The Guild Founders: Gabby Dizon, Beryl Li and the Business of Lending Axies

In the summer of 2021, a guild in the Philippines was handing out digital monsters the way a bank hands out loans. Its players had collectively earned 43 million SLP, the reward token of Axie Infinity, worth about $8.6 million at the time. The guild was Yield Guild Games (YGG), and in August 2021 it became Andreessen Horowitz's first investment in a Filipino-led startup.

Behind it were three founders with very different backgrounds. This piece is about them and the money they moved; YGG's full corporate history is covered elsewhere in our blockchain section.

Three founders, one idea

Gabby Dizon had spent more than 20 years in the games industry and was a founding member and former president of the Game Developers Association of the Philippines. In YGG's own telling, the guild grew out of him lending his Axies to people who could not afford to buy a team.

Beryl Li came from crypto finance: she was on the founding team of Coins.ph, the Philippine crypto app later bought by Gojek. The third founder works under a pseudonym, Owl of Moistness, a smart-contract developer who had built Axie breeding algorithms and bots that bring NFTs into Discord.

The idea was simple. Axie needed three creatures to play, and in 2021 those cost hundreds of dollars. YGG bought the Axies, lent them to players called scholars, and split the rewards.

The 2021 money

By August 2021, YGG counted about 48,000 gamers in its community and 4,700 scholars. Its $4.6 million round, led by a16z, also brought in Kingsway Capital, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Atelier Ventures and the mobile-games entrepreneur Gabriel Leydon (read his story). The round closed before the guild's own YGG token sale on 27 July 2021.

For the founders, the token was where the real value sat. A guild token gave holders a claim on a treasury of game NFTs and a share of future revenue, and in the boom, guild tokens traded at prices that valued YGG far above its $4.6 million round. As with most crypto founders, none of the three has a published net worth from Forbes or Bloomberg.

The scholar model also drew criticism. Some managers demanded quotas, and critics compared guilds to landlords taking a cut of other people's labour. When SLP collapsed in 2022, scholar earnings collapsed with it (the scholars' story).

From guild to publisher, and back again

When play-to-earn faded, YGG changed shape. In May 2025, it launched YGG Play with a casual "degen" game called LOL Land, then grew it into a publishing and token-launch platform. In its first quarter of 2026 update, YGG Play reported more than $9 million in lifetime revenue and a treasury of about $20.6 million.

It did not last. On 6 July 2026, YGG announced it would shut YGG Play, LOL Land and Waifu Sweeper on 31 July, cutting 35 jobs. Dizon called it a "market decision, not a product decision". Revenue had peaked in October 2025, and he pointed to the 10 October crypto liquidation event as the moment the casual crypto-gaming audience lost its confidence and its spending money.

Where the founders are now

Dizon remains YGG's co-founder and public voice. The guild's new plan is to sell gaming datasets to AI companies, including those building "world models", and to rebrand its job-alerts service as AI Alerts, connecting members with remote AI-training work. YGG says its treasury is still worth more than $20 million, with about $6 million in stablecoins, Treasury bills and large-cap tokens, and around four years of runway.

Why it matters

YGG's founders made a fortune on paper by spotting, before almost anyone, that a game economy could be run like a lending business. They have also been unusually honest about the limits of it. The pivot from scholarships to AI data work is, in a way, the same idea in a new costume: organising a big online community to do paid digital work. Whether that is a better business than lending Axies is the question for 2027.

Token prices are highly volatile. Nothing in this article is investment advice.