Axie Infinity Game Review – How Axies Built a Play to Earn Powerhouse ($AXS)

Axie Infinity (AXS) is probably the one project that single-handedly pushed the play to earn trend into full motion. Axies started gaining widespread popularity around the time most of the attention was pointed to CryptoPunks. But the gamified aspect of NFTs was the recipe to produce a real thriving community and a source of constant activity and value generation. 

Axie Infinity is a multi-pronged digital world with collectible characters, breeding, competitions and battles. Its native token, AXS, fuels the play to earn economy. Axie Infinity has taken the lead in most charts for play to earn projects and has created a winning recipe for multiple sources of income, digital breeding program and a dedicated community.

The Axie world also situates its games on a digital map, and has its own version of the digital land plot market, similar to Decentraland or The Sandbox. 

What is Axie Infinity

Axie Infinity is a blockchain project based on the Ethereum blockchain. The Axie Infinity team is also working on the launch of the Ronin network, a side chain to Ethereum. The RON token will be added to the Axie economy and boost land-based gameplay.

It is a metaverse-based game that centers around characters and their special abilities. The game also involves daily challenges, arena battle mode and breeding. 

Breeding characters is one of the most lucrative play to earn features of Axie Infinity. Playing the game results in Smooth Love Potion rewards, which can then be used to breed characters. Rare Axies can then be sold on OpenSea or offered to other players. 

What is Axie Infinity: Origin

The Origin update is a renewed approach to the game, with restyled art, new attack cards and a shift in the balance of attacks and defenses between the various classes of Axies. Origin arrived in March 2022, with the Android version launched in May.

Origin offers a starter pack of three Axies, and is free-to-play. The version planned to spend most of 2022 in tests, introducing token payments later.

The Origin Update expands craftable items, special attacks, introduces Blood Moon Mode. In the future, the game will also hand out AXS token awards for holding land plots.

Axie Infinity Brought Together a Powerful Community

The Axie Infinity community has a marked regional character, joining gamers from Southeast Asia and especially the Philippines. At one point in 2021, searches for Axie in the Philippines outpaced interest in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The Axie Discord community is among the largest, gathering 800,000 members in its play to earn metaverse. On Twitter, more than 742,000 accounts follow the latest updates, trades and battles for the best Axies. Holders on the blockchain are also a significant crowd, with AXS tokens spread to 41,500 addresses on Etherscan. 

The Axie metaverse is also taking the top spots on OpenSea, where rare and expensive land plots trade for as much as 550 ETH. Interest in the project also affected the AXS market price, which rallied by as much as 28,823% over the course of 2021. 

Who Built the Axie Metaverse

The Axie metaverse game is a nod to Pokemon’s aesthetic. Its imagery was built under art director Tu Doan and the company is headed by CEO Trung Nguyen. 

The Axie project was created and backed by co-founders related to the Pangea Blockchain fund. The game and blockchain aspects of Axie depend on a team of more than 100 experts in managerial, creative or developer positions.

For all its fame, Axie Infinity held a very short IEO in November 2020, raising about $2.9M. The token sale was curated by Binance Launchpad, and aimed to make the sale as widespread as possible, capping investment to $200 per bidder. Despite the limited token sale, AXS tokens managed significant returns, to nearly 120 times against ETH and more than 320 times against BTC.

Even before the Binance Launchpad token sale, Axie Infinity had secured two seed rounds for a total of $1.5M and a Series A tranche of $7.5M just before the project took off in May 2021. Axie Infinity is focused on the Asian market, attracting regional funds, but also interest from US-based venture capital.

What Makes Axie Infinity Unique

Axies were one of the first play to earn metaverses to really gain traction in only a few months. Its first mover advantage and its large community mean Axies are one of the more secure tools to begin with play to earn. 

The Axie metaverse also offers digital plots in addition to characters, for another valuable source of gaming income. The biggest advantage of the Axies game are the daily challenges and non-stop play that generates constant token rewards, while boosting the overall liquidity of the game. 

The other factor is the very high liquidity of the AXS token, which is widely adopted by both centralized and decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges. The amazing rise of AXS from a price of just a few cents to valuations above $150 in only a few months also makes this project an outlier. The success of AXS is sparking interest in other projects in the space, lifting the valuation of other play to earn tokens. 

The game itself has adopted the characteristics of a social network, creating ties, job opportunities, scholarships and other side projects since its launch and wider adoption. 

Axie is also the platform that managed to introduce developing countries to blockchain technology, giving access to coins and tokens to previously unbanked people. The earnings distribution on Axie Infinity is also not limited to the biggest winners, instead awarding a proportion of earnings to each player for completing their missions. 

Axie Infinity focuses on a wholesome, educational experience that appeals to a wide array of players at any age. The team was first inspired by CryptoKitties as one of the first examples of blockchain usage beyond trading.

How to Make Money with Axie Infinity

Axie Infinity offers multiple avenues for play to earn income. Completing challenges and competitions awards a special token, Smooth Love Potion (SLP) and increases the breedability of characters. With more valuable winning characters and by paying in SLP, Axie players can breed their collection. 

The newly created Axies, with varying levels of rarity and special features, can then be sold on OpenSea, the NFT marketplace. 

SLP can be swapped or traded for other assets. If not immediately available, SLP can also be bought with other coins or tokens. Due to the high popularity of Axies in 2021 and early 2022, buying the first characters required an upfront investment, with basic characters estimated between $600 and $1,200 for a team of three of playable Axies. Later, Axie prices crashed and some were also available for free or for a very low price.

If buying Axies is not immediately available, players can seek some of the Scholarship programs available. Those programs are a type of profit-sharing scheme where players rent Axies and share the earnings with the owner. Interest in Axies is so high that groups of investors organize to buy a pool of characters, then rent it out.

How Axie Infinity Tokens Store Value

The AXS token is the native asset for trading within the game ecosystem. AXS has a relatively low supply of 270M tokens in total, with only around 60M released in circulation so far. The AXS token, also known as Axie Infinity Shards, has several functions. 

AXS is used for voting and governance within the game ecosystem. The asset can also be locked for staking to receive passive rewards. AXS can also be generated through gameplay. AXS that has been staked or used for voting is stored at the Axie Infinity Treasury, which also redistributes tokens for gaming rewards, closing the circle on the in-game economy. 

The token schedule will set aside a total of 20% of AXS for play to earn rewards, with the rest spread out on other funds, treasuries and initiatives.

What is Smooth Love Potion (SLP)

SLP is the other token that drives the Axie Infinity economy. It works as a reward token for completing missions. SLP is burned to create new breedable Axie characters. For players, SLP is also a source of income, as it can be liquidated on exchanges. 

The supply of SLP has grown to 3.08B tokens, with its value at around 6 cents. SLP may increase in value if more tokens get burned and transformed into NFTs. SLP can be traded both through Binance swapping, or it can be locked for liquidity or automatic trading on the Uniswap decentralized exchange. SLP, however, faces continued price pressure if sellers choose to liquidate instead of breeding more characters. 

What are the Best Wallets for Axie Infinity

The best tools for Axie Infinity are browser-based wallets that connect to the Ethereum network. Those include MetaMask, BitKeep, Binance Wallet, Phantom Wallet and others. Trust Wallet is also compatible with Axie Infinity for mobile access.

Our Verdict for Axie Infinity

Axie Infinity saw its peak play and reward in May 2021, and while its popularity has grown, the ecosystem revealed dome risk. The market price of SLP has been volatile, cutting into play to earn profits. 

Overall, our verdict for the Axie Infinity project is 46/50 for completeness and a large community so far, but with a caveat on token price volatility.