I originally had planned to title this post “Axie Infinity: Financial deconstruction of a $1 billion blockchain game”.
But that was boring and so last week: things have moved beyond what I would have predicted.
Indeed, my view has always been I can’t predict when blockchain gaming in general and any title in particular will go mass market.
But I do know that when it happens, it goes much quicker than we expect.
And that’s certainly the situation with Axie Infinity, which by any calculation is well in excess of $1 billion, whatever $1 billion means these days.
Some data points:
The game is attracting over 350,00 daily active unique wallets
It’s been the top project in terms of NFT trading volume for the past month, generating:
$16 million of trading volume in the past 24 hours
$89 million in the past week
$182 million in the past month
$247 million all-time
The AXS token is now at an all-time high, with a market cap of over $600 million.
The price of Axie NFTs is also booming
The cheapest Axie (there are +1 million) is around $200 (you need 3 to play)
The cheapest Origin Axie (max 4,088) is around $7,000
The cheapest Mystic Axie (max 1,453) is around $50,000
Plus Axie Infinity is the most profitable blockchain application across all categories, including DeFi dapps, having generated $11 million in profits during the past 30 days.
Most significantly, this combination of a 4.25% margin charged on all NFT trading and a fee of 2 AXS tokens per breed is paid into the game’s treasury not to the game’s developer Sky Mavis. The treasury is controlled by AXS token holders.
But what’s really amazing is Axie Infinity’s growing status as an aspirational financial layer for thousands of ordinary people in developing countries, particularly the Philippines. This has been fuelled by programs such as Yield Guild, which takes a cut of revenues earned by gamers because it allows them to borrow the NFTs they need to play.
The result is the image below, which shows an ad for high-end real estate with the rent to be paid in AXS tokens.
Forget El Salvador making Bitcoin legal tender. Thanks to blockchain, it looks like gaming is finally eating the world.
If there’s not a Nintendo branded crypto-backed debit card in the next 10 years, I’ll eat my son’s Mario beloved cap and mint it as an NFT!