, we're really putting a lot of effort into the videos that we're putting out on YouTube to put really great, fun, educational, entertaining, informative content up on YouTube. So check that out over at Hustle and Flowchart TV. That'll get you right over to the YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter. I am Matt R. Wolfe on Twitter. Joe is Joe Fear on Twitter.

And.

And then everything we talk about gaming and metaverse and web3 we talk about over on Hard Fork Gaming. So check us out at those Twitter locations. We're sharing a ton of cool stuff, ton of cool alpha. You'll probably get some free NFTs if you follow us. That's not a joke. Just pay attention. We're going to be giving away some cool stuff soon, so pay attention to those places. And final call to action, go to Hardfork GG Whitelist. If you go get on our whitelist, that's where we are. Sharing a weekly newsletter of what we're paying attention to in Webinar Web three and gaming and talking about all the cool stuff that you should be paying attention to. And hint, hint, we're probably gonna be giving away free NFTs to people on those email lists as well. So Hardfork ggwhitelist, that's the place to be. All right, let's go jump in with Brendan Wong from Avocado Guild.

We'll start it here. Thanks for joining us. And like we were saying, got a lot of different things that, you know, I know that you've been doing inside the Web3 space. We've had an interesting group of people coming through the podcast, kind of giving education and perspectives and how the space is so new, this web3 space, but how it's developing in cool ways and helping so many people in the process. And I think that's what's cool with these Play to earn or just guilds in general. There's a lot of different aspects on how guilds can be utilized. So it's cool to have you on the show here, Brennan. Thanks for your time.

Pleasure to be here, guys. Very keen and curious to see how I can contribute and share my thoughts and learnings on the space. Once you go into Web three, honestly, one year kind of feels like five discounted. So, yeah, I've seen some of your other podcasts and it's cool that you've had so many influential people in the space come and share their thoughts as well.

Thanks, man. Yeah, I appreciate it. It's been fun. We all jumped in. I feel like everyone has that moment. You just jump in and it's like a whole different perspective. So we've had folks like Peter Ngon from Blockchain space, he's one of our partners as well, or guild partner with them as well. And he described the guild and from his perspective, and I'm curious from yours, how you would describe a guild, like a gaming guild, in maybe in a short, succinct kind of way, because sometimes I think it kind of loses a lot of people in how it's structured and how it also impacts folks. So how would you describe what you.

Guys do in a guild in general, short, succinct way?

It's Always been a bit of a tough one. So a guild is. To us at Avocado, a guild is a community of like minded gamers that have come together to look for opportunities through Web3 gaming initiatives. What started off as a bit of like a yield farming operation in different games has now evolved into a community of people that are looking for ways to find sustainability in the ecosystem as well as just build bonds and kind of learn more about what Web3 really means and how it can benefit their lives.

Yeah, I know it's tough with defining that in so much of an easy way, I guess, or in a succinct way, because Avocado, I guess it's smarter to go back over there with Avocado. What you guys are doing, you have quite a bit going on and I know you raised funding already, but in such a short period of time, I think it's what, 100,000 scholars as part of your guild. So I guess talk a little bit about what you guys are doing at Avocado and where that's headed.

Sure thing. We have closed all our funding. We raised, I think over 42 million in the year of 2021. We believe we were the largest guild, the largest play to earn guild in the whole Web3 gaming space. We had over 10.8 thousand scholars when we finished up 2021. Predominantly, most of our scholars are from Indonesia and Philippines, where the whole play to Earn movement that was kind of initiated by Axie Infinity allowed these guys to make a living, change their lives, improve their lives during a time where COVID 19 was quite rampant and affecting those areas more than others. I heard your podcast with Peter Ng and he mentioned that, you know, there's 20,000 plus guilds in the space right now. I agree with him. There's many, many guilds. But you know, with guilds it can range anything from like two to three to four scholars basically, or even just friends getting together to enjoy a game to something quite large. Like we were really, really quite sizable in 2020 21, what we try to achieve. We wanted to hit 10,000 by the end of the year, and we did. And every time we managed to scale up from 100 to 250 to 500 to 1000 to 2000 to 5000 and so on. It became more and more difficult to kind of handle the size and we always had to plan ahead. It was very interesting, kind of just exploring the whole territory and Geography of Web3 Gaming at its infant stage.

How did you get your guild initially started? Like, what was the very beginning because that's clearly like that would be, you know, macro guild status and it would obviously require a lot of assets, a lot of NFTs to have that many scholars all playing. So I'm curious about that sort of process that, that, that path that you took to, to build up such a, you know, a huge war chest of assets for all those players.

Great question. How did it all get started? It all starts a little bit, you know, with kind of like my past life. Like traditionally I came from retail, hospitality, import export trading. Like I've done business for many, many years. Over 15 years I've done business and the last couple of businesses I did was platform based web2style businesses. And in that business one thing we learned is you can build a platform, you can build a website, but building a community is the toughest part. Like if you have a community, that's your moat around your competitors. Not saying that we have competitors really in guild everyone just trying to do the same thing of onboarding more users into Web3, but just basically building strong mode of community was always very tough. And when I came into the space and I had this vast interest in Axie Infinity and what it really meant, I noticed that there was a huge overflow of community that wasn't being serviced. A lot of the smaller guilds and people in the space were quite segmented. They were playing the field very, very carefully. But all these scholars at the time.

Asking for an opportunity to borrow NFT so they can make changes to their life. I thought it was very interesting. We came in and I went in personally. I tried to start a small scholarship with 10, 20 and I realized I'm getting the hang of this, I can scale this brought in some members of my previous team and basically went to town and before we knew it, we realized, wow, we can really change lives here. And the more you do it, the more you realize how little you kind of know. But you can also see the amount of impact that you have and really how early everything is just based off the options available. We utilize our skills from our previous Web2 platform planning. We also started building a strong community framework right from the beginning, one that was ready for scale. And even then we had to improve it over time and the rest is history.

How do you. You said we're so early, like in your perspective, what makes you think we're so early and what kind of trends are you seeing for Web3 and gaming in general in this space, how it's going to go?

Well, what I'm seeing recently is the deviation from using the term play to earn to play and earn. To me, they basically mean the same thing. Play to earn sounds like it earns a bit more than play and earn, which sounds like it earns a little bit less. But essentially it's the same thing. Right. It's kind of like, might not be the best example, but for example, if you're a professional poker player, you know, play and earn, you're playing one game. Play to earn. You're playing 18 games, perhaps. Okay, I don't know. Right. And a professional poker player would play 18 games in one session. Sure. But the point I'm trying to point out is when people can't even really determine, like, what terminology to use and you start hearing things like the current, you know, game, it's not sustainable. Play to earn, and all the big players are in the space. And when everyone thinks about a true play to earn game, you think about how many players in these games and you think about how many games you kind of, you know, really strike your mind. It's less than 5 that are noticeable.

What are the ones right now? Like top of mind for you guys?

Top of the mind right now? Well, Axie Infinity. It's kind of like the Godfather Defi Kingdoms. But Defi Kingdom recently, you know, had an exploit and they didn't do too well, but still they had a lot of traction. Cyborg Rev Racing by Animoca Brands. What else have we got? The Wasted Lands. That's really about the main ones. I mean, obviously you've only got Splinterlands. Yeah, I would say, like, it's. I mean, there's more than 25, but the ones that really strike your mind, it's only really a handful. But when you realize that's all there is and the amount of users that they have is, you know, compared to the real market, a real gaming traditional market is very little. You tend to realize, wow, you know, there's a. It's very barren, you know, and everything kind of started that way. If you think about any form of technology, cars, phones, people didn't understand, but over time you become kind of accustomed to it. So that's why I think it's. It is actually very, very early.

What would you say? Because I know guilds play a part on onboarding, would you say that that's one of the biggest purposes or focuses of Avocado Guild, at least right now, 100%.

What we do at the guild is we introduce crypto gaming to traditional gamers, but at the same time, also people that traditionally, perhaps winning game when we realize the amount of people that doesn't even understand, say what a wallet is, that's insane. And this isn't like, this isn't strictly limited to say third world countries like.

In Singapore, Australia, anywhere. A lot of people don't understand what it means to really kind of own or hold crypto. Like do you really own and hold it when it's in an exchange, for example? I know most people think they do, but nowadays with proper education you'd probably challenge that. And with the, I guess the nascency of all of the play to earn games nowadays, part of what we do is educate our community members on what it means to hold it and what the responsibility really is and also.

What you can actually do. So when you hold it, you can trade it off to different tokens as opposed to just always converting it to fiat. And sometimes everything starts with planting a little seed in their mind of what the possibilities can be. And before you know it, with enough numbers you get conversion.

And then education begins and they become the next generation users.

Yeah, and Peter Ng, I know he was going a little bit down that line as well is how there's this whole financial element that it gives access to even credit in some cases. And you mentioned defi or other coins. There's that knowledge of where you can possibly stake your coins and all these other things. That's incredible. So it's like it's onboarding traditional gamers, it sounds like, and that's obviously probably the biggest challenge right now is kind of educating. That's something we always kind of ask and think about is like how do you see onboarding or how do you, how do you kind of like flip that switch from traditional gamers to web three focused gamers when there is some resistance to NFTs and scams and things like that?

I think traditional gamers are extremely important. I started off as a gamer. I used to play way too much games. I used to be a guild leader in World of Warcraft, Vanilla World of Warcraft. We had over 200 members in our guild. Yeah. But I played a vast genre of different games strategy FPS. When you think about it, they don't exist in the current web3 space. No, not yet. Exactly not yet. The fact that you said yet shows that you comprehend how early we are. So we don't just onboard traditional gamers, we actually onboard anyone that can benefit from this. So if you tell someone just randomly about, you can make a couple of dollars or a couple of tokens playing a game, you'll probably lose their interest fairly quickly unless the news is talking about it. But if you gave them a couple of tokens and you gave them a hit on how that can be, that has a real world intrinsic value, then they're going to start getting really curious as to how can I, how do I take that value, how do I extract this and how do I, how do I get more, you know what I mean? It's same as like with the team in Avocado. It's all about instilling that inquisitive questioning into their brains and making them kind of realize the potential of what can be. So that's kind of what we see onboarding as being doing. And with all the different genres that are yet to come, when you think about it, yeah, shooting game, strategy games are super cool. But what about puzzle games? What about hyper casual games that people play in the real world when they're transiting to and from work? What if I gave you a very basic thought, for example, everyone's messing with their phones, let's just say for half an hour to an hour. What if during that time of messing with your phone, you can make a couple of bucks, one, two dollars. Would that change the way people respond on the transit to work? Possibly. Especially when you combine some natures of Web2, such as being able to mingle, your friends having a common topic to.

Talk about, an element.

Yeah, exactly. We're seeing terms like gamefi, social fi coming into this space. Sometimes I think that they kind of almost merged together. And what we see may not necessarily be full web 3, but perhaps web 2.5. So I don't have the answers. And that's what's really intriguing for. And I'm trying to find the answers.

Where do you look for your answers? What kind of resources do you go to? Do you have, I'm sure you have crypto Twitter. Are there people that you follow on Twitter that you keep up with the latest and maybe you would also recommend for people to learn some of this stuff.

I'm quite operational. Very frankly speaking, I don't have that much time to be on Twitter all the time. I probably should be on Twitter more considering how powerful the tool is for crypto. You know, I have the luck of being able to speak to many founders similar to myself. Many different game founders coming from Web2Space. Many game founders that traditionally were already intrigued with Defi and already in Web three, trying to almost build a game as a legacy. And through my exposure with these guys and sharing our thoughts in the space, looking at the path which they choose to take to solve this problem and really build a legacy for themselves. You start to learn a lot about what's going on in everyone's mind. So I'm used to speaking to about anywhere from 10 to 25 different kind of platform and game developers per week. And when they share their thoughts with me and I share my thoughts with them, we somehow end up with a new thought. And even if sometimes myself or they are stubborn, we walk off still with a little seed planted in our mind and we end up thinking about it. And it's very interesting how after I have one chat with someone, three or four chats later, everyone's talking about it. That's how quickly information kind of travels in the space. So I guess what shapes my thinking is basically living and breathing the opportunity that I have right now to possibly shape a little bit of gamefire moving forward.

What a heck of a brain trust right there.

So I want to go back to the guild concept for a second here and I want to ask about the sort of inflation element, right? Because it seems like a lot of games you have this issue where when the game comes out, there's a lot of hype. The tokens are worth a lot. The people that play the games earn a lot. But then over time, if there's not enough utility for the tokens, they seem to kind of inflate to the point where there's not a whole lot of value in the games. We've seen it with like the SLP with Axie a little bit. We've seen it with the Pagan token, the VIS token, and a handful of other examples where you just see it kind of go to nothing. And I'm curious on your thoughts on. Do you have any thoughts on how that might get solved or how. Or, you know, is that really even a problem in the first place? Like, what are your thoughts around that whole thing that's going on where there's just that. That hyperinflation that happens?

I love this question. Token inflation element, you are correct. A lot of the games that are coming up same as the previous ones, Axie, Infinity, Pegaxie had a huge token inflation where the amount people were earning was diminishing at an exponential rate. Whether this rate is due to bots or just people farming and not putting back into the system or a variety of different means, it's still a real problem that a lot of these games have. And this is part of a lot of people think that play to earn is not sustainable. I personally believe that we're moving more towards a win and earn model. Although I don't think that that is going to be the final form. I see everything as a bit of an evolutionary form. Play to earn, play and earn, win and earn, and then you have step and just walk and run to earn. You know what I mean? Like it's, it's still evolving and no one has the answer. However, people need to understand that once you're in the crypto gaming space, the web3 space, all these game companies are charging people real money for NFTs. You're introducing that element of real world kind of economy into the systems. Once you do that, people are going to find ways to extract maximum value and they're going to find ways to, I guess, take as much as they can for their investment out of your system. And that's something games have to be prepared for. Traditionally in web2 games are not really prepared for stuff like this because it's make believe money. But in this particular case, if games are raising millions of dollars through just the sales NFTs alone, there's a certain level of economic return that they expect it to kind of give. So how I like to look at the problem is every single game is like a little bit of a pond in itself. It's a pond that someone has come along and started to grow some fish, started to build up their ecosystem, trying to make it a nice looking pond, a lot of algae and everything, right? But then it takes time for the fish to mature, for the ecosystem within the pond to mature. It takes time for a game even, especially in Web three to become fun. They need to constantly develop it. Look at Axie for example. You know, start off as a simple basic card game and now it's evolved to Origins and we haven't even seen LAN play yet. There's many other games. I can give examples of this. We're all trying to explore the space where real world economy is playing a huge part because it's the type of money that's just being moved around. But sometimes when these games, you know, when people know, hey, there's a fish you can eat in this point, everyone gets intrigued and they're coming in and they're eating more fish than they should before the actual population has even matured. So I think that is a little bit of an issue. And I think a very basic way to control something like this is just limit the amount of intake of users that you like, manage the capital, manage the outflow of tokens and really have proper burn mechanics that actually work. What we see nowadays are still games, but they're not like the type of games you see in the real world where you know, they're built by like hundreds and thousands of people, like, and just a marketing budget. So like, you know, just a marketing budget is $10 million. You know, that's not what we're seeing in Web3. A lot of the games I'm afraid are, you know, indie game studios like Axie Infinity would have started in 2018. That would have just been a team of three, four, five people that has just exponentially grown. I think the whole, not just the games but the whole sector needs a little bit of time to grow and adopt. I don't like to say this, but I do feel that innovation is built up on the innovators which build the foundation. So yeah, that also brings us back to the point of why everything is so early.

That was a perfect timeline, man. Is there a game that you see right now that's doing it right or at least doing it pretty good?

Oh, amazing question. Far out. Like I lose sleep over this one. I'm going to be really candid. Hopefully I don't get in trouble. I'm very, very bullish on the game on the BNB chain called Cyborg. Extremely bullish on them because I know the team. Yeah it's bears mention them because I know that they built the game from scratch for the purpose of Web3. But as I mentioned before, once you introduce tokens and you're charging people a lot of money for NFTs, you're introducing real world economy just as like how everyone's talking about interest rate hikes right now and that would affect depression, fear, everyone's trying to hold cash, all that kind of stuff. In the crypto space it's the same. You've introduced money macro market movements will influence market sentiment towards altcoins out tokens as well as all of these. Play to earn or play and earn or just gamefi web3, gamefi in general. So timing is quite key. You can launch a game and the game can be super perfect in my mind at least for its early stage. But then if the market takes a turn against you, it can really impact the amount of growth and everything that that could have been. For example, part of the reason in my mind why Stepan did so well, other than the fact that they have such great burn mechanics and the concept's not new but I love shoes. Who doesn't? It's collect, it's freaking a collectible item. In the real world, even my mom collects shoes, man. And when you think about it, they launch just as Covid is kind of easing down, encouraging people to exercise. And on top of that, it's brand new. GameFi is at its prime talking about it. Timing is so key, guys. We can't ignore that. Timing will even influence whether, for example, Binance wants to list you. You know what I mean? It influences everything. If you think about it, if Cyborg was launched at the exact same time as Axie Infinity, what would happen? We don't know.

We don't know.

Yeah, but you know, but because of the timing, I could go on forever on this, man. It's even timing.

That's where I don't know. I guess what? So the guild. I love the aspect of a guild because it's community and you're building a lot of moats around your community. Like we had Bryson on here as well, and he was talking about how so many people will bounce around from guild to guild, chasing opportunities. But it's, you know, in a variety of other reasons, of course. But for you guys, like, how do you. What's your strategy and approach? And I know there's numerous. I was actually looking at your magazine too. I think your scholars.

Ah, yeah. Nice.

I forget what it's called now. It's Avocado something.

Avocadian. Avocadian, yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you for that. Thank you for that. So a little bit about our Avocadian. It's written by the scholars. For the scholars. It's actually edited, put together. The graphics are designed by internal scholars. We have, I think, one or two members kind of like acting as editors from our core team, but the whole thing is put together by them. We gave them a little bit of a direction, helped with some alignment, and they went off and did that themselves. It's actually something that our team is super proud of because if people take the time to read it, all the different issues, you really start to. It really starts to paint a picture on what really happens within Avocado Guild and the lives of the people that were changing and affecting. With Avocado, we're very community focused. I know there are guilds out there that are building data solutions, platforms and all that to try and remove the friction. For us, we find, yes, removing friction is extremely important, but because of really how early we are.

Just having the platform itself is not enough to remove the friction. You need to almost handhold people into the space. And that's kind of what we chose to do. We handheld people into the space. We empower them to Become the leaders of their own immediate communities. And then we almost taught them how to spread the word, share the word, and explain what we really are about. And then after this, we use technology to wrap around needs, whatever we need to scale better technology to collect big data as our guild grows. And in terms of moat, the community itself acts as a moat. Realistically, a lot of our scholars play three to four hours worth of games, but they'll stay on for, like, another four or five hours because of the friendships they've developed. And I recall you asking me earlier, so what is kind of like a guild and something that makes Avocado a little bit different is my scholars know myself personally and our team fairly well. We see ourselves as a support vessel trying to help these guys navigate the space. So if you look at our Twitter, you look at our banner, it shows Avocado guild as, like a little spaceship. And what it's meant to depict is our scholars inside as we kind of take them through the metaverse journey of all these different metaverses and games. We want to show them what can be, but at the same time, we want to protect them from making investments themselves, which perhaps, if they're uneducated, they can fall into certain traps of. And we want them to be able to experience all of this new stuff as we journey kind of into the unknown. So sometimes I explain it as being avocado. We're not really walking the path of those that have walked before us, realistically speaking, we're cutting the grass. We're paving the road behind us as we walk into the unknown and overcoming these obstacles that come about us. So we're not afraid of doing that in avocado.

Oh, it's beautiful, man. Why avocado?

Why avocado? Interesting. A variety of reasons, actually. It wasn't really so much as compelling to be called avocado. I used to sell avocados in one of my past jobs as well.

So that played a little bit of avocado.

Amazing. Is a hass. Yeah, they are actually love hass, my favorite. But so I'm originally from Australia, and in Australia, you know, people always have avocado in the morning on toast, avocados and eggs on toast and stuff like that. It's become kind of like the hipster thing to eat. Totally. And it's always overpriced as well.

So we call it kind of like a. It's a disruptor. It's something that people love. It's kind of, like, quite buttery, but it's quite healthy. And that's what I see. Avocado as a disruptor in the industry. I wish. That's a story I could tell you. But the fact is, we just came upon Avocado.

It's a great story.

It's true. It's true. No, it's true. We just came up on Avocado. Rolled off the tongue. Maybe it entered my mind because I used to sell it, but the fact is, Avocado also happens to be an industry disruptor. That doesn't make sense.

What are your thoughts on the future of guilds? Where do you think, do you see an evolution in guilds doing something different than they do now? Where do you see it going?

At the very beginning, I got asked this question maybe in September, and back then, my knowledge of guilds and the space was quite early. However, surprisingly, even though a lot of things have changed in my mind, that particular one hasn't changed. There's been some evolutions. But I do feel that in future, as we move along and I guess navigate through the choppy waters of possibly a bare winter season, we're really going to see some guilds survive, possibly some guilds take off. But many guilds in my mind may perish. One thing in business, I refer to it as a business, because guilds have become quite commercial nowadays. You've raised money, you're expected to give something back. Same as how people charge for NFTs. You're expected to give some form of value back. But while we weather this storm, many will not survive because of the capital that they've raised, or that they' for lack of capital, but also the lack of guidance within the space. Like I myself, I work like crazy hours, and I've got a great team, and I've got, I would say, one of the best advisors in the whole world for what I'm doing. And still we're navigating through this choppy water into the unknown. But, you know, if we sail through this, I think we'll have many answers until the next storm. I feel that in future we're going to see regionally a couple of large guilds per particular geographical region and in general space, like similar to ygg, a couple of other mammoths may kind of emerge. I feel many guilds will not last. They cannot be punched by the weather, and they'll find it very difficult to pick themselves up, especially as we wait for games to mature and new genres come into space. And all of this costs money to kind of get into. They all have new NFTs, new strategies that they don't know if they work or not. And yeah, many guilds will perish, but at the same time as these perish, as I explained before, innovation will build upon that foundation and you have more guilds into this space. But eventually there will be a couple of really big ones. One thing that, that I didn't kind of foresee happening was a lot of people that have a huge community and huge amount of support in the traditional web2 space have now come in and formed their own guilds. I've still yet to kind of guess what may happen, but I do feel they will have some form of a strategic advantage that will increase the chances of survival. As with anything in business, those that adapt quick are the ones that generally will come out ahead.

It's a first mover advantage, it sounds like right now.

Oh, massive, massive. Yeah, it's a first mover advantage, but you can also put that down to timing. First mover advantage. But what happens when the waves just keep coming, crashing at different directions? You literally have to keep moving the whole time.

Yeah, it's true. You said Runway on guilds, that's one thing. Think about the games. Like Runway on games.

Yeah, exactly.

I know a lot of folks don't raise enough money to even get to the point where they launch a game because maybe unforeseen things, but let alone market conditions that could come through and wipe them out as well. So it's crazy. It's the wild.

Well, perfectly correct. Some games raise a million, million and a half. People don't realize that in Web3, that's really not that much money. You got to go seed your pools. You got to get on exchanges like it's not enough. But then some games raise hundreds, if not multi, hundreds of millions of dollars, small nations of money. And I'm like, God damn, what are you building? You know what I mean?

Ser.

Like, I mean, you could send a couple of rockets to space, you know, but yeah, but that's the variance, right? And it's very intriguing to see what happens when you have kind of this disparity. Once again, it goes back to highlight how elementary the whole space is and all the opportunities that could exist and the lack of education around, I guess bluntly, like some of the VCs and what they're kind of backing and things like that. I do think all of this will mature with time. And I think true leaders will be born and bred. And if I'm still around in two, three years time, perhaps people will listen a bit more to what I say.

They're right here watching us now.

How do you decide which games that you want to get involved in? I know the playing field at the moment isn't absolutely massive, but how do you decide? All right, this is a game we want to get involved with inside the guild.

Great question. Generally, games that do well are games that, from what we've seen, are games that kind of launch on promising new networks. They generally do well. First, to market massive for myself in Avocado, we have a method for assessing the games. A lot of that revolves around the game's ability to generate a strong community. Because if you can build a game that's just the product, that's great. Don't get me wrong, I love playing games, but in the traditional world, you get games and you get publishers for a reason, because the engineers that build the games want to focus on the games, and the publishers that don't know how to build a game want to focus on giving you that traction in the real world. But in Web three, you can focus on the game and build the best product. But if you don't have means of pushing this in front of all of the eyes that matter, it's very easy for the product to get lost in translation. But obviously sometimes they also end up being quite hyped and people come up. But that's really not proper planning in my mind for myself. Even though we assess all these games with the methodologies within Avocado of assessing the community, their functionality, and whether they've got their tokenomics and the right support to help them succeed, one thing that I put a lot of emphasis on is actually who's this person I'm speaking to behind the camera? Most of the times behind the camera, I'll have multiple talks with them, and a lot of the times I'll be very candid with them because I really want to understand who I'm talking with. Because in the end of the day, this unknown person over the Internet is the person that I'm going to entrust with the money. And I want to know if they kind of understand and see the space like myself. And I want to know that if a giant wave comes along and punches them in the face, they've kind of got what it takes to pick themselves up. I want to see hunger and I want to kind of see resilience in the founder, because in the end of the day, that's the person that's really calling the shots and running the shots. Obviously, unless you have, like a huge conglomerate come in with like 700 people, you know, Then it's kind of like, okay, you know, gotta change my assessment. It's going to be more methodical now and more technical, but generally it's really just backing the dude on the other end of the camera and seeing what their vision of gamefi is and what they're willing to go to to try and make it work. That's my secret sauce, man.

You stole it all.

This is good stuff. You mentioned something earlier, Rev Racing and it's kind of ticking in my mind. I made a note because we're working with Animoca, specifically with Rev right now. They have a lot of cool stuff going on. But I'm curious, I want to hear from you on how you guys are working with Rev Racing and I guess what are the stories, how you guys work together, maybe what's upcoming. They have some new acquisitions at Animoca that just came through. So what do you see over there?

So Animoca Brands. Yeah. Then let our series a investment. You know, we raised literally the most money a play to earn Guild has raised that I was aware of. We raised 18 million led by Animoca. And our plan was always to onboard as many users into the space. Provide more to many was always kind of like our motto. And we tested Rev Racing, we had a joint partnership with them and I saw the potential in the game at that time. But still at the same time it was not ready for mass market yet. But we're revisiting that now after a couple of months has passed. And I don't understand why it's not taking off with the traction that I think it should. But at the same time I kind of understand why there's this huge interest in cars. So as I was mentioning with Stepan before, it's a shoe. Everyone knows what a shoe does, same as everyone know what a car does. If you think about it, a car itself and a shoe, they're both kind of like blank canvases. What that means is you can brand it. Everyone. When you talk about a car, you, you know it's got wheels, you know it runs and traditionally it's a hugely popular genre. So how do you bring something that's already so familiar with everyone into this web3 space and give it that kind of traction. And yeah, I'm thinking we're going to probably work closer with Animoca Brands to see what we can do there to help Rev Racing. And at the same time, I mean I sync up with Animoca like every two weeks or so just to bounce ideas as well.

Oh yeah, no They've been super cool working with them, and Lucy over there is really cool that we're working with. But yeah, Rev, I see there's a lot of opportunity there, but still, it's just. There was a timing thing and an onboarding thing, and it's just interesting to see. This is the common challenge though, with all the games out there, or most games. No, that's cool. Thanks for talking about that.

Well, I know you guys have the Avocado Dao token. How does the Dao, the token element of your business work? Can you break that down a little bit?

Because I know we're curious as investors too. Listening.

So, Avocado Dao Token, very simply put, it is meant to be a token that represents the performance as well as, I guess, the ethos of Avocado. And what we're trying to do. We're trying to onboard as many users into Web3 as we can. We use technology to wrap around and support all of these guys, and eventually we will build a vault where people can stake their tokens for the profit that the guild kind of generates through all of our various operations, whether it be through our investments, whether it be through our yield farming operations or the future platform that we're going to build. I can't say too much at the moment, but for example, we also use the Avocado Dow token as a means of rewarding our players for contribution. In Web3, I believe it's about giving as many as you can, but at the same time not giving blindly. So we've been very careful with releasing our staking, which is the version one will be inflationary as it comes from the ecosystem, but also as a reward for holding our token. But at the same time, we're working on a system that makes a lot of sense to reward our scholar community for their participation in all of the activities within the guild. Helping us a lot with guild management as well as game testing and things like that. We're just building up the correct reward mechanism so that it's nice and fair. But even till now, we haven't rewarded our scholars with any tokens yet, as we're trying to make sure that that's right before we kind of dive into it. Because wrong expectations are set, things can crumble quite quickly. But the token is there to incentivize participation in the guild as well as as a form of rewarding investors in our token. And we do plan that for the next version of vaults that we that we release, they will be non inflationary. It will be a more Sustainable model through the various operations of the guild, as some of which I mentioned earlier, but also as governance and proposal for helping navigate the direction of the guild. But that's going to come a little bit later. As we've touched on many times, we are so early in this space right now, it's quite important that the direction is angled by those that really live and breathe what we do. But once we settle all of these admin things and the space matures up a bit, that's something we're going to implement very quickly.

Yeah, I love just going to the website too. Avocadodao IO right?

IO yeah, we're actually about to. We already have the new version. We're about to revamp it very soon. Soon. We're also offering. It's interesting you mentioned it before. I haven't even touched on it. We recently released an article on moving our token to BNB Bridge. I mean, sorry, BNB Chain. And the whole purpose of this is to provide accessibility. So we're building infrastructure on BNB Chain as well. We want to provide our token accessibility, all of the staking and all of the future tech that we're going to build for our scholars. And at the same time we feel that there are a lot of whales in eth. And I mean, that's good if you're trying to raise north that. But if you want proper utility functionality without getting chopped by the gas fees, I think you're going to have to choose a layer two or some cheaper Layer one option. And thanks to Axie Infinity, really, when they did the Ronin Bridge direct to Binance, that really introduced Binance to a lot of our scholars. And at the same time it helped the retail consumers understand AXS and Ronin and the whole gamefi thing. So we thought BNB Chain kind of made sense to build infrastructure there. It would make it easier for the retail consumers, our existing token holders, who wouldn't have to pay like, I don't know, 90 bucks for gas fees. And also our own scholars, which we plan to reward for contribution with tokens as well. So yeah, that's cool.

And it's a huge audience over there too in the BNB network, so it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, but I was going to say your website already is super cool. Like scrolling down. It's just kind of fun. It's really fun. Well done. And it's a cool space to kind of learn, but curious to see what you got for the new site.

Everything that we build, whether it be the website or the backend, we Want to gamify it because we are in the gaming space. There is no point if it's not fun. One thing we find in Web three is some of the stuff is sometimes just slip slop and it's just boom. Here is your yield. Enjoy. And that's great and all, but there's a reason why UI UX plays such a huge part in the traditional world, because it just makes that experience so much more enjoyable. So we try to showcase our capabilities through even the smallest of tasks of staking or websites to try and make everything a bit more fun. To remind you that we're community based and we are a gaming guild. In the end of the day, we're not a vc, even though we invest. And I'm not this advisor that just talks all day as well. In the end, I'm trying to change lives. And these are real people that we deal with and we are a gaming guild guys, whatever that is. Right?

Evolution, right. We're building. It's maybe web3 correct of this and that's perfectly fine. It is funny how things get lost. And sure, it's built by a bunch of people who are very techy coder types that maybe the UI UX isn't that important, but for the mass adoption we got to think totally different.

Yeah, it's all about reducing that friction. It's all about keeping them entertained and interested. Yeah, I mean, it can't just be made for degens.

You know, it's cool for a while, but then they come to a point in the party. All right, let's bring some more people in here. Different types.

Yeah, that's what it's all about, man. I think the space lacks users and that's what we really hope to bring in.

Right on. Well, Twitter, I'm sure. Well, Avocado Guild, you can find them there. And avocadodao IO anywhere else that we can point people to. Go hang out with you guys and see what you're up to.

Avocadodao IO Avocado Guild, our Twitter, we always put whatever's latest news on that. I would say obviously we've got Medium as well. We put most of our publications out in Medium, so please check that out. You guys are curious to see what we've done previously and what's coming up. But one thing that I think is fairly unique for Avocado is do check the Avocadian newsletter that Joe has checked out himself. Sometimes we put little sneak peeks in here on what we're developing, but most of the time It's a newsletter that just brings everyone back other than all the money or the defi and all that kind of stuff, which is important, and we'll talk about that. But just understand that we actually have a community, something that we treasure a lot and we see as quite unique, and it's our moat as well as it's our gold. At the same time, without this, we would have no guild. A platform with no users is not very helpful, so we want to make sure our users are looked after. And if you go through the Advocadian, you can kind of understand what really happens behind the scenes.

Oh, it's beautiful, man. I saw pictures of babies in there and families seriously celebrating. So, yeah, it brings a whole human element, which is often lost when we're just sitting behind a computer, a bunch of djens thinking about the money or the next thing you're flipping and, you know, there's. There's more to it and. And to see the.

Yeah, there's more. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We. We try to be charitable, but at the same time, we are also trying to be commercial. It's kind of weird, right? We want to give back each other. Yeah.

In the right way. So. Awesome, man. I appreciate your time, and it's been fun. You've enlightened us a lot. So, Brendan, appreciate you, man.

No, thank you, Joe. Thank you, Matt, so much for the opportunity today. Anytime you guys have any questions, feel free to ask me. I don't have all the answers, but I do have an opinion. And, you know, this is literally all I do. Like, I've come into the space, put everything behind myself and trying to see what difference I can make. So, yeah. Thank you for giving me this platform and opportunity to share my thoughts.

Sam.