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I ran a crypto gaming guild. Then the economy broke.

A year and a half running Mega Kraken Guild on Axie Infinity. 223 scholars in the Philippines, three time zones, manual payments that took three days. After the play-to-earn economy collapsed, the same channel became Super Crypto Time, a solo news show on the industry that hosted the operation.

See what shippedThe wind-down

11 episodes

Eleven episodes from the run.

Four from the operations chapter. Seven from the news show that followed. The thumbnail below is the manual-payments session, playing muted.

// now playing: Problems with Manual Scholar Payments

  • Axie Infinity Beginners Guide 2021

    14:13Nov 2021

    OPS

  • Axie Infinity Scholarship Account, What Is It?

    3:15Nov 2021

    OPS

  • Axie Infinity Scholarship Application

    9:54Nov 2021

    OPS

  • Problems with Manual Scholar Payments

    18:56Dec 2021

    OPSFeatured

  • The Story of Tornado Cash

    5:02Aug 2022

    SHOW

  • Super Crypto Time, Crypto News Pilot Episode

    7:39Sep 2022

    SHOW

  • Vitalik's Death

    9:19Sep 2022

    SHOW

  • Joseph Lubin and Consensys, History and Story

    6:57Oct 2022

    SHOW

  • Is the Metaverse Dead? What Is the Metaverse?

    9:05Oct 2022

    SHOW

  • What's the Metaverse?

    30:31Oct 2022

    SHOW

  • Binance CEO Kills FTX with a Tweet

    7:55Nov 2022

    SHOW

11 videos in scrollable rail.

The token economy the operation ran on.

SLP / USD across the eighteen-month run. The work stayed steady at roughly 140 SLP per scholar per day. The currency that paid the work dropped from $0.30 to under $0.003.

The roster the guild was paying.

Every scholar was a row in a spreadsheet that lived in the operator’s head and a Google Sheet his scholar-leads kept synced. Filter by claim-ready state to see who is getting paid this cycle, by region to see how many scholars are in each time zone, by total SLP to see who is actually producing.

// scroll for the full 223-scholar roster · field set matches the Mega Kraken Google Sheet · click any row for the full profile

An NFT game with a thousand-dollar buy-in. Most of the people who wanted to play could not afford it.

$700+

team buy-in

70 / 30

scholar split

223

scholars / 3 time zones

Axie Infinity launched a model where you could earn real income playing a game. To play, you needed three Axie NFTs and a wallet to hold them. The cheapest team was around seven hundred dollars. A competitive team ran past two thousand. The people most motivated to grind eight hours a day for the income were exactly the people who could not put up the entry capital.

Mega Kraken Guild

Mega Kraken Guild

Operator-funded scholarship pool.

Mega Kraken Guild bought the NFTs and lent them out. Scholars played, the guild held the keys, earnings split seventy-thirty in the scholar’s favor. Onboarding ran through Discord and a Google Form. Daily numbers went into a shared spreadsheet. Payments went out from a Ronin wallet, manually, one wallet at a time. The operation fully employed 223 scholars in the Philippines across three time zones. The roster forced payment cycles to run in parallel across delegated handlers pulled from the scholar pool itself.

The work was custody, async coordination, and the slow grind of doing a tight financial loop a hundred times a week without making a typo. After the SLP economy collapsed through 2022 the channel pivoted to a news show on the same industry. The show ran a few months and then quietly stopped.

Three layers of operational surface.

Nine surfaces grouped into custody and payments on Ronin, community and coordination on Discord, and the editorial residue on YouTube.

01/LAYER

CUSTODY AND PAYMENTS

Hot-key custody for 223 wallets

One operator held every private key. Manual import flow per payment cycle, with a strict no-third-party policy after the bot route was killed in week one.

01 / 09
01/LAYER

CUSTODY AND PAYMENTS

70/30 manual payouts on Ronin

Two transactions per scholar per cycle, claimed from the marketplace, split, and sent. The 223-scholar roster forced parallel payment cycles across delegated operator-handlers pulled from the scholar pool itself.

02 / 09
01/LAYER

CUSTODY AND PAYMENTS

Ronin Bridge funding loop

Wire fiat on-ramp into MetaMask, MetaMask through the Ronin Bridge, Ronin into the Mega Kraken fund wallet, fund wallet into wrapped ETH, wrapped ETH into more Axies.

03 / 09
01/LAYER

CUSTODY AND PAYMENTS

Axie Tracker integration

On-chain claim-ready state across the full roster. Saw who was claimable this cycle without a Discord ping, which kept payment timing inside the operator's hands.

04 / 09
02/LAYER

COMMUNITY AND COORDINATION

Discord with five working channels

Daily-numbers reporting, applications, training, match-shares, payments. Each channel had a delegated scholar-mod tier so the daily-numbers ingest never bottlenecked on one person.

05 / 09
02/LAYER

COMMUNITY AND COORDINATION

Application funnel with rejection gates

Google Form into a Discord interview into a hard selection gate. Game knowledge, non-toxicity, and prior community engagement got you through. Hard-luck framing was an automatic reject.

06 / 09
02/LAYER

COMMUNITY AND COORDINATION

Async coordination across time zones

Daily reports staggered across three time zones, ingested by scholar-leads and copy-pasted into a master sheet that ran the payment cadence.

07 / 09
03/LAYER

EDITORIAL RESIDUE

@supercryptotime9198 channel

Solo on-camera, OBS plus Premiere, posted from a home studio. Five-to-ten-minute episodes plus one thirty-minute deep dive on the metaverse with a guest.

08 / 09
03/LAYER

EDITORIAL RESIDUE

Eleven episodes of news commentary

Market commentary, the Ethereum Merge, FTX, Tornado Cash, a piece on Vitalik, Joseph Lubin and Consensys, and the long retrospective on running a guild and what it cost.

09 / 09

Scroll to browse the full stack

ARC 01 / THE GUILDthe operations chapter

“I had a payment a few weeks ago. It took me three days to do these payments.”

Mike, Mega Kraken Guild - December 2021

Late 2021 through 2022. Mega Kraken Guild bought the NFTs, lent them to scholars, and split the earnings 70/30. At peak the roster was 223 scholars across multiple time zones. The operation ran on Discord, Google Sheets, Axie Tracker, and the Ronin wallet, with delegated scholar-leads handling daily ingest and parallel payment cycles.

// Problems with Manual Scholar Payments

Pass or reject. You make the call.

The screening loop ran on signal density. Game knowledge yes or no. Visible community engagement yes or no. Hard-luck opener. Multi-account history. Read each application, make a call, then see how Michael ruled. Five real-shaped applicants drawn from the actual screening criteria.

// click PASS or REJECT to reveal Michael's call · five real-shaped applicants · state persists

The Discord at peak.

Five working channels, 223 scholars across three time zones, a couple of scholar-leads ingesting daily reports into a master spreadsheet. The mockup below is a snapshot of the active channels at one moment, December 30 2021 21:30 UTC. Click any channel in the sidebar to switch the feed.

// snapshot moment, Dec 30 2021 21:30 UTC · click a channel to switch the feed · 223 members on the server

What manual payment cost at scale.

Slide the scholar-count slider. Wall-clock hours, error probability, and bot-fee economics compound across N scholars. The decision tree at the bottom snaps to whatever the simulator says is the rational call at that scholar count. With 223 wallets on the roster the only sustainable option was to build automation in-house. The crash arrived first.

// slider drives every panel · numbers based on the verbatim cost model from the December 2021 video

Where the SLP went after a claim.

A scholar’s claim hit the Ronin wallet. The guild split it seventy-thirty in the scholar’s favor. The scholar’s portion shipped to their payout address. The guild’s thirty percent rolled into a Mega Kraken fund wallet, which converted to wrapped ETH and bought more Axies. Animate the flow.

// click Process Claim to watch one cycle · all transactions are mocked · numbers approximate Dec 2021 prices

Same daily SLP. Different USD payout.

Across thirty days, the 223-scholar roster produced roughly the same daily SLP volume while the USD payout per scholar collapsed because the SLP price collapsed. This chart is the visual case for “the economy was not durable.” Daily output held steady; the asset class did not.

// drag the date scrubber to walk through 2022 · synthetic data, real shape

The math the roster forced.

Manual cycles hit a delegation regime fast. The 223-scholar roster forced parallel cycles across handlers pulled from the scholar pool. Drag the sliders to see how scholar count and minutes-per-claim drive handlers, hours, and operator cost.

// real shape, real math · slider state persists locally · the operator-skill thesis as a live model

What carried after the economy broke.

DELEGATION

Roster scale forces delegation.

Manual ops scale linearly until typing fatigue catches up. The 223-scholar roster ran on delegated handlers pulled from the scholar pool itself. Parallel cycles through trusted scholar-leads, not raw effort, kept the cadence on schedule.

CUSTODY

Keys or fees, never both safe.

The third-party bot looked like salvation and was killed in a week because uploading 223 private keys to a service was an unbounded risk surface. Delegation in crypto-native ops costs you either keys or fees.

MANUAL

100% custody

3-day cycles

BOT

0% custody

3% per claim

RISK SHAPE

The operator funds the assets and eats the volatility.

The guild funded the asset base, ate the volatility, and absorbed the wind-down. Scholars earned wages while the system ran and walked away when it ended. That asymmetry is the structural shape of every token-based labor economy.

Operator capital risk100%
Participant capital risk0%

ARC 02 / THE SHOWthe editorial residue

“How’s it going, I’m Mike, and I cover news stories and projects in the crypto space.”

Mike, Super Crypto Time - opening line of every episode

September through November 2022. Solo on-camera commentary on the industry that hosted Mega Kraken. The Ethereum Merge, the FTX collapse, Tornado Cash sanctions. The show stops in late 2022 with no farewell episode.

Pilot episode · 7:39 · September 2022

Here are the episodes.

Top rail is the Mega Kraken operations arc. Bottom rail is the Super Crypto Time news show. Drag either to scroll. Click any tile to play in-place.

FULL-TIME JOBS · EIGHTEEN MONTHS · PHILIPPINES

223

people fully employed, playing a video game, for a year and a half.

Rent, groceries, and school fees came out of daily SLP payouts settled to local currency. Three time zones, async ops, and for most of them this was their primary income for the entire run of the operation.

What the income did.

The guild paid a daily wage in volatile crypto that settled to peso, dong, and baht through the scholars' own wallets. For most of them this was their primary income during the operation, and the operation ran through the back half of the COVID lockdowns in Southeast Asia.

RENT THROUGH THE LOCKDOWNS

Most scholars used cycle payouts to cover monthly rent and utilities. When the Philippines extended community quarantine into 2022, that line item did not go away. The daily SLP claim was the way it got paid.

SCHOOL FEES AND HOUSEHOLD COSTS

Tuition, transportation, and groceries flowed out of the same wallet. The 70 percent scholar split meant that even a modest claim cycle covered a week of household basics for many of the families running the accounts.

REAL JOB FOR EIGHTEEN MONTHS

For 223 people across three time zones this was a full-time role for the entire run of the operation. They showed up, posted daily numbers, and got paid. When the economy broke, the work ended; the income they had earned for the year and a half was already theirs.

Operator-funded, in a VC-funded field.

The YGG-era guild model was a venture-funded growth story. Mega Kraken ran the same playbook on personal capital. Operating capital across the field, from the largest raise down to ours.

GUILD
CAPITAL RAISED
GuildFi
$150M FDV
Merit Circle
$100M+
Yield Guild Games
$20M+
Avocado Guild
$18M
Crypto Gaming United
private
Mega Kraken
$0 raised

The field raised hundreds of millions in venture capital and did not survive the SLP collapse. Mega Kraken ran on personal capital, employed 223 scholars at peak, and wound down on schedule with every wallet intact.

THE CALL

Then I set down a lot of people.

“I had to like set down a lot of people and be like you know you’re the only one that made money in this. I didn’t make money on this. The guild didn’t make a cent. A single cent. So yeah, the people that are upset, I’m like I don’t... I think we all knew the risks involved and they weren’t actually taking any risks. We were the only ones really taking a risk.”

Mike, in the metaverse retrospective conversation, late 2022

// HEAR THE QUOTE

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