The AXS token of Axie Infinity has nearly doubled in the last four days. On Monday, its price reached its all-time high of USD 155.
On September 30, the platform activated staking which allowed players to lock their coins and earn rewards. The platform allocated 800,000 AXS among its first users, which is equivalent to about USD 60 million based on the AXS price at that moment.
Earn money by playing a game
Axie Infinity is similar to Pokémon Go. Players need to breed, raise and battle their digital pets, or Axies. Each AXS token is a fragment of the Axie universe. In traditional games, characters are mainly valuable within the game itself, but in Axie Infinity every pet is an NFT, which is a non-interchangeable digital asset stored on a blockchain.
“When Axie was born in February 2018, almost nobody knew what an NFT was, let alone an Axie. Today, NFTs have permeated mainstream culture and Axie is the largest NFT project of all time. Together, with our community that spans every corner of the earth, we’ve started a movement that will redefine the nature of work.”
The creators of the Axie universe are transforming the entire notion of gaming. Their goal is to save players from game publishers and app developers profiting from them. Axie is presented as the first game created specifically for the community of players.
The game is based on the three main Axie principles as stated on the axie.substack.com website:
- Rewarding value creation: everyone’s time is valuable. People should always be rewarded for creating value, especially within games.
- Co-creation: a game is a creative partnership between its developers and the community that plays and builds value around it.
- Co-ownership: your game assets are your property. As a gamer, you deserve property rights and should be able to own the games you love.
Blurring the lines between playing and working
The game’s developers believe that gaming can also be regarded as work and that every player deserves to be paid for spending their time. Gamers used to spend the money they have earned elsewhere, but now gaming has become a source of income on its own.
The success of the project is indicated by its metrics:
- Between April and September, the number of active players has grown from 38,000 to over 2,000,000.
- The volume of trading on the game’s NFT marketplace has reached USD 2.2 billion.
- The new scholarship model has redefined the future of work and has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs in some of the countries which have suffered from the pandemic.
- Over 2 million wallets for the total amount of USD 4.5 billion have been locked on the Ronin platform for trading.
- Players have been gifted AXS tokens for the total amount of over USD 100 million.
How to buy the tokens?
Axies can be bought and sold on platforms and exchanges such as OpenSea for an amount of at least USD 150. Gamers can also earn AXS and SLP (Small Love Potion, another type of token) while playing the game. Both cryptocurrencies can be traded at certain exchanges, for example at Uniswap.
However, there is an entry barrier, as a user needs to buy at least 3 Axies to play the game.
Axie Infinity was developed by Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis and released in 2018. It has gained particular popularity in the Philippines where some people play Axie Infinity to earn their living.
