I was building the guild back in 2005, now we started Avocado DAO - Exclusive conversation with Brendan, Founder CEO of Avocado DAO

Avocado DAO strives to invest and partner with new games and protocols to navigate the rapidly changing GameFi landscape. We're thrilled to have an exclusive conversation with Brendan, Founder and CEO of Avocado DAO to discuss what's the function of gaming DAO and how is the DAO going to curate a better relationships between gamers and game studios.

1. Introduction of Avocado DAO by co-founder/CEO Brendan

Avocado DAO (AVG) is a DAO guild/community where everyone can play games and earn scholarships. It was formed in June of 2021 with a vision to bridge players from Web 2 to Web 3. Blockchain technology is going to prevail thus there’s a substantial opportunity for different genres of gaming to be introduced and embraced around the technology. Because the cost to enter is quite high now, what we do now is to acquire lots of NFTs (mainly Axie Infinity at the moment) and lend them out to our users (scholars). The community is built around this mechanism and last year we were the largest scholar community in the entire guild space. Nowadays we still run scholarships. We grant, like venture capital (VC) but with smaller capacities, scholarships to help games develop. We also educate and help them understand the landscape in order to build better games. We are strategic partners/investors of a lot of projects in Web 3 gaming, and that’s also how we met with Carv.

2. How Brendan’s prior experience of leading a guild in World of WarCraft led him to found Avocado DAO?

Back in 2005, the guild in World of WarCraft I led had a size of over 100, later on we merged with another guild to become the largest one on our server with a total member of 200. We were the first to raid Molten Core. We started to understand the power of community at that point. But back then, it was very difficult to gather 40 people from all around the world online at the same time to pull a raid. And now we started Avocado DAO, we can target members that are geographically not too far from each other, with good adoption of blockchain technology and comprehension of English.

3. What’s the biggest advantage of AVG for degens to join the guild?

We’re always actively hiring scholars, especially for new games that are coming into the ecosystem. Last year, Axie Infinity dominated the whole space, but what we can see this year in Q4, possibly Q1/Q2 of next year is an influx of different genres of games. Some of these haven’t been seen in Web2 before, so that’s going to be very interesting. Other than providing scholarships, we’re working with a couple of names that we met in Korea. They are big games that are looking to enter Web3, which will be super exciting.

In terms of Degen stuff about AVG, many other guilds are also trying to onboard users into WEB3. The difference about Avocado is that our token emissions are quite low compared to other guilds in terms of rewards from ecosystem and staking. So our market cap is quite low, and until a guild excels above every other guild, I think AVG itself actually has more upside.

4. What games are you most looking for? What games are you bullish on in the near future?

I’m very bullish on Phantom Galaxy right now. While I was at Korean Blockchain Week a couple of weeks ago, I had the honour of sitting next to Yatsu. And during that time I had a chat with him and I understood that he created the tokenomics and their approach is very different. He’s very careful about token emissions, Also gameplay is always top priority. It wasn’t always about money for him. Instead, it was really about building a great product and breaking through the ecosystem, allowing people to onboard this technology.

Another game is Star heroes. They were originally building on Terra, but then obviously with the Terra crash, now they’re moving to Polygon. I think the product that they’re building is pretty insane. I tested it the other day, it was fairly fun. Some areas need polishing, but the tokenomics was insane.

5. AVG used to mean Avocado Guild, what makes you turn it into a DAO?

So we started off as Avocado Guild and we wanted to build it into a Dao. The decisions are not purely made by myself. We consulted with our advisors, our main investors, and a lot of industry partners to see the best direction, because, in the end, we want to benefit the ecosystem and move players on board.

6. What’s the utility of the $AVG token?

In terms of token use cases, right now, you can only state the token. But later on, we do plan to enable voting that will allow people to stay for the returns — not just for the game activity, but whatever activity the Dao engages in that yields a profit.

7. Tournaments held in discord community?

Internally we host a lot of tournaments with different types of games to ensure that the community can identify the type of games they like. When I look at web 3 gaming, I don’t quite see it as it is going to be console-style games or hardcore competitive PC games or even mobile games. I kind of see this space as having the opportunity to develop its own type of genres of games for a very unique clientele until Web 2 starts to adopt this technology and understand what the infrastructure really means and how blockchain can add more to the value of the games. So right now, we try to educate users about wallet security and how the wallets work, onboard them with any cool new NFT-based games or web3-based games that we find and reward the community for participation.

8. What new markets is AVG targeting now?

The Philippines and Indonesia were our major targets in the beginning. Currently, we are looking to expand our presence in the Greater China area, Vietnam, and Korea. With the current state of the market as a whole, we need GameFi projects to involve a bit more and those areas are where a significant size of people are interested in the GameFi space.

9. Is AVG hiring language mods for those communities?

We are hiring moderators for Telegram, and possibly for discord for Vietnam and Chinese communities. We would love to be able to transparently share much more information about what we’re doing currently and which direction we’re evolving into.

10. What’s AVG’s next move and how do you see guilds play their roles in Web 3 and GameFi?

The most important thing to do during a bear is to make sure that you’re nice and warm and make sure you have a nice load of treasury around yourself so you can survive. We want to continuously build useful products. We are working on a couple of really cool products and hoping to release V1 around late October or early November. But at the same time, our main goal is to help onboard users from web2 to web3 and help build better games. We do see guilds as unique builders and supporters, in the sense that we help a lot of infrastructure projects by investing in them and advising them. At the same time, we see ourselves as community managers. Whatever the future may hold, guilds will be at the forefront of this.

11. As the two revenue sources of AVG, how are the decisions being made when it comes to investing in a project, and how do we make sure our NFT lent out to users aren’t at risk of losing?

Investment decisions are now made by AVG’s contributing team, which includes myself (Brendan), the other co-founders, and some management as well as investment advisors. We build a team to assess these projects to determine the risk and the cofounders’ capabilities with help of some extensive research reports. In the future, we’re looking at creating some form of portal and research source that will allow us to share information with holders who staked their tokens. So they will have access to the information and vote at some level to help influence the decision-making process. But right now, due to rapidly evolving GameFi space and confidentiality of the information, the decisions are made only by the founding team and our experts because we just need to do it much quicker.

In terms of collateralizing, we currently do not lend any of our assets up without having retained complete custody. A lot of the new games are building lending functions that we can utilize to control our assets. It’s fairly normal to be able to lend out your assets. There are people building smart contracts to allow this to happen as well as infrastructure layers trying to tackle this problem

We will be updating our white paper in the next coming months. And it will include different plans that have different revenue streams. What we realized is we’re barely scratching the surface of GameFi and there is so much more to build.

12. What projects will come up from the collaboration between AvocadoDao and Carv and how will the community benefit from such collaboration?

On-chain credentials are very important because we are working under the guise of being completely anonymous. Through on-chain credentials, people can track you, they can validate you and they can provide better transparency. So in that sense, I think there are a lot of opportunities for us in the future to explore collaborations, and sharing of information, such as this AMA, but also the integration of different technologies into what each other is building.

For communities, We will build out different functionalities that allow token holders to benefit from advanced information or just access to the different projects that we are a part of.

13. Is there a game project coming?

We thought about making our own game projects. We definitely have enough partners to do this. However, for game development, it is really a complicated innovation. It actually takes quite a bit of time, probably 3 or 4 years. And right now, we feel that our value is actually in providing awareness of how the landscape looks and transparency a lot more than actually trying to develop it ourselves.

MetaVerse as the final Goal

Metaverse in itself is not new. Discord itself is a metaverse with all of these audiences. The only difference is the level of engagement we can receive from our community. When you look at blockchain technology, NFTs, tokens and the communities you can build, that’s just another layer of engagement that you can have in this METAVERSE. The real focus isn’t on the METAVERSE, but on the technology, the attention, the money, and the game developers wanting to come in.

14. What do you think about the future of web 3 games and what do you expect from future games?

Although the current market is in a downturn and macroeconomic conditions affect most of anything that has something to do with money, I’m still very bullish on Web 3 games. During the boom of GameFi last year, the majority of the games just followed Axie Infinity. You don’t really see much variance in tokenomics and gameplay designs. GameFi is still a completely barren place that needs innovation and development. If we give it time, when the market returns to its right path, even many good projects will fail during the bear market, those with enough vision and funds will stand. And I believe different genres of games and unique tokenomics will be designed and built. Metaverse in blockchain is still a brand new concept and technology with so much value to be given. If you give it 3–5 years, more real game BUIDLers will come to embrace the technology and have enough time to properly build sustainable games, and by that time we will see sports games, simulation games, FPS games and all the traditional Web 2 game genres onboarded Web 3.

About CARV