Web3 gaming in the third world: Axie facilitating billions
The research department of blockchain analytics platform Nansen have published a comprehensive guide to popular play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, calculating quantitative insights such as that 2.8 million unique addresses are currently holding 11.1 million Axies, alongside that 97% of those users hold a minimum of three Axie nonfungible tokens, or NFT’s.
Axie Infinity is a play-to-earn game constructed around the collection of, and interaction with, digital pet avatars called Axies. Built by Vietnamese gaming studio Sky Mavis in March 2018, the game rose to cultural prominence during 2019 following the emergence of stories in which players from third-world countries such as Venezuela and Philippines were making a full-time living off of Axie's native crypto assets: Smooth Love Potion (SLP) and Axie Infinity (AXS).
In May 2021, 22-year-old John Aaron Ramos, recognized as Magnus TV within the gaming community, announced that Axie Infinity had empowered him to make two lucrative property purchases in the Philippines.
Nansen’s report follows the trend of other public assessments of Axie, principally focusing on the perks of authenticated ownership of in-game assets, secondary marketplace trading opportunities, decentralized governance, as well as the impending potential for cross-game interoperability, among others.
On the subject of decentralization, Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin was infamously inspired to pursue the technology following a distressing experience on World of Warcraft, a game previously owned by Activision Blizzard before their acquisition by Microsoft for $69 billion in January.
Buterin stated that “Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved Warlock’s Siphon Life spell.” In other words, Blizzard
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