Axie Infinity $AXS Wiki: Coin History, Techstack, and Crypto News

Axie Infinity is an online video game based on Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs). The game was developed by a Vietnamese studio known as Sky Mavis. The game is known for its in-game economy which uses cryptocurrency based on the Ethereum blockchain.  The native cryptocurrency for the game is called the Smooth Love Potion(SLP).

The Axie Infinity game works on a play-to-earn model. Players of the game collect and mint NFTs that represent digital pets known as Axies. The players can earn by progressing through the game and collecting the in-game awards after they pay the initial fees required to start. The pets can breed, and fight each other within the game. The players are charged a fee whenever they want to exchange Axies on the game marketplace.

History

The development of Axie Infinity began in 2017. It was led by the founder and CEO Nguyen Thanh Trung with Jeffrey Zirlin, Andy Ho, and Aleksander Larsen. The team released Axie Infinity’s first battle system in October 2018 and developed the game’s real-time card battle system in March 2019.

Sky Mavis launched the Ronin Wallet in February 2021 which sped up transactions and reduced gas fees for users who played the game.

Biggest Claims to Fame

Players can in theory earn an income through playing the game. Axie Infinity is one of the only blockchain-based games that have managed to get a worldwide economy of gamers. The players get rewarded with SLPs whenever they play and win an in-game battle. If a player wins enough of these battles, they may be able to earn enough to make a living from the profit they make from winning a game.

Some of the Axies are collectibles. Axie Infinity has created mystic axies that are rare within the game, making them digital collectibles. This is a tried and true model with tradable cards of baseball players and collectible Pokemon cards in the market going for high prices. A company known as Delphi Digital spent $162,000 on five Axies as an NFT investment in September 2020.

Axie Infinity has a roadmap of goals and achievements they want to achieve. This helps in the creation of milestones and creation of a timeline for growth. From the developmental milestones Axie Infinity has put on itself, users can easily see whether Axie Infinity is growing at the rate it had promised to be and if not, they can pull out their investment.

Biggest Criticism

Most of the players in the game are from the Philippines. They have to rent out characters in order to play since the cost of buying up the characters is high. They end up working as low-wage workers as they rent the characters from those who have Axies and progress in the game on the owner’s behalf in exchange for little to none of the awards that come from progressing with the game. This has been likened to colonialism as those who can afford the game are typically in the United States and Europe.

The game model is very similar to gambling. A user pays the initial fee to buy into the game and then earns money by playing a game. The game will not be easy to navigate or win, which could be fun in a normal game but ends up being frustrating for those who want to play but also want to earn back the money they used to buy in. The game model also allows a user to think that by upgrading their character for more money, they can improve their chances of winning, which is the same formula that works in gambling.

The game is overly reliant on new players coming into the game. The initial cost of getting into the game is higher than the amount of currency the game gets from players as they play the game. It is more likely for players to cash in on the money they get than for them to spend it as they proceed with the game. This is not a stable business model at all because the number of people coming into the game will reduce after some time and they will need the people already playing the game to put their money into the game to maintain the financial ecosystem of the game.

Team

Nguyen Thanh Trung is one of the founders of Axie Infinity. He was one of the investors of crypto kitties before he began working on his own game. He combined elements of Cryptokitties with elements from Pokemon and Neopets.