Axie Infinity is currently the most popular NFT game on the crypto market. It brings creators more in a week than projects like Ethereum, Uniswap, Aave, PancakeSwap, MetaMask, MakerDAO, and Synthetix.
Since the beginning of the year, the AXS and SLP project tokens have grown in price 76 and 11.5 times, respectively, and the number of NFT game users has increased 35 times – now there are more than 350,000 people.
The main feature of Axie Infinity is that it allows you to receive tokens after each victory. So, the average player can earn tokens worth several tens of dollars every day.
We figured out how the popular NFT game Axie Infinity works, how you can earn tokens in it and what are its future prospects on the crypto market.
What makes Axie Infinity unique?
Axie Infinity was launched in 2018 by Vietnamese game studio Sky Mavis. And in December 2019, the alpha version of the game was presented. The company has raised $ 13 million in investments from firms such as Animoca, Hashed and Consensys. In October last year, the Axie Infinity Shards (AXS) project management token was held on Binance Launchpad, bringing the creators $ 2.97 million.
Axie Infinity is an Ethereum-based collectible NFT game in which users breed Axie virtual creatures. Each Axie is a unique non-fungible NFT token.
Users can grow their Axies, trade them, create teams with them, and fight other players. Axie Infinity’s plot is similar to the world of Pokémon, and the game itself is very similar to another popular NFT game, CryptoKitties, in which players raise and breed digital cats.
But unlike her, Axie Infinity players can make money not only by selling their virtual pets. During the game, they receive project tokens SLP and AXS for each victory. These tokens can be sold on the exchange, sent for staking, or used in voting on the development of the game. We will tell you more about SLP and AXS below.
It’s worth noting that Axie Infinity has more in common with investing than with regular blockchain games. It combines elements of the Pay-to-Win (pay to win) and Play-to-Earn (play to earn) mechanics.
The end result is something like Pay-to-Win-to-Earn (pay to win and earn). So, to start playing Axie Infinity, you need an initial investment, and then everything depends on the efforts and skills of the player who can win and earn.
Who are Axie?
Axie are virtual Pokemon-like creatures that players breed.
To start, you need to buy at least three Axies, which are available on the game’s marketplace. The cheapest Axies now cost about $ 200, and the record for sales of these virtual creatures is 666 ETH ($ 250,000 at the time of the transaction).
There are 6 main types of Axie, each with its own color:
- Beast (orange);
- Plant (green);
- Waterfowl (blue);
- Reptile (purple);
- Bird (pink);
- Beetle (red).
Each of them has distinctive traits – health, speed, experience, morale – that can be expressed more or less. For example, beasts and insects have high morale, which means they have a better chance of delivering critical hits in combat. Birds and waterfowl have high speed, plants and reptiles have good health. But at the same time, each specific Axie has its own unique ratio of these indicators.
Each Axie has 6 body parts: eyes, ears, mouth, horn, back and tail. So far, only the mouth, horn, back and tail are used in combat. But in the future, pets will be able to fight each other using their eyes and ears.
At the same time, the body parts of all Axies look different. For example, one Axie may have a tail from a horse and another from a dog. Some are more common, others less common, and only a few have others.
It is also noteworthy that each part of Axie’s body belongs to one of three genes: dominant, recessive and minor-recessive. These properties of Axie can be presented both in pure form (in the most purebred virtual creatures), and in mixed form, when, for example, a bird can combine elements of plants or waterfowl.
As a result, each Axie is a unique set of several characteristics. The less frequent its properties, the stronger and more valuable it is.
Each Axie has two life cycles : Egg and Adult. The egg takes 5 days to mature. As soon as the hatchling grows up (the transition to adulthood will require payment in SLP), it can be used in battles with other players, as well as in mating with other individuals.
Axie breeding is paid – players pay 0.005 ETH (about $ 12 at the current exchange rate), as well as a certain amount of SLP. Each Axie can reproduce up to 7 times. At the same time, with each new pairing, players pay an increasing number of SLP tokens.
SLP and AXS tokens and digital real estate
As we wrote above, there are two types of tokens available to players in Axie Infinity.
Small Love Potion (SLP) are utility tokens that are used to pay out rewards to winners and to pay for in-game actions such as Axie breeding.
Axie Infinity Shard (AXS) are governance tokens (management tokens) of the ERC-20 format platform. They are needed for:
- Governments – AXS holders can vote on governance issues;
- Staking – holders can stake tokens with a yield of about 40% per annum;
- Payments – Players can make in-game payments to purchase Axie, digital real estate, and in-game items.
Axie Infinity also has virtual land parcels (LANDs). During several auctions, all plots were sold: now they are only available on the secondary market. The owners of the land can use it however they want: build a hideout for Axie, install a billboard or rent it out.
How to play Axie Infinity?
Axie Infinity is not available in Russia, but you can connect to the game via VPN.
To start playing, you need to download the game, register and buy three Axies (this is the minimum number of team members). You can buy pets by creating a wallet in MetaMask and connecting it to the Ronin wallet – this is the sidechain of the Ethereum network, which will be discussed below.
Buy Axie wisely: it is important for each player to assemble the strongest team. There are already special breeders who specialize in breeding the most unique Axies. If there is no money for three Axies at once, you can buy several AXS tokens and keep them staking.
There are two main ways to play Axie Infinity:
- PvP (Arena) – breed Axie and fight other users. Battles are fought in teams of three by three. The winner receives an SLP reward and increases his rating. The higher the rating, the higher the reward, but the more difficult the opponents.
- PvE (Adventure Mode) – go through tasks and fight monsters (chimeras), earning EXP (experience points): 50 or 100 SLP for a completed task. When completing a task, players lose energy – this limits the number of available tasks per day. Newbies usually start at this stage, which helps them gain experience and increase their ranking. While completing tasks, you can also find hidden treasures in the form of AXS or other game resources.
How and how much can you earn on Axie Infinity?
There are several ways to make money with Axie Infinity:
- Victory in battles;
- Crossing and selling Axie;
- A bet on the victory of other players;
- Rent and resale of land.
By participating in battles, an experienced player can earn an average of 100 to 200 SLP per day. At the current rate of $ 0.2129 per SLP, this brings players from $ 21 to $ 42.6 per day, that is, up to $ 1,320 per month.
Axie Infinity is the most popular in the Philippines. Last year, a lockdown caused millions of people to lose their jobs and earning opportunities. For many of them, Axie Infinity was the way out of the situation.
BloomX co-founder Luis Buenaventura estimates that Filipino players can make millions of dollars in a year. Some of them managed to make a fortune. For example, 22-year-old John Aaron Ramos stated that he bought two houses in the Philippines from the profits made in the game. Income over a thousand dollars is good money in this country.
Investors in AXS and SLP tokens also received excellent returns.
Since November last year, the AXS token has grown from $ 0.2 to $ 37.96 – 190 times. The capitalization is $ 2.327 billion – this is the 46th place among other digital assets.
Since July last year, the SLP price has increased from $ 0.09126 to $ 0.2076 – 2.2 times. Capitalization – $ 130.59 million
New users increase demand for Axie breeding and project tokens. The SLP and AXS rally is largely driven by the overall growth in Axie Infinity players after the protocol moved to Ronin in early May, an Ethereum sidechain designed specifically for the game. The project team has been working on this migration since June last year. The Ronin integration made Axie Infinity faster and more scalable, and the problem of high fees in Ethereum became less urgent for players.
After the migration of the game to Ronin, the SLP token has grown in price almost 11 times in a few days. What’s more, the game has faced an influx of new users, with the largest increases in the Philippines, Venezuela, Cuba, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. As new users enter the ecosystem, they need more SLP and AXS to participate in the gameplay, which has led to an increase in token prices.
Perhaps another reason for the rally in Axie Infinity in-game tokens was that in early May, some players launched special “scholarships” for those users who do not have start-up capital. They give them the extra Axie, and in return they receive a percentage of the winnings.
Land investments in Axie Infinity have also brought excellent returns to investors – digital real estate has increased in value by thousands of percent over the past year.
For example, the co-founder of the Illuvium project, Kieran Warwick, bought the site for $ 300 in mid-2020, and on July 13 sold it for $ 28,000 – a profit of more than 9,000%. The entrepreneur said that he is investing in virtual real estate in four projects and hopes to make great money on this. Digital land markets are also represented in the Decentraland and The Sandbox projects.
Axie Infinity perspectives
According to Tokenterminal, Axie Infinity’s total revenues exceeded $ 214 million, of which over $ 110 million were in the last ten days. According to this indicator, the game bypassed Ethereum and the largest dApps – Uniswap, PancakeSwap, Aave, SushiSwap, QuickSwap, MetaMask, MakerDAO, Synthetix and others.
Notably, 97% of the profit comes from Axie trading. More than 57,000 NFT projects are sold daily, over the last month – more than 1.35 million.The total sales for all the time, according to Dappradar, exceeded $ 942 million.
Now the game has over 350,000 users, about 60% are Filipinos. A year ago, only 500 people played Axie Infinity, and at the beginning of the year – 10,000. If the pace continues, Axie Infinity will very soon become a game with a million people.
Axie Infinity is a promising and ambitious project that can take the NFT gaming sector far. It may seem like a very expensive game, but it is actually a relatively affordable way to invest in the NFT asset market.
