A gaming guild that lends you the NFTs, teaches you crypto in Spanish, and lets you keep a cut of what you win.
Here is a fact that sounds made up but is not: for a while in 2021 and 2022, people were earning real money by playing video games, and almost none of the marketing was in Spanish. There were roughly 230 million active gamers in Latin America. There was a booming, chaotic, occasionally lucrative thing called "play-to-earn." And there was a language gap wide enough to drive a bus through. Ola Guild Games is what happens when someone notices that gap and decides it is a business.
The mechanics of play-to-earn are worth pausing on, because they are genuinely strange. In games like Axie Infinity, the little creatures you play with are NFTs - digital assets you own, or rent, and that can be worth money. The catch is that you had to buy the NFTs first, and they weren't cheap. So a market emerged for people who owned NFTs but didn't want to play, to lend them to people who wanted to play but couldn't afford to buy in. The lender fronts the assets, the player brings the time and skill, and they split the winnings. In Web3 this arrangement got the very earnest name "scholarship." Ola GG runs one of the largest Spanish-language versions of it.
"There is no initial cost or risk for the players who access these scholarships."
Ola GG is not a standalone company in the usual sense. It is a subDAO - a smaller decentralized organization nested inside a much larger one, Yield Guild Games, which bills itself as the first and largest gaming guild in the world. If Yield Guild Games is the parent, Ola GG is the regional franchise for the Hispanic world, run by people who actually grew up gaming in it. YGG introduced Ola GG as its subDAO for Hispanic communities, and from there it went and built the largest Web3 gaming community in the Spanish-speaking market: more than 400,000 followers across Latin America and Spain, and over 3,000 scholarship players in its shared-rewards program.
The word "ola" means "wave" in Spanish, which is a nicer origin story than most crypto branding gets. The community's rallying cry is #SomosOLA - "we are OLA" - and it functions less like a slogan and more like a membership card. That matters more than it sounds, because in a category where the products are volatile and the token charts go up and down like an EKG, the durable asset turned out to be the community itself.
A guild is really just a group of people who agree to share the risk. Ola GG made that agreement in Spanish, and half a million people signed.
Two of these numbers are Ola GG's. Two are the size of the pond it's fishing in. The bet is that the ratio has room to move.
Ola GG lends you the NFT assets you need to play and earn in blockchain games. No upfront cost, no risk. You play, you win, and the rewards get split between you and the guild.
Spanish-language courses and an academy covering blockchain, crypto, DeFi, and tokenomics - so members understand the thing they're participating in, not just the game on top of it.
A LATAM-focused guild organizing tournaments, events, and a genuine sense of belonging across Latin America, Spain, and a dedicated Brazilian arm.
Curated access to blockchain games - Axie Infinity, CyBall, Mokens League, MonkeyLeague - with support, benefits, and tournaments to smooth the very steep learning curve.
The pitch to a player is refreshingly concrete: we hand you the keys, we explain the car, you drive, we split the fare.
In April 2022, Ola GG announced an $8 million seed round. What's notable isn't the size - it's the guest list, which reads like a who's-who of crypto and gaming capital deciding that a Spanish-speaking gaming guild was worth writing checks for.
Bars are illustrative, not disclosed allocations. The exact split isn't public - the names are.
The stated use of funds was unusually legible for the genre: acquire yield-generating NFTs (so there's inventory to lend), produce language-specific educational content (so people know what they're doing), and push play-to-earn adoption across LATAM, the Americas, and Spain. Put plainly, the money buys the assets, teaches the players, and grows the community - which is more or less the whole business in one sentence.
Ola GG's founding team came out of the emerging-markets fintech and crypto world, not out of a gaming studio - which tells you something about how they see the opportunity. Clara Bullrich, a co-founder, is a longtime investor with roots in wealth management and venture capital, and an active participant in the Web3 sector. Nico del Pino, co-founder and the public face of the company, spent over 15 years in emerging-markets blockchain and fintech - a commercial partner at a leading LATAM crypto exchange, work with Endeavor and dLocal, and a co-founding role in an early publicly traded liquidity-mining operation. The guild also traces its lineage to Gabby Dizon and the Yield Guild Games ecosystem it belongs to.
The founders' resume isn't "we love games." It's "we spent a decade moving money in markets everyone else ignored." Ola GG is that thesis, gamified.
Nico del Pino, on paper: fintech operator, crypto native, LATAM lifer. On the internet: the guy answering #SomosOLA at all hours.
Ola GG is YGG's regional subDAO for Hispanic communities - the franchise arm of the world's largest gaming guild.
Skill-based blockchain sports games. Ola GG brings tournaments, events, and player benefits to its community.
A partnership to grow MonkeyLeague's player base through Ola GG's Spanish-speaking community.
Investors and ecosystem partners providing the rails the guild's games run on.
Play-to-earn cooled after its 2021 peak. Ola GG's response was to lean on the least volatile thing it owned: the community.
Onboarding 230 million gamers to games that reward the value they bring to virtual economies.
— Ola GG's founding thesis, roughly