Hello! This Editor K!
Starting with last week's "NFT Game, what’s about it?" series has begun to deal with various projects related to NFT games. In fact, when I participated in the Busan NFT event in person, I was able to experience the popularity of the domestic NFT market. Globally, there are already several cases in which several NFT game projects that started as the first generation are booming. Among them, today, we will learn about Axie Infinity, which was mentioned in the previous episode for a while.
1. The prelude to Axie Infinity.
Existing games as we know them generally have the structure of Pay to Win (P2W) and Pay to Play (P2P). Users purchase characters or items to make the game better, which is the main source of revenue for game developers. The company uses this to pay for maintaining and repairing the game or developing another game. It can be said that this structure is general because game companies must operate stably so that games can be maintained continuously.
Image Credit: https://axie.substack.com/
But with the advent of blockchain, this simple common sense begins to change. With blockchain technology that guarantees ownership of digital assets, games that players used to spend money on are changing into games that they can make money from. At the center of it is Axie Infinity, the origin and pronoun of the P2E game. Unlike existing games, Axie Infinity is a Play to Earn (P2E) style that allows you to earn money the more you play the game.
Axie Infinity is an Ethereum (ETH)-based blockchain game created in 2017 by Vietnam's young CEO Trung Nguyen, born in 1992, and art director Tu Doan. Mr.Truong said, “I created Axie Infinity after realizing that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can be used to make good games that are useful in real life.” Afterwards, in 2018, Mr.Truong established Sky Mavis, a Vietnamese startup company, the main developer of Axie Infinity, and started full-scale game development.
2. Digging into Axie Infinity
Image Credit: https://whitepaper.axieinfinity.com/
· What?
Axie Infinity is a game inspired by Pokemon. It is a digital pet game project built on the Ethereum blockchain where anyone can earn token rewards through gameplay. Users can start the game by purchasing characters from other players through the Marketplace, and AXS tokens can be staked to participate in governance voting or used as an in-game payment method.
Axie Infinity currently uses two ERC-20 tokens as its base currency: Axie Infinity Shards (AXS) and Smooth Love Potions (SLP). AXS is the governance token of the Axie ecosystem, and SLP is a utility token that can be obtained as a reward for gameplay. Although both AXS and SLP are used for breeding, the difference is that the used SLP is incinerated, which has the effect of suppressing the increase in the supply of SLP, whereas AXS accumulates in the community's finances.
Image Credit: https://axieinfinity.com/
· How?
To play, you must first sign up for the Axie Infinity official site. Axie Infinity has its own cryptocurrency wallet ‘Ronin’, but you need to connect the external wallet ‘Metamask’ to transfer coins in the game.
After completing the above procedure, you will need to purchase at least 3 Axies (characters) from the Marketplace to play. The amount of Axie varies depending on its ability and market price, but it is at least 300,000 to 400,000 won per animal, so the initial capital to play is not easy. Axies that are cheaper by about 100 dollars a day come out, so if you want to minimize the amount of investment, you need to set the right timing. However, since this Axie is an NFT, it can also be traded through the marketplace in the future. You can purchase an Axie that suits your financial situation by considering several factors.
If you do not have the initial capital, you can also use the Scholarship. This means that the SLP acquired by borrowing someone else's Axie to play is shared with the Axie owner and the profits. Usually, the profit is distributed at a rate of 60% to the owner of Axie and 40% to the borrower. If there is no Axie, you can borrow and make a profit, and if you have a lot of Axie, you can lend it to others and create a bigger profit. It is a true win-win, and it can be said that they are building a system that combines finance with NFT games.
Image Credit: https://axieinfinity.com/
The peculiarity of Axie Infinity is that it can be briefed. Users can cross breed Axie with each other to create a new baby Axie and raise them and sell them to Marketplace. At this time, near relationship cross breeding such as combining mother Axie and son Axie is not allowed. For the briefing, we need two Axie coin(AXS) and some Smooth Love Potion(SLP) coin that can be obtained through quests. More and more SLPs are needed depending on the number of briefings from 100, 200, and onwards. If Axie’s ability is really good, then it can be sold at a high price, right?
Image Credit: https://whitepaper.axieinfinity.com/
When you start playing in earnest, three purchased Axies can team up to hunt through ADVENTURE or compete 1:1 with other players at ARENA. When you click on the top quest and complete all three quests, attendance check, adventure clear, arena victory, you were able to get up to 50 SLPs a day, but now after the updates, you can get up to 25 SLPs. Axie Infinity games provide English as the basic language, but thanks to its simple interface and rules, anyone of all ages can easily enjoy playing.
· Why?
In particular, Axie Infinity, which is gaining sensational popularity in Southeast Asia, currently has more than 1 million users worldwide, of which 60% are Filipinos. Why is it so popular in the Philippines? There are about 2.2 million overseas migrant workers in the Philippines, who play a very important role in the Philippine economy. However, the Philippine economy shrank sharply as about 400,000 migrant workers lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this situation, the biggest attraction for Filipinos is that they can make profits through games. In fact, a YouTube documentary on the theme of Axie Infinity reported cases of citizens making a living with Axie Infinity.
3. Axie Infinity, so how much do they earn?
Image Credit: https://axie.substack.com/
SLP that is obtained through play within the Axie Infinity game can be cashed in. If you log in from the website Marketplace and request Claim Tokens, you can move the SLP to the Ronin wallet. After that, you can send SLP free of charge by selecting the Ronin network and sending SLP Coin from the Binance wallet. The most common way to cash in Korean money is to sell it through Binance, purchase it with relatively low and fast transmission fees, etc., and transfer it back to an exchange that can be withdrawn in Korean money. If you own a dollar account, the procedure will be simpler, right?
According to Coin Market Cap, as of November 22nd, SLP coins amounted to $0.064057 (about 75 korean won) per piece. Upon completion of the daily quest, you can obtain 25 SLPs and earn 1,875 won a day and 56,250 won a month. Currently, SLP coin prices have fallen a lot, so it is difficult to see them as a big profit, but as of November 4, about two weeks ago, SLP coin was able to earn twice the current amount at $0.1218 per piece.
In addition, you can earn profits by conducting adventures and arenas. Adventure is a total of 36 steps, and SLP is differentially paid for each step by the user. There are a total of 50 SLPs that can be obtained per day through Adventure, and you can earn 3,750 won per day and 112,500 won per month. Arena has different compensation rates depending on MMR (Match Making Rating), and the more you win in high MMR matches, the more SLPs they receive. A total of 50 SLPs can be obtained per day through Arena, the same as Adventure. In addition, additional AXS coins can be obtained depending on the ranking. From 1st to 1000th places will be compensated with different amounts and this season's Top 1 can receive 135,000 rewards. It's $8647.695, which is a considerable amount of about 10 million won in Korean currency.
In summary, the maximum profit you can earn from daily quests, adventures, and arenas for a month is $236.94 (about 281,250 won). Currently, game companies are continuously adjusting the game difficulty and compensation system, which has decreased the rate of return significantly compared to the initial rate of return. Also, the amount of money you can earn varies depending on the price change of SLP coin, so please refer to the rate of return.
4. Axie Infinity, what will happen?
Image Credit: https://coinmarketcap.com/
As of November 22, AXS Coin is $127.80 USD and 24-hour trading volume is $621,287,953 USD. The total real-time value is $7,784,183,318 USD. The coin market cap ranking is 26th, but in terms of games on DappRadar alone, you can see that it is ranked 4th. As mentioned earlier, the supply decreased as the game company gradually reduced the amount of coins over time. This seems to have increased scarcity and soared coin prices. The price has soared more than 300 times compared to the beginning of this year. We’re looking forward to their future steps.
Today, we learned about Axie Infinity, the epitome of P2E games. In addition, there are various blockchain games, but most of them are projects that develop plausible at first and end in a blur. Through Axie Infinity, I was able to see how important it is to balance regular games for the sustainability of the game. In the next episode, we will have time to learn about Decentraland.
This has been Editor K.
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