Crypto glossary
Gaming guild
A gaming guild is an organisation, often a DAO, that buys NFTs for blockchain games and lends them to players in exchange for a share of their earnings.
During the play-to-earn boom of 2021, many popular blockchain games required expensive NFTs to start playing. Guilds stepped in: they bought characters, land and items with investor money and lent them to players, often in South-East Asia and Latin America, through scholarship programmes. Scholars kept a share of the tokens they earned and the guild and its managers took the rest.
The largest guilds raised venture funding, launched their own tokens and governed treasuries as DAOs, presenting themselves as the investment and recruitment layer of the play-to-earn economy. For a time, scholarship earnings exceeded local wages in some countries, which attracted mainstream media attention.
The model collapsed with the token economies it depended on. When game token prices crashed in 2022, scholar earnings fell below subsistence and guild treasuries lost most of their value. Critics described the arrangement as digital sharecropping. Surviving guilds have pivoted toward community building, quests, game discovery and publishing rather than renting assets.
Example
In 2021 a guild lent three game characters to a player in the Philippines; the player earned daily tokens, kept 70% and sent 30% to the guild and its local manager.