In 2018, a Vietnamese-Australian developer named Nguyen Thanh Trung and his team launched Axie Infinity, a blockchain-based game inspired by Pokémon and Tamagotchi. Players collect, breed, and battle creatures called Axies, each represented by a unique NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. The game had a small but dedicated community until 2021, when something remarkable happened: Filipino workers, left unemployed by COVID-19, discovered they could earn more playing Axie than working regular jobs.
The “play-to-earn” economics worked like this: players earned Small Love Potions (SLP), a cryptocurrency, by winning battles. They also earned AXS tokens, Axie’s governance currency. Both could be sold on crypto exchanges for real money. At peak, a skilled player could earn $50-100 per day — more than the average Philippines salary. Entire villages in rural Philippines turned to playing Axie as their primary income source.
The scale of Axie’s success was staggering. By mid-2021, the game had over 2 million daily active users. Its native token AXS reached a market cap of over $10 billion. The “scholarship” system emerged: wealthy Axie holders would lend their Axies to players who couldn’t afford to start, in exchange for a cut of the earnings. This created an entire economy of scholars, managers, and guilds — a pyramid-like structure where the top earned a significant percentage of everyone below them.
But Axie’s economy depended on constant influx of new players buying Axies to start playing. When new player growth slowed in late 2021, the economics began breaking down. SLP supply kept growing while demand for Axies fell. SLP prices crashed, then AXS prices crashed. Daily earnings for scholars dropped from $50 to $5 to almost nothing. Millions of Filipino players suddenly couldn’t pay their bills.
Then came the killing blow: in March 2022, hackers exploited a bug in Axie’s Ronin bridge and stole $625 million in assets — one of the largest crypto hacks ever. Axie Infinity survived but was permanently damaged. The play-to-earn model as a whole fell out of favor. But Axie’s legacy is important: it proved that blockchain games could attract millions of users, that NFTs could have real utility beyond profile pictures, and that crypto could meaningfully impact the economic lives of people in developing countries — for better and for worse.
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