Perion's Amos Whitewolf: top gamers with the best NFTs earned 3.86x the average scholar

Ashton Addison: What is Perion, and what is it focused on?▶ 00:24

Amos Whitewolf: Perion is an NFT gaming organization. Our goal is to have the most skilled gamers in the world in the play-to-earn space creating the best content, so we can train new people in our community to become highly skilled gamers and give them the opportunity to be economic champions in their communities. We give them the best NFT gaming assets. In traditional gaming, you might have a bronze scimitar, and the best weapon would be something like a dragon scimitar. We give the most skilled gamers the absolute best NFTs in the space, so they can earn supernormal returns compared with other NFT gaming guilds. Those guilds might go for a higher quantity of people, say 5,000 or 6,000 scholars, but give them less expensive and less useful NFTs that earn a base rate. The last time we ran the statistics, the average Perion scholar was earning 3.86 times the average scholar rate, which at the time was around $800 a month. That's huge, especially in developing countries. Since SLP has come down because of Axie, and the whole space has slowed slightly, our scholars now earn around $300 a month. If their average monthly income is normally around $500, that's for a full day's work every day, whereas with us they're playing maybe two to three hours a day.

Ashton: What's the secret to such capital efficiency? Why do your gamers earn so much more than regular esports players?▶ 04:48

Amos: It started when I got into Axie Infinity to get my little sisters earning a bit of pocket money. To teach them, I wanted to understand the game. As I learned, I climbed to the top 10,000, then the top thousand, then the top hundred, and eventually got to number one in the world on the Axie leaderboard. I held that title on and off for about a month. Playing against the best people in the world gave us a view from a really high level of the game. We could see where the meta was going and how to breed the best Axies. We could also give our players the best NFTs and teach them how to earn the best returns for themselves and for Perion. Part of our selection process was to take my skills as a gamer and copy them over. I was a semi-pro League of Legends player at university, and I used to boost people's accounts from low levels to high levels and get paid for it. So we hooked up to the Dota 2, League of Legends and Mobile Legends APIs, and our recruitment process automatically checks that a player is highly skilled in a competitive game. Axie Infinity won't be the only play-to-earn game, so we wanted versatile players who can jump from one game to the next and find the best way to earn in each.

Ashton: Are you working only with specific play-to-earn games like Axie, or are other games already in the works?▶ 08:02

Amos: We're invested in around 10 games at the moment, including Axie Infinity, Zed Run and Ember Sword, and we're really interested in Sin City. We invest in games early and ideally help them with their economic structures for scale and longevity. It's a really new space. Axie Infinity has had incredible success, while other games have made very small mistakes that ruined their entire economy. When hundreds of thousands of people are playing your game, that's something DeFi hasn't really experienced at the early stage. In DeFi you might have 5,000 users at the start, and a mistake or a hack can be remedied because not so many people are hurt. With these NFT blockchain games, so many users come in so quickly, all expecting a return. One mistake on the economic side, one hack, one small thing can ruin it for the entire community, and it's very difficult to come back from.

Ashton: Do you plan to work with as many games as possible, or a select few?▶ 12:14

Amos: During our funding round we talked to a lot of investors, and we did a lot of research on other guilds in the space. Many of them use a spray-and-pray technique. They invest in every game that comes through and don't put much effort into those games unless one becomes much more successful. We prefer to keep the portfolio small and easy to manage, but very high conviction. You're not only investing, you're building a community that plays the game. That involves content, training, streamers, assets and balancing, and constantly finding ways to make returns within that game. For each game, that almost takes a mini team. So we'll invest in far fewer games, with very high conviction, and we'll have players in all of them.

Ashton: How does the investor side work? Can anyone contribute, and how do they get returns?▶ 10:23

Amos: Anyone can invest in the Perion token, Perion Credits, or PERC. As we build it out, we'll build a DAO that automatically takes funds from all the gamers and puts them through multiple pools, which will be Gnosis Safes. A separate DAO, a game DAO, will be the mechanism for distributing rewards to people who hold Perion Credits. Because our whole organization is for gamers, by gamers, we'll distribute rewards in a gamified way. You could stake your Perion Credits in a Perion NFT. The NFT is the ticket, and the credits are your ammunition or energy to play. Once a month you get an opportunity to jump into the game and play it to the best of your ability, or rent that opportunity to a highly skilled gamer, like a scholar, to earn the return for you. If you get to level one, you get very little of the percentage the DAO gives you based on the amount you're staking. If you get to level 30, you get the maximum rewards available.

Ashton: For people new to play-to-earn and unfamiliar with guilds and DAOs, what's the best way to get involved with Perion?▶ 13:58

Amos: The best way is to jump on our Twitter and into our Discord and see what's happening. If you aren't skilled enough to be one of Perion's scholars, there are plenty of other ways to get involved, including watching our streamers on Twitch. We love where this future is going, and we want to be in a position to influence where this space goes. We have some great ideas about which kinds of games will fit into economic models that aren't very complex pyramid schemes, like some people say Axie is.