Introducing GuildFi

GuildFi is an ecosystem of interconnected Web3 games, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and guilds. It aims to bridge different play-to-earn games and existing guilds while also lowering entry barriers with gaming scholarship offerings. GuildFi is taking gaming guilds to the next level by evolving its proven model to create an infrastructure to onboard, connect, and add value to players, guilds, games, and investors.

GuildFi has a native token–GF. It can be used for governance as well as offering staking rewards and in-game benefits to stakers and holders. With the explosion of PlaytoEarn games, GuildFi is focused on increasing access to games with a gaming scholarship program that lends in-game assets to new players. It aims to be the base layer that connects the metaverse. The GuildFi platform encompasses a large variety of features for its users, such as GuildFi ID, Game Discovery, Guild Discovery, Proof-of-Play Rewards to Metadrop Launchpad, etc.

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Gaming Center

The Gaming Center is an intuitive interface designed to onboard users. It provides the users with discovery and access to GuildFi’s unique features and offerings. It is the first point of contact for new users in the ecosystem. The gaming center has four key elements to improve the metaverse gaming experience. 

GuildFi ID: It is a unique player identification mechanism used to track players’ performance and their overall footprint in the gaming ecosystem. It also enables players to access the various products in the ecosystem. Guilds can also use the GuildFi ID to track the performance of their scholarship programs and the performance of players in these programs. 

Game Discovery: This mechanism is used to provide users access to the platform’s repertoire of curated games–based on users’ past activity on the platform. It also helps the games’ developers target the most appropriate user base by carefully profiling player preferences and interests. This mechanism significantly increases the game’s likelihood to succeed and achieve mass adoption. Essentially, it helps players find the right games and helps games find the right players through segmentation and targeting.  

‍Guild Discovery: GuildFi offers a plethora of scholarship programs on one platform. Scholarship programs can be critical to onboarding new players for whom the entry costs for games can be quite prohibitory. These scholarships are funded by the treasury, partnered guilds, or other connected NFT funds. GuildFi acts as an aggregator mechanism for players to find scholarships as these programs are fragmented across the ecosystem and hard to discover for new players. On GuildFi, players can easily navigate and access scholarships for different games from various guilds. This mechanism benefits both the guilds and players, as in GuildFi, guilds have a platform to generate passive income from the ecosystem’s player base, and players have an opportunity to enter the play-to-earn domain with almost no entry costs. 

Proof-of-Play: In addition to earning in-game rewards such as tokens, NFTs, etc. GuildFi is also a Proof of Play (PoP) rewards mechanism that rewards players for their participation in the ecosystem, such as playing games, completing quests, using GuildFi features, etc. The rewards are in terms of GXP, which are basically experience points. Based on the GXP points accumulated, players can access rewards with NFT allocations from the in-house launchpad, GuildFi tokens, airdrops, bonus yields, etc. GXP points also form a basis for ranking players in the ecosystem. The proof-of-play mechanism makes every game in the GuildFi ecosystem a play-to-earn opportunity. 

Guild Zone

GuildFi’s guild zone is a dedicated engine designed to drive the guild operations for the in-house guild and other guilds and investors. It has three key components such as:

• GuildFi Guild: GuildFi’s in house guild follows the regular gaming guild model, which involves lending assets (NFTs) to recruited scholars (interested players who, without this support, would not be willing or able to play the game), allowing them to start playing and earning without any upfront costs, thereby removing/lowering (depending on the scholarship) the barriers to entry. The guild model is revolutionary in the GameFi space as it enables sustainable growth of the economies of participating games. It achieves this by organically creating an ecosystem of different types of players interlinked by their unique interests in the game, which in turn supports games by facilitating the onboarding of large communities. 

• Guild Network: The Guild Network is designed to aggregate all the guilds in the metaverse on the GuildFi platform. It enables interoperability between different games and guilds. It enables lending of NFTs between guilds, borrowing assets from available funds, and connected VCs. The guild network also aims to discourage monopolization by distributing assets to all connected guilds. It also provides a platform for guilds to recruit new scholars through the GuildFi’s Scholarship Portal. 

• Guild-as-a-Service (GaaS): GuildFi offers GaaS as a revolutionary service to anyone who is interested in running their own guild. In essence, it is a guild management service where interested users can turn up with cash, crypto, or assets (NFTs), and GuildFi handles the rest, including managing capital, guild operations, acquiring NFTs, and recruiting scholars. The interested parties (individuals, new and established guilds) simply need to provide assets and plug into the GuildFi platform. This enables users to generate income from their guilds without active management. The service also allows users to earn income from the scholarship program without creating a guild. 

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GameFi Tools

GuildFi provides an extensive repository of information and other tools to help everyone within the ecosystem, including but not limited to guild managers, scholars, players, etc. Players can use features such as account management, seamless payments, and team management. At the same time, game creators can easily integrate their games with the platform and tap into our player base from the onset. One of the game-changing tools offered by GuildFi is the ezHub. It provides advanced scholarship management and a GameFi tool for guilds, managers, and players. It is the go-to repository of information and tools for play to earn gamers, guilds, and managers worldwide. 

Some of the key features of ezHub include:

Scholar Overview: It allows guild managers to get detailed insights into the performance of a specific scholar. This includes data like tokens claimed, tokens held, monthly returns, and adventures completed with charts to visualize and compare a player’s progress. 

Inventory Management: It is a one-stop page to view & manage your inventory of assets for a game. Players & scholars can easily check the status of their gaming portfolio, while guild managers can create customized filters to divide their scholars by team or by game. It also shows earnings in fiat terms. An alternate way to view all this data is through the scholar list management feature. 

Card Exploration: This feature gives players an easy interface to view all the cards (or characters) for a specific game. It includes customized filters so users can input a combination of different traits to find the card they desire easily. 

GuildFi aims for ezHub to be an all-in-one data center for the entire GameFi. In the future, the platform will be integrated with the GuildFi token system, thereby incentivizing players to simply use the ezHub tool. 

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MetaDrop NFT Launchpad 

Another interesting feature of GuildFi is the MetaDrop NFT Launchpad. Through this launchpad, the platform offers exclusive NFTs and early token investment opportunities from partner games. The allocation is determined by players' participation in the metaverse. It is the first-of-its-kind allocation powered by the aforementioned proof-of-play mechanism where games can reward players for participating in successful launches. Players also have access to exclusive airdrops and rewards for staking the native GF token. 

The idea behind such rewards is to incentivize participants who are actually interested and believe in the platform. The platform also handles Initial Game Offerings (IGO), where participants can get early access to the in-game assets and a chance to test the early version of the game. In the future, GuildFi intends to introduce an NFT marketplace and provide a lending platform. 

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Treasury

To ensure long-term economic sustainability and growth, GuildFi has a comprehensive treasury mechanism that largely serves as a capital-efficient reserve asset fund. It is used to Invest in in-game NFT assets, metaverse project tokens, and other guilds. The treasury is trifurcated as follows:

• Venture Fund: It is primarily used to invest in promising projects and acquire the most competitive and innovative assets and technologies across the GameFi metaverse. It enables GuildFi to acquire tokens, NFTs, and other assets as early-stage investments. This fund can be volatile as the exposure is largely limited to higher risk and unproven assets. 

• Growth Fund: It is primarily designed to preserve capital for long-term sustainability and protection. It uses strategies such as low-risk stablecoin yield-farming, with the asset base primarily in USDC/USDT. The major benefit of the growth fund is that GuildFi will remain protected even in bearish market conditions by maintaining a large capital reserve. 

• Development Fund: It is used for everyday operational costs such as staff salaries, rent, etc., and for marketing activities such as AMA rewards, fan-art contests, marketing campaigns, etc. It will also be used to reward the key contributors in the community through the ‘Community Bounty’ program. 

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GuildFi Token

The GuildFi Token (GF) is the native token of the protocol’s ecosystem. It was launched through a Token Launch Auction (TLA) on Copperlaunch, which raised a staggering $140 Million. The token can be staked for additional GF rewards. Various tier levels of staked GF tokens will generate additional rewards and benefits in the form of exclusive NFTs or airdrops, access to GuildFi tools, and early access to new games.

5% of the total supply of GF tokens was allocated for public sale, and half of those were purchased at the public auction. The tokens that were not sold in the auction were split between liquidity pools and the GuildFi treasury. The remaining token distribution is as follows, 24% to seed investors, 40% to the ecosystem, 2% to advisors, 15% to the team, and 14% to the treasury.

GF token accrues value through the following: 

• Revenue generated from up-and-coming P2E games.
• Revenue generated from Play-to-Earn guilds & scholarship businesses.
• NFT sales & IGOs.
• NFT asset value & yields generated from different investments.
• NFT usage transaction volume.
• NFT asset lending across the ecosystem.
• Metaverse-related project token value.

Participating in the GF token can be perceived as investing in the long-term success of the metaverse. Staking GF tokens entitles users to become a member of the GuildFi DAO. GuildFi’s staking program is primarily used to differentiate between short-term speculators and long-term investors and partners. The GF token itself does not give users governance rights, and the token is required to be staked in order to receive sGF token, which is used to determine users’ weight in governance. The amount of sGF token a user receives depends on how long the GF token is staked for. Users can stake the GF token from 2 to 52 weeks. GuildFi uses a time-weighted format to recognize and reward the most loyal community members while also rewarding early community members who may not wish to opt for the long-term options. The weighting varies linearly, such that GF tokens staked for two weeks will have a weighting of 1, while GF tokens staked for 52 weeks will have a weighting of 2.

In addition to governance, the sGF token holders also benefit from value accrual through Metadrop Launchpad, GuildFi Tools Zone, GuildFi ID, Proof of Play Rewards, and Game Discovery. 

Supported Games

At present, two games have successfully integrated with GuildFi, such as Axie Infinity and CyBall. GuildFi will serve as a platform for players of these games to access guild scholarships and gaming tools. Players can simply create Guildfi IDs, link with the game, and start earning additional rewards. Their in-game experience will be accumulated as points and compounded along with other games in the metaverse. GuildFi provided more than 1500 scholarships from its treasury to players interested in the Axie Infinity and 1000 scholarships for CyBall.   

Recent Developments

As mentioned on the protocol’s Medium blog, GuildFi has been aggressively expanding its offerings through partnerships with popular and upcoming games such as World Overlay, Nyan Heroes, Stella Fantasy, Crypto Raiders, Wonder Heroes, Ascenders, etc. It also partnered with Zipmex for the formation and management of ZGuild where Zipmex will provide the capital for the acquisition of Axie teams, and GuildFi providing Guild 2.0 as a Service, will oversee the management and rewards sharing. GuildFi was also involved in the world’s first triple IGO with Binance NFT and CyBall. The move was considered revolutionary by the community as it may set a precedent for how games or projects might be launched in the future, gaining three times the exposure. It partnered with Binance NFTs to onboard new players to provide them with an improved gaming experience. 

GuildFi has also made significant investments in the GameFi space, such as it purchased $500,000 worth of Land and $MAVIA token on Heroes of Mavia. It also Invested $880,000 in Apeiron. 

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Team Background and Funding

GuildFi was co-founded by Jarindr Thitadilaka and Gazinpoj Techahuasingh. Jarindr has significant experience in blockchain and software development with companies such as OmiseGo (OMG) and Bitfinex and has been instrumental in technical research such as tokenizing NFTs on Layer 2 platforms and building the first-ever Proof-of-Concept blockchain game on the Plasma Protocol. Gazinpoj is Head of Business Development. He was also a co-founder at the Cryptomind group, which is one of the biggest Thailand-based digital asset fund managers.

As reported by BSC News, GuildFi secured funding from Binance’s $1 billion Growth Fund; the exact amount was not disclosed; however, it still paints a picture of conviction and confidence in the project. To celebrate this announcement with the community, GuildFi announced that 150,000 GuildFi IDs would be able to earn double the GXP and in-game token rewards through all games in the GuildFi gaming center.

GuildFi also secured $6 Million in funding in the first seed round led by co-led by DeFiance Capital and Hashed. It was backed by Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, Animoca Brands, Dapper Labs, Play Ventures, Coin98 Ventures, and SkyVision Capital. As mentioned earlier, the token launch raised $140 Million.

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Concluding Thoughts

The growth of GameFi across blockchain networks has been huge and is one of the mainstays of the cryptoverse even in the bear market through H1 2022. Within this ecosystem, the GameFi protocols on the BNB Chain are also supported by Binance’s $1 billion growth fund that is gradually being distributed to the best upcoming projects building on the network. 

GuildFi is conceptually a very robust ecosystem, and as illustrated it is backed by some of the giants in the VC space. However, the platform is yet to fully mature and explore its potential as only two have been fully integrated at the time of writing, and it is operational only on the BNB and ETH chains. 

In the near future, GuildFi plans to integrate cross-chain interoperability which will make the platform truly scalable while tying in various unique aspects of the expanding GameFi ecosystem such as scholarship programs, investment opportunities, Guilds-as-a-Service, etc. These unique value propositions along with reducing entry barriers make it easier for newbies in the ecosystem to get a taste of the revolution that blockchain gaming brings to the larger gaming community. Ensuring sustainable growth of this user base is key to the protocol’s long-term prospects. 

Find more about GuildFi here:

Website | Twitter | Telegram | Discord | Blog | Whitepaper |  

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