He decided a joystick could be a financial instrument - then built a continent-sized community to prove it.
Web3 Gaming · Financial Inclusion · LATAM
Nico del Pino. Builds for the 500 million who were told gaming was just a hobby.
When Yield Guild Games went global, the obvious move was a copy-paste: spin up "YGG Latin," translate the dashboard, ship it. Nico del Pino said no. He and co-founder Clara Bullrich wanted something that smelled like the region it served - its slang, its leagues, its hustle. So they built Ola Guild Games, a subDAO of YGG, and pointed it at the largest play-to-earn community in the Hispanic world.
Today del Pino runs OLA GG as its co-founder and CEO. The pitch is deceptively simple and quietly radical: if you can own a piece of the economy inside a game, that ownership can show up in a real household budget. Not as a metaphor. As money. The community he leads spans players, creators, and game developers from Venezuela to Argentina to Brazil, and the thing that holds it together is a belief that play and pay don't have to be opposites.
He has been building toward this for more than a decade, mostly in the unglamorous trenches of emerging-markets crypto and fintech - the places where "financial inclusion" is not a conference panel but a daily problem. OLA GG is where all of that experience finally found a controller.
We wanted to tell our own story and build something unique to Latin America.
OLA GG isn't a single app with a single button. It is a sprawling clubhouse where the doors all lead somewhere useful. Scholarships put yield-generating NFTs in the hands of players who couldn't afford the buy-in. Tournaments and leagues give them somewhere to compete. Quests, polls, events, media, mini-games, and a store keep the whole thing humming.
Underneath the fun sits a DAO - a structure where the community doesn't just play in the economy, it participates in the business and the revenue. That is the part del Pino keeps coming back to. A guild that earns together has different incentives than a company that extracts from its users.
And he is honest about the limits. The first wave of play-to-earn over-promised, propped up by tokens dressed as marketing. OLA GG's bet is the harder, slower one: real digital economies, sustainable curricula, and esports that people actually want to watch.
Yield-bearing NFTs handed to players who can't front the cost - the on-ramp to ownership.
An esports series running on Arbitrum, turning casual players into competitors.
Language-specific education that combines web3 literacy with competitive play.
In April 2022, OLA GG closed an $8M seed round with a guest list that read like a who's-who of crypto and gaming capital - led by Galaxy Interactive, BITKRAFT and Arca, with Polygon, Crypto.com Capital, Huobi Ventures, BlockTower and a dozen more along for the ride.
Long before NFTs, del Pino was working the emerging-markets beat - the kind of fintech where moving money across borders is a genuine engineering and trust problem. He served as VP of Sales at dLocal, the cross-border payments company that later listed on the NASDAQ. He ran fintech at Endeavor Global, the network that backs high-impact entrepreneurs in growth markets. He's a partner at Bitex.la, one of Latin America's earliest crypto exchanges.
Then he helped build something genuinely first-of-its-kind: Liquid Meta, the first publicly traded liquidity-mining operation in the world. It was DeFi plumbing wired into public markets - the kind of bet that only makes sense if you've spent years believing these two worlds would eventually merge.
His crypto roots run deep enough to be measured in friendships, not just funding rounds. The OLA GG partnership grew out of a long relationship with Gabby Dizon of Yield Guild Games - the people, then the project.
In 2017 he sharpened the entrepreneurial side of his game at the Stanford-Endeavor Innovation and Growth Program. Put it all together and the throughline is obvious: payments, exchanges, DeFi, and now gaming are all the same story for him - getting financial tools into the hands of people the legacy system overlooked.
Different vehicles. Same passenger: the underbanked.
Tokens were used as marketing tools. That is not sustainable long term.
Run a DAO long enough and you learn that hype is a loan you eventually have to repay. Del Pino's answer is to under-promise out loud.
"Transparency is key," he says. "We have always been clear about what we can and cannot do." In a sector that has burned plenty of communities with moon-math and vanishing roadmaps, that sentence is a competitive advantage. It is also a constraint he seems to enjoy.
The other half of his philosophy is the one that gets him out of bed: real digital economies. Ownership of in-game assets, governance that actually governs, and value that flows back to the people doing the playing. When the incentives are honest, he argues, the community stops being an audience and starts being a workforce, a fan base, and a set of shareholders all at once.
"What excites me about web3 gaming is that it allows for real digital economies."
That is the bet underneath OLA GG's social work too - the UNICEF collaboration in Sao Paulo, the education curricula, the leagues. It is not charity bolted onto a crypto company. It is the same thesis pointed at a younger audience: give people the tools and the ownership, and watch what they build.
"We wanted to tell our own story and build something unique to Latin America."
"Transparency is key. We have always been clear about what we can and cannot do."
"What excites me about web3 gaming is that it allows for real digital economies."
"Tokens were used as marketing tools. That is not sustainable long term."
Del Pino's north star hasn't moved in a decade: durable financial inclusion for the Spanish-speaking world. The vehicle changed - payments, then exchanges, then DeFi, now gaming - but the destination is the same. Build economies people can own, teach them to navigate it, and make the on-ramp a game worth playing.
If the first wave of play-to-earn was about the promise, his wager is that the second wave will be about the proof. Slower, more honest, more durable. The kind you can show your grandmother and your auditor.
Reporting drawn from public interviews, company announcements and professional profiles. Verify and update as the story evolves.