Dizon, a mobile game executive in Manila, was one of Axie Infinity’s first 500 players. The largest is Yield Guild Games (YGG), founded by Gabby Dizon in October 2020. They covered the high cost of entry for players who couldn’t afford it in exchange for a share of players’ future earnings. Player guilds were one reason Axie Infinity’s user numbers shot up so quickly. In May 2021, Axie Infinity awarded players 150 SLP a day for playing its single-player mode and daily quests-equivalent to $55, more than five times Manila’s minimum daily wage. “Everything has been spread through word of mouth,” he says.įifty-five percent of Axie Infinity users are in the Philippines, where game earnings can outpace real wages. Larsen attributes the growth largely to pandemic lockdowns forcing people inside and the power of social networks. In July 2021, Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, stopped SLP trading briefly because volume was so high.

Axie Infinity’s daily active users increased from 38,000 in April 2021 to 1.9 million in September 2021 to a peak of 2.5 million by the year’s end.

The game is still bare-bones conceptually, but its player base is now massive. In fact, the game attracted only a few thousand players in its first year, which the founders attribute to rudimentary gameplay and basic graphics. “I spent all my time at home searching for hustles so I could get a little money, but I couldn’t find any,” he says.īut when Axie Infinity launched in October 2018, it hardly changed the video game world overnight. A bout of COVID that hospitalized his father had saddled Pablo’s family with hundreds of dollars in medical debt. Last year, a COVID lockdown in the Philippines had confined the 26-year-old to the two-bedroom house he shared with his parents near Manila, and the pandemic had eliminated his job as a teacher. One of those players was Pablo, who turned to the game during a low point in his life. But the breach could also devastate Axie Infinity’s hundreds of thousands of users-the majority of whom live in one of the world’s poorest countries-whose earnings were already under pressure as the game’s booming popularity made it harder to earn meaningful payouts. The hack, which went undiscovered for nearly a week, exposed the security vulnerabilities of Axie Infinity and walloped the reputation of its developer, Sky Mavis, Vietnam’s most valuable unicorn, which vowed to recover the lost funds and find the culprit.

Infinitymu credit hack