While DeFi and NFT marketplaces have garnered all the hype in crypto over the past couple of years, some might be surprised to learn that the most popular crypto application is actually a game!
Sky Mavis, the development team behind leading crypto application Axie Infinity, worked for more than three years to create the most popular application in crypto.
But wait, just how popular is Axie Infinity?
Growth
Axie Infinity currently boasts over 300,000 DAUs, an increase of more than 30x since the beginning of the year. Furthermore, growth in their Discord has gone absolutely parabolic, making them one of the largest Discord servers across the world.
Monthly revenue for July has surpassed $23 million, which is already more than double the June revenue numbers. Axie Infinity’s revenue in January was just over $100,000!
Source: Axieworld
Across all growth metrics, Axie Infinity has been by far the leading crypto application. Yet why are so few people discussing the growth of Axie Infinity?
Where does the growth come from?
Interestingly, Axie Infinity has become a primary way to earn income for people in developing countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam, and others.
Axie Infinity is an innovator in utilizing a new business model enabled by crypto: play to earn. Play to earn is a new business model in gaming that allows for an open economy within the game itself that provides financial benefits to the players who participate in the game.
Currently, users playing Axie Infinity can earn around $10 - 20 (recently closer to $30 - 50) a day in digital assets through playing the game. Users earn this money through the following methods: selling smooth love potions (SLP) and selling Axies.
Users can earn SLP through winning battles or completing challenges, which are currently the main activities in the game. SLP is an ERC-20 that can be sold on various decentralized exchanges. As the price of SLP rises in dollar terms, users can make more money make by selling the SLP on the open market.
The second way to earn money in Axie Infinity is using the SLP in order to breed more Axies. Through breeding two Axies, a baby Axie is born. In order to breed, users need a certain amount of SLP, which varies based on how many times the parent Axies have been used for breeding. Axies can be bred up to seven times, and the offspring can be sold on the open market. There is constant demand for new Axies since a user is required to own three Axies in order to play the game. These Axies are NFTs, and thus can be sold through the various NFT marketplaces that have been created on Ethereum.
While that amount of money does not make a difference in places like the United States, that amount makes a drastic impact in countries like the Philippines, where the daily minimum wage is usually between $5 - 10. Thus, workers can earn effectively double, triple, quadruple, or even quintuple the minimum wage by just playing a game, which is a lot more fun than alternative jobs anyway!
Use MetaMask to play Axie Infinity
Users can access Axie Infinity by creating a MetaMask wallet and connecting it with a Ronin wallet. Ronin is Axie Infinity’s Ethereum-compatible sidechain.
In order to access the network, users will have to download the Ronin Wallet chrome extension. Then, you can actually use the same secret recovery phrase (formerly known as a seed phrase) as your MetaMask wallet to create the Ronin wallet, effectively linking the two wallets. You can also go the inverse way by adding your Ronin wallet to your MetaMask wallet by following these instructions.
Here is what your Ronin wallet looks like:
The Ronin wallet will allow you to earn SLP (small love potions) through playing Axie Infinity, buy land on Axie Infinity, hold Axies, and buy items.