K
Kathleen Martin
Guest
Blockchain boosters have long touted cross-border remittances as a market that’s practically begging to be disrupted by their technology of choice, the public ledgers that underpin cryptocurrencies.
But what if early blockchain proselytizers weren’t quite right? What if the biggest impact blockchains will have isn’t enabling overseas workers to send money back home cheaply and quickly (and thereby circumventing the steep fees levied by services such as Western Union’s)? What if the real innovation lay, instead, in people’s ability to earn a living wage…while working from home…playing video games?
That’s the dream offered by Axie Infinity, a video game developed by Sky Mavis, a Singapore-based development studio. The game recently blew up, attracting more than 1 million daily players in August, up from less than 500 in July of 2020. (Yes, that’s a 200,000% increase in usage, approximately.)
Axie is a bit like Hearthstone, the popular, phone-based collectible “card” game, which is itself sort of like a digital Magic: The Gathering. The difference is that Axie uses blockchain tech to let people buy, breed, and battle a race of chubby, fantastical beasts called Axies.
Through playtime and match victories, Axie players can earn SLP, or “smooth love potion,” an Ethereum-based crypto token. People make money exchanging the token on online crypto exchanges, for fiat currencies. Alternatively, people can “burn”—or spend—the tokens to create more Axies, fueling the in-game economy.
I recently spoke to Gabby Dizon, founder of Yield Guild Games, a company that invests in Axies, SLP, and other in-game assets in order to rent them out to prospective players in return for a share of their virtual proceeds. Since we chatted last month, the Guild raised $4.6 million in investment from a16z crypto, the crypto-focused arm of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, along with other investors.
Axie is rolling in the crypto dough. SLP is now trading at $0.13, up from $0.02 in January—though down from an all-time high of $0.36 in May. Axie, itself, brought in $364 million in revenue last month, up from $196 million in July, according to data from the blockchain-tracker Token Terminal. In terms of revenue generation for a crypto project, that puts Axie second only to Ethereum, which brought in $670 million during the same period.
Third place at about $80 million went to OpenSea, a marketplace that sells NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, a technology that makes digital media—anything from artwork to pixelated profile pictures to virtual real estate—trackable and tradeable on blockchain.
Continue reading: https://fortune.com/2021/09/02/__trashed-2/
But what if early blockchain proselytizers weren’t quite right? What if the biggest impact blockchains will have isn’t enabling overseas workers to send money back home cheaply and quickly (and thereby circumventing the steep fees levied by services such as Western Union’s)? What if the real innovation lay, instead, in people’s ability to earn a living wage…while working from home…playing video games?
That’s the dream offered by Axie Infinity, a video game developed by Sky Mavis, a Singapore-based development studio. The game recently blew up, attracting more than 1 million daily players in August, up from less than 500 in July of 2020. (Yes, that’s a 200,000% increase in usage, approximately.)
Axie is a bit like Hearthstone, the popular, phone-based collectible “card” game, which is itself sort of like a digital Magic: The Gathering. The difference is that Axie uses blockchain tech to let people buy, breed, and battle a race of chubby, fantastical beasts called Axies.
Through playtime and match victories, Axie players can earn SLP, or “smooth love potion,” an Ethereum-based crypto token. People make money exchanging the token on online crypto exchanges, for fiat currencies. Alternatively, people can “burn”—or spend—the tokens to create more Axies, fueling the in-game economy.
I recently spoke to Gabby Dizon, founder of Yield Guild Games, a company that invests in Axies, SLP, and other in-game assets in order to rent them out to prospective players in return for a share of their virtual proceeds. Since we chatted last month, the Guild raised $4.6 million in investment from a16z crypto, the crypto-focused arm of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, along with other investors.
Axie is rolling in the crypto dough. SLP is now trading at $0.13, up from $0.02 in January—though down from an all-time high of $0.36 in May. Axie, itself, brought in $364 million in revenue last month, up from $196 million in July, according to data from the blockchain-tracker Token Terminal. In terms of revenue generation for a crypto project, that puts Axie second only to Ethereum, which brought in $670 million during the same period.
Third place at about $80 million went to OpenSea, a marketplace that sells NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, a technology that makes digital media—anything from artwork to pixelated profile pictures to virtual real estate—trackable and tradeable on blockchain.
Continue reading: https://fortune.com/2021/09/02/__trashed-2/
