Can you really earn tens of thousands playing a game? Axie Infinity explained

Written in July 2021, at the height of the play-to-earn boom. In March 2022 the Ronin bridge used by Axie Infinity was exploited for roughly 600 million US dollars, and the prices of AXS and SLP subsequently fell very sharply. The article is kept as written.

Axie Infinity is an NFT game on Ethereum's blockchain using a play-to-earn model that gives players both money and entertainment, and it has become one of the dApps that overtook its rivals on revenue in 2021.

Talk about a dApp on a blockchain enjoying overwhelming popularity right now and you cannot avoid Axie Infinity, an NFT game from Vietnamese developers that attracts 350,000 active accounts a day and drew around 3 billion baht into the platform over the past thirty days. What is Axie Infinity, and how do you start playing? Here are the answers.

Axie Infinity is a blockchain game that lets players make money

Axie Infinity is an NFT game on Ethereum from Vietnamese developers, open to play since 2018. The game lets players exchange, buy and sell items and virtual land within it, as well as breed and raise the round, fluffy monsters in the game, called Axies, and take them on battle missions. A team consists of three Axies, and the more powerful the creature the greater the cost of buying it. Axies can be bought and sold as NFTs, each with a unique identity, in more than 500 varieties across a range of classes — plant, reptile, beast, bug, aquatic and bird — with each creature graded by difficulty, from common through rare and ultra rare to legendary.

What is SLP (Small Love Potion)?

On completing a mission, players receive SLP tokens — Small Love Potions — which are used for breeding. There is also the AXS coin, awarded to players at the end of a season, which is the game's governance token and gives holders special rights, such as the right to vote on what is done with the game's community treasury.

Getting started is not hard, and you can play with no capital through the scholarship system

Axie Infinity can be played on a computer or on other devices such as phones and tablets, on both Android and iOS — though on iOS you may have to play through TestFlight — and you need a crypto wallet such as Ronin Wallet, MetaMask, or any wallet that works with Ethereum, in order to buy and sell within the game.

Do you really have to buy an Axie before you can start?

Although starting does mean buying an Axie first, and the price per creature is currently rather high — a capable one runs to the order of ten thousand baht each, as at the time of writing — the most expensive Axie ever traded was Axie Angel, at over 300 ETH. Players without capital can find funding, or a scholarship, within the player community, where people who have capital but no time to play are looking for players. The two sides agree a split of the proceeds between them as they see fit. Anyone interested can join the Facebook groups set up specifically for Axie Infinity players.

What are AXS and SLP worth?

How hot this game is can be judged from the price of its two main coins: AXS (1,413.46 baht at the time of writing) and SLP (7.58 baht at the time of writing), which have surged unstoppably, growing 859% and 90% respectively over the preceding 30 days. That has made this game a source of extra income, or a main occupation outright, for a considerable number of players. What has made it so popular, beyond the game being charming and uncomplicated, is the strength of the player community built around earning while playing — play-to-earn.