Axie Infinity

In the spring of 2021, in provincial towns across the Philippines, something unusual was happening. Tricycle drivers grounded by lockdown, students with no classes to attend, and furloughed hotel staff were spending their afternoons breeding small cartoon creatures called Axies, sending them into battle, and earning tokens that, for a few dizzying months, could out-pay their old jobs. Scholarship guilds sprang up, lending starter Axies to players who could not afford the entry cost, splitting the proceeds. It was, depending on who you asked, either the future of labour or a very elaborate pyramid dressed in pixel art.

That tension — between genuine innovation and speculative excess — has never quite left Axie Infinity. It was the game that made “play-to-earn” a phrase worth writing down, and it remains the reference point against which every subsequent attempt at blockchain gaming is measured, usually unfavourably to itself.

The story so far

Axie Infinity was built by Sky Mavis, a Vietnamese studio founded in 2018 by Trung Nguyen and a small band of co-founders who had cut their teeth on more conventional game development. The premise borrowed openly from Pokémon and Tamagotchi: collect creatures, breed them, battle them, trade them. What made it different was that every Axie was a non-fungible token, genuinely owned by the player, tradeable on open markets rather than locked inside a publisher’s database.

For its first two years Axie Infinity was a curiosity, popular among crypto natives but hardly a cultural moment. The turning point came with the pandemic and, crucially, with the Philippines, where economic disruption met a population already comfortable with mobile gaming and remittance economies. Word spread that Axies could be bred and sold for real money, that battling could earn a token called Smooth Love Potion, and that a guild model meant even the asset-less could participate. At its peak the game claimed millions of daily active users and its governance token, AXS, became one of the most-traded assets in crypto, with a supply capped at 270 million tokens against a circulating figure that today sits at roughly 174 million.

Then came the Ronin bridge hack in March 2022, in which attackers made off with more than 600 million dollars in crypto assets, one of the largest thefts in the industry’s history. Sky Mavis reimbursed users, restructured its security, and pressed on, launching a sequel game, Axie Infinity: Origins, and diversifying into a broader ecosystem it calls the Ronin network. But the episode punctured something that proved harder to repair than the balance sheet: the sense that the whole enterprise was invincible.

The years since have been a slower, quieter rebuilding — fewer headlines, more infrastructure, an attempt to shift the economy away from pure token emission towards something resembling sustainable game design. Whether that shift has succeeded is, depending on whom you ask, either well underway or still mostly aspirational.

The case for Axie Infinity

Believers point first to proof of concept: Axie Infinity did, for a real and measurable period, transfer meaningful income to people who badly needed it, in a country with limited formal employment options. That is not nothing, and it is a claim few crypto projects can make with any honesty. Supporters also argue that Sky Mavis learned from its mistakes in ways that matter — the Ronin network has been rebuilt with more robust validator arrangements, and the studio has continued shipping product rather than retreating into pure token speculation, which in an industry prone to abandonment counts for something.

There is also a longer-term argument about digital ownership itself: that regardless of Axie Infinity’s particular fortunes, the underlying idea — that in-game assets should belong to players, be tradeable, and outlive any single title — is directionally correct, and that Axie remains the most battle-tested laboratory for working out how that idea might actually function at scale, mistakes and all.

The case against Axie Infinity

The sceptics’ strongest card is simple arithmetic: the original economy was never sustainable, because it paid players in a token whose value depended on ever more new players arriving to buy in, a structure indistinguishable in practice from a Ponzi scheme regardless of the game mechanics wrapped around it. When new user growth slowed, the token economics collapsed under their own weight, and the “earn” in play-to-earn evaporated for most participants well before the Ronin hack ever happened.

There is also the harder human question of what it meant to encourage people in economically precarious positions to treat a speculative game as a livelihood, and what happened to the guild members and scholarship players once the token price fell away — a story that received far less attention than the initial boom did. And the security failure at Ronin remains a legitimate stain, not because breaches never happen in crypto, but because of its scale and because bridges of this kind concentrate exactly the kind of centralised risk that decentralised systems are supposed to avoid. Whether the game itself, stripped of speculative reward, is compelling enough to retain players on its own merits remains, even now, an open question.

The bottom line

Axie Infinity’s place in crypto history is already secure, whatever happens next: it proved that blockchain gaming could pull in millions of real users almost overnight, and it proved just as forcefully how quickly such economies can unravel once the incentives stop lining up. With a market capitalisation of roughly 177 million dollars today, a fraction of its 2021 exuberance, the project persists in a more sober register — building, patching, arguing its case to a market that has grown considerably warier of promises about earning money by playing games. Whether that quieter version amounts to genuine maturation or simply a long, managed decline is not yet settled, and probably will not be for some time. This is journalism, not financial advice.