Axie Infinity is a play-to-earn game that is having an insane run in the last few months. In early July, the game reached over 100 million USD in weekly sales volume, bringing this game to a multi-billion dollar annual run rate if this trend continues.
Daily active users went from 38,000 to 350,000 in just about 3 months which makes it the most used app in crypto. $AXS which is the governance token that is used behind the project is up 246% in the last two months alone.
Investors that got in the game early are now rich beyond their expectations. But there is still an insane amount of money being made by new people entering the game today.
What is Axie Infinity?
Axie Infinity is a game inspired by pokemon. In the fictional world of Lunacia, there are creatures called Axies. You can collect them, trade them, breed them, and ultimately put them up in 3v3 battles against each other. Everything in the game is either an NFT or an ERC-20 Token which means you have true ownership of whatever you buy and collect. There are the Axies themselves, items, and land.
One of the main reasons why this game became popular to begin with is because it is one of the first games to introduce play-to-earn, wherein gamers can make real money by actually playing the game or trading assets from the game.
But how exactly does this mechanic work?
Play To Earn Mechanic
SLP Farming – Basically you do daily quests, battle other players with your Axies, and by doing that you are able to farm Smooth Love Potions, these are ERC Tokens that can be sold on the secondary market. The reason that people will want to buy SLPs is because they are essential for breeding. You need a minimum of 150 SLP if your Axie hasn’t bred before, and the amount of SLP required to breed goes up in value with each breeding round. So, you can grind up to 150 – 200 SLP/ day which would amount to $40-$50, depending on the current value of the SLP in the market, just by playing for 2 to 3 hours that day.
Other Ways to Earn
- Breeding – The way breeding works can be quite complex if taken at a deeper level. But for the sake of this article, we’ll be skipping on the minute details. This is just to give you a basic understanding on how it works, but if you want to get into breeding, there are tons of detailed guides out there that you may want to read. For the purpose of breeding, you just have to know that breeding is taking two Axies and breeding them to create a third. You can sell them for a profit, breed them for more Axies, or use them for battle. Each axie can be bred a maximum of 7 times but it gets more expensive each time. There are several breeding strategies, but the more popular ones is to breed pure Axies which are just Axies at the same class. Another thing to note is that you can’t breed an Axie with either a sibling or a parent, but you can with cousins or uncles.
- HODLing Rare Axies / Land – “HODL” is a term in the investing world which means “hold on for dear life” which means holding on to an item in hopes that the value will rise in the future. HODLing rare Axies/Land is a good long-term strategy because of the scarcity within the game. There are only a hundred of origin Axies which came from the creator themselves, and there are only a couple of Axies with mystic traits. These Axies will become more and more valuable as more Axies are bred because it will make those limited number of Axies even more rare. While the land part of Axie Infinity will rise in value as the metaverse that is being created materializes.
- Buying the $AXS Token – The $AXS Token is needed for breeding Axies, so buying and selling $AXS can be a good strategy for flippers. In the future, staking $AXS will become a part of Axie Infinity and the token will become more and more important as the game becomes more decentralized.
Esports Announced
Axie Infinity recently announced that they are deploying a dedicated server for Axie esports while working on scaling their primary game servers. This is a big announcement given that Axie has the potential to be one of the biggest esports games in the world because of its skill-based and competitive nature and massively growing player base. The creators of Axie believes that esports is a critical aspect of Axie Infinity for its future growth.
Most, if not all, of the popular esports games are heavily skill-based. E.g. League of Legends, CS:GO, DOTA 2, etc. Read about the current titans of esports here.
Axie Infinity is committing 5,000 $AXS ($145,450) from the play-to-earn allocation pool towards the prize money of the community tournaments that will be taking place this year. They are currently accepting event proposals from July 15th – July 29th from tournament organizers and will be publishing an official schedule of tournaments for the rest of the year after approving select events. The proposed events have to take place within August 6th, 2021 – November 30th, 2021. Read more on this here.
The creators of Axie Infinity have big plans for 2022 and beyond in terms of esports, but for now, it is up to the community to organize these tournaments. Read their roadmap here.
Only time will tell how Axie Infinity will perform against the giants of the esports scene. But if this current trend continues, it will no doubt be among the top esports games of all time.
Let us know if you want to know more about Axie Infinity by commenting below!