Axie Infinity is the biggest money game in cyrpto

Getting hold of all the Axies seems complicated, considering that the cheapest one costs about 200 dollars (0.1 ETH) and they have been sold for more than 500,000 dollars (300 ETH). These virtual creatures, in the style of Pokémon, are the protagonists of 'Axie Infinity', the latest phenomenon within the crypto world and a game that already gathers more than 350,000 daily active users.

'Axie Infinity' combines an adventure mode with daily quests, clashes with other players and coin collecting with the underlying infrastructure of NFTs and the blockchain network. A game with a fun and familiar look that serves as a prelude to a much more serious and risky proposition, where players can get money in exchange for playing. "Play to earn" they call it. A style of game that wants to go beyond "Free to play" or "pay to win".

Due to the global pandemic, we were pushed into the confines of our homes and we discovered that there are various ways of earning online. You have most likely heard of people earning from YouTube or TikTok or many other online games. And chances are, you’ve heard of terms such as cryptocurrency and blockchain. And so, you’ve probably heard of the biggest money game in cryptocurrency – Axie Infinity.

Being mainly accessed through sideloading an Android APK file, Axie Infinity can be played on mobile phones and PC. It was launched in 2018 by a Vietnamese company, Sky Mavis.  Axie Infinity has experienced considerable growth in 2021, especially in the past couple of months. Records show that it now has 2 million daily average users (DAUs), while over $2 billion of its non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been traded.

Axie Infinity is a game but not a usual game. It’s a play to earn game built in the Ethereum network inspired by the Pokemon universe. Axie infinity allows you to earn tokens while playing by breeding, race and battle.

The platform’s long-term aim is to introduce the population to blockchain technology.

Let us define some terms to make things easier to understand. Ethereum allows people to program things into the currency itself. The creators of Axie Infinity allow its players to earn through an Axie which is an NFT which means that the Axie becomes a type of crypto currency. A non-fungible token (NFT) is data that is unique and non-interchangeable unit that is stored on a digital ledger or a block chain. It can be used to represent easily-reproducible items such as photos, videos, audio, and other types of digital files. NFTs have an actual tracker of the original owner of the product and to who it was sold to.

There are many resources in the Axie universe. For example, SLP or Smooth Love Potions are used to breed Axies and have babies which will be used in playing the game. The SLP is another NFT that can be traded in the cryptocurrency marketplace. This means that when you are playing the game, for example, you might win 10 SLP for winning a battle. Those 10 SLP could be worth 10cents each which means you earned 30cents for playing that level. Therefore, by playing Axie Infinity, the rewards that you gather could be turned into real money.

Many people describe Axie Infinity like Pokémon on the blockchain. The technology allows a secure way for individuals to deal directly with each other, without an intermediary like a government, bank or other third party. This blockchain-powered online game allows players to battle cute pet monsters called Axies to earn a cryptocurrency called Smooth Love Potion (SLP). This could be sold for cash or used to breed more Axies. Axies come in different body parts, including aquatic, beast, bird, bug, plant, and reptile parts. Axies can have any combination of body parts from any type of class, making them highly variable and often rare and unique.

Smooth Love Potion (SLP) tokens are earned by playing the Axie Infinity game. It is an ERC-20 token that can be traded for another cryptocurrency and then converted to cash. An ERC20 token is a standard used for creating and issuing smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. ERC stands for "Ethereum Request for Comment," and the ERC20 standard was implemented in 2015.

Axie Infinity has peer-to-peer trading and is based on a fair market price that is dictated by the Axie economy. The fact that Smooth Love Potions (SLP) is convertible to real money via cryptocurrency exchanges means that Axie economy is a legitimate one as new money is coming in through various ways.

Despite these factors, people should still exercise caution in investing real money in Axie Infinity, especially since the cryptocurrency market is very volatile which means you will never know when the value of an AXIE or SLP will drop.

There are different ways one can play Axie Infinity.

One is through breeding Axies and selling them in the marketplace, and the other is by doing quests and engaging in PvP battles against other users. The latter involves putting your raised Axies to the test.

Axie Infinity requires you to have 3 axies to play the game. The lowest price of an Axie doesn’t fall below $200 in the marketplace. Therefore, you might need around $700 as an initial investment for this game.

What do you do if you don’t have enough money to buy 3 Axies? You can look for an Axie Infinity Scholarship. In this scholarship, a free Axie team is given to a scholar by a manager or breeder. To earn money, the scholar will use these Axies to play the game and take a percentage of the earnings. In the Axie community, scholarship programs are popular because some players or breeders have a lot of Axies but cannot use them to earn SLP because the use of multiple accounts is not allowed. Also, some aspiring players want to play but cannot afford a starter team.

This is where the Manager and Scholar roles play an important factor in understanding Axie. Managers are those who have multiple Axie teams but do not have the time to manage all of them, while Scholars are those who offer their services to manage Axies. The idea with the Manager-Scholar relationship is that the former “rents” their Axies to the latter, while the latter plays them to earn SLPs.

The normal arrangement between Managers and Scholars is a 60/40 revenue from the tokens won during battles, and the contract between the two may vary depending on what is agreed upon.

Axie Infinity has become so popular globally, especially in Brazil, Guatemala and the Philippines. The simplest explanation is that because it has stood true to its aim: it has become a platform where one can earn money while playing a game.

Players claim that there is joy of breeding, but more than that Axie Infinity provides an opportunity for an ordinary human being to understand the workings of the crypto economy.

Media outlets have covered several success stories involving Axie scholars. With the income scholars earn from playing Axie, they manage to buy various items from daily essentials to even several houses.

Some bankers and investors who are knowledgeable about the workings of the finance industry, explained that the Axie ecosystem is sustainable at the time being because of the stakeholders involved in making the Axie economy work which are mainly comprised of the investors and scholars. A big part of the success also remains to be seen in the cryptocurrency market in general, which affects the Axie economy indirectly because of how it dictates the demand for SLP and AXS tokens.

There might be a question of how long one will stay in Axie’s digital world and it definitely depends on how well Axie Infinity keeps the player engaged, challenged, stimulated or entertained, and how well the developer manages the player community. At the end of the day, the sustainability of the Axie economy still relies on the interest in the game. Pressure or no pressure, the challenge for its sustainability all depends on how Sky Mavis improves the game in its future iterations.