Yield Guild Games (YGG) is the canonical gaming-guild DAO: a decentralized organization that pools capital to buy the NFTs a blockchain game requires, then lends those assets to players who cannot afford them and shares the in-game yield. It is the first ecosystem-directory entry whose members coordinate around playing games together rather than around a protocol, a treasury, a collectible, or a research portfolio — the gaming/guild archetype that social, venture, and collector DAOs do not cover.

YGG grew out of the Philippines during the 2020–21 pandemic, when co-founder Gabby Dizon began lending his Axie Infinity game assets to unemployed players so they could earn income they otherwise had no capital to unlock. Formalized as a DAO in 2020 (Dizon, Beryl Li, and "Owl of Moistness"), YGG became the defining institution of the play-to-earn era — and, as that era boomed and then collapsed, a live case study in what happens to a guild when the game economies it depends on stop paying out.

The scholarship model

YGG's original mechanism is the scholarship. Play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity required a player to own NFTs (a team of Axies) before they could earn — a capital barrier that priced out exactly the players in emerging markets who most wanted the income. YGG's DAO treasury bought those NFTs at scale and lent them to scholars, who played and returned a share of what they earned.

The split is three-way: the scholar keeps the majority of what they earn (commonly ~70%), and the remainder is divided between the guild and a community manager — a mentor responsible for recruiting, training, and supporting a cohort of scholars. That human layer, not the token, was the guild's real product: a recruitment-and-training pipeline that turned idle treasury NFTs into productive, income-generating players. By August 2021 YGG had over 4,700 scholars who had collectively earned more than $8.6 million.

The model's fragility is the same as its strength: scholar income is only as durable as the underlying game's token economy. When Axie's rewards token depreciated through 2022, scholar earnings fell with it, and the guild's asset-lending thesis had to broaden beyond any single game — the pressure that later pushed YGG toward being infrastructure rather than a single guild.

Token, Vaults, and SubDAOs

The YGG token is an Ethereum ERC-20 with a maximum supply of 1,000,000,000, allocated roughly 45% to community programs, 22.4% to investors, 15% to founders, 13.3% to the treasury, 2.5% to the public sale, and 1.75% to advisors. Its July 2021 IDO on SushiSwap’s MISO sold out in 31 seconds, raising roughly $12.5 million. The token confers governance rights — holders can submit and vote on proposals over strategy, investments, and treasury use — on a one-token-one-vote basis, meaning voting power tracks the freely transferable, purchasable YGG balance.

YGG Vaults are the staking primitive. Each vault represents the reward stream from one or all guild revenue sources; stakers receive rewards in proportion to the tokens they stake and the revenue the assigned source generates. It is a way to route real, activity-derived yield back to token holders rather than emitting fresh inflation.

SubDAOs compartmentalize the guild. A SubDAO is a specialized branch organized around either a specific game or a specific region — game SubDAOs concentrate the operational know-how of one title's economy, while regional SubDAOs such as YGG SEA (Southeast Asia), YGG Japan, and IndiGG (India) localize recruitment, language, and community. Each can carry its own leadership and, in some cases, its own sub-token, letting local operators who understand a game or market run semi-autonomously under the main DAO.

From asset guild to Guild Protocol

YGG's most consequential turn is the move from owning the assets to issuing the reputation. With its Guild Protocol Concept Paper (September 2024), YGG reframed itself as infrastructure any guild can build on — "Onchain Guilds," which YGG calls "a web3 primitive, serving as the building blocks for guilds across the ecosystem."

An Onchain Guild has three parts: a member list verified onchain and an SBT given to members upon joining; a multi-sig treasury wallet whose earnings are "distributed evenly among guild members permissionlessly and trustlessly through a smart contract"; and activities (quests) that earn reputation. The load-bearing element is the soulbound token: YGG-issued, non-transferable badges that signal guild membership and record achievements. Since 2022, YGG has issued these achievement SBTs through its questing programs — the Guild Advancement Program (GAP) and Superquests — "to recognize and reward in-game excellence as well as community contributions."

This is the same intuition behind Vitalik Buterin’s "soulbound" proposal: some things — reputation, membership, contribution history — should not be transferable, because their whole value is that they were earned by a specific participant. YGG applies it to guild reputation. Notably, though, it stops short of applying it to governance: YGG's own votes still ride the buyable YGG token, so a member's soulbound reputation and their voting power live in two separate places.

The publishing detour and the AI-data pivot

As play-to-earn cooled, YGG tried to become a game publisher. It launched YGG Play and, on October 15, 2025, opened the YGG Play Launchpad with $LOL, the token of its first in-house game LOL Land — a browser board game on the Abstract chain in what YGG branded the "casual degen" genre (short-session games with real token stakes). LOL Land drew over 630,000 monthly users and multi-million-dollar revenue at its peak.

It did not last. On July 6, 2026, YGG announced it was sunsetting the YGG Play business unit, citing the "10/10 crash" — the October 10, 2025 macro shock that triggered "the largest liquidation in crypto history, wiping out over $19 billion" — and concluding that "YGG Play simply cannot be commercially sustainable in this climate." LOL Land and Waifu Sweeper are being retired, and YGG says it will "channel its resources into the AI data economy," starting with a B2B pipeline built around gaming datasets.

The arc is the honest lesson of the whole play-to-earn era compressed into one organization: a guild built on games that paid, that had to keep reinventing what it was — asset lender, then reputation infrastructure, then publisher, now data business — each time the ground under the previous model gave way. The durable residue is the guild network and the soulbound reputation layer; the yield-bearing thesis proved cyclical.

How Caper approaches this

YGG and Caper converge on one idea and diverge on where they put it. Both treat a soulbound, non-transferable token as the honest record of participation — YGG issues them as guild badges and achievement SBTs, and Caper mints a "Soulbound proof-of-vote token" (verified against contracts/src/caper_dao.rs: DIVISIBILITY_NONE, non-transferable via a depositor rule locked to the DAO itself, minted one per vote).

The difference is what that soulbound token controls. In YGG the SBT is reputation; governance power still rides the buyable YGG balance, so a large enough purchase buys votes. In Caper the earned token is decisive in the weight itself: voting power and exit share are both compute_vote_weight = (t · v) / (V · T) — where t is a member's held caper stake, v their earned soulbound votes, V the total soulbound-vote supply, and T tokens in circulation — and exit() reuses the exact same helper before burning the vote tokens. That means the part of influence a buyer cannot simply purchase is folded straight into both the vote and the payout.

This is not "your bag doesn't count" — t is a multiplier, so stake still matters. It is that a big enough bag alone can't capture control, because v has to be earned by showing up and can't be bought or transferred. YGG proved soulbound reputation is worth issuing; Caper puts it on the critical path of who actually decides.