Salad Ventures recently announced the launch of its open online course (MOOC) platform – Salad Academy. The new academy offers a comprehensive introduction for players into the rapidly emerging world of blockchain games and is part of the project’s plan to develop a scalable and comprehensive play-to-earn ecosystem.
Established in May 2021 as a play-to-earn guild, Salad has evolved to offer a three-tiered offering to its ecosystem, with the academy forming the tip of its spear.
Co-Founder and Project Lead Felix Sim explains: “Play-to-earn is the start of Work 3.0. While most guilds are focused on aggressive asset acquisition and yield, Salad’s North Star is infrastructure and education. This approach will enable the entire Play-to-earn industry to build sustainable value for all stakeholders.”
Dubbed the “Udemy of GameFi”, the free online courses are focused initially on Axie Infinity but the team is currently adding courses for games including Mines of Dalarnia, Happyland and MiniRoyale.
Axie accreditation is available at two certification levels – Basic Axie and Arena Mastery. The extensive course materials include videos and presentations, and require online test completion with scores of over 80% for progression and ultimate certification. The academy will soon include free NFT-minting of certificates to its graduates.
The academy aims to be generating scholars who – whether they go on to represent Salad’s prominent existing guild – Apollo Squad – or play elsewhere, are raising the gameplay bar for the entire industry, with a certification set to be recognized by any prominent guild.
Apollo Squad Gains Early Traction
Apollo Squad is on track to have over 1,000 scholars in its line-up by year’s end. The guild shot to prominence with its adoption of a novel ‘salaried’ approach to its scholars. This absorbs the risk of currency fluctuations damaging player earnings from guilds utilizing a revenue-sharing approach to P2E games while offering exceptional players a substantial wage and bonus structure based on their performance. Scholars in Apollo Squad are trained and equipped to double the performance requirements of other leading guilds
Drawing on the core team’s background in technology and human capital management, the rapid growth of the guild saw Salad develop its own GuildOS. The full-featured guild management suite covers onboarding, monitoring, asset, and player management. GuildOS goes well above the industry norms of ‘read-only’ free online scholar tracker tools.
A Shared Vision With Web3’s Brightest Minds
The six-month-old project has already seen its vision for a systematized approach to play-to-earn endorsed by leading investors including Multicoin Capital, Kosmos Ventures, Rarestone Capital, GBV, OSAZ, and Project Galaxy. Salad is also backed by prominent angels including Santiago R Santos, Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano, Jack Herrick, Ryan Zurrer, Matteo Franceschetti, Savneet Singh and Tin Nguyen.
Mable Jiang, Partner at Multicoin says: “We have always been looking for a systematic way to embrace the new paradigm of labor relationship in the Web3 world. Salad Academy and GuildOS, both under Salad Ventures, will complement each other hand-in-hand: the former will structurally improve the labor quality and train specialized labor for the supply side, and the latter will optimize the operation and management of different guilds on the demand side. We are thrilled to back Felix and the team to empower the Web3 labor market. We believe they are the right team for this grand vision with their operational expertise in Apollo Squad and their past background.”
Prominent Web3 investor Santiago R Santos added: “Guilds have proven to be incredibly important onboarding funnels for new users venturing into Web3. I love Salad’s approach focused on providing the most comprehensive curriculum to educate users. The opportunity here is for Salad to become the go-to Web3 university and I’m excited to back Felix and the team in this journey.”
Salad is presently in talks with investors looking to partner with the project in its private sale round. More details will soon be announced. In the meantime is aggressively hiring product managers, developers, UX specialists and senior directors to join its team.
