Discussing the future of Axie Infinity: Axie Infinity's legendary journey has just begun
Source: threebody
Compilation & Arrangement: Chen Zou
The price of Axie Infinity's AXS token has always been the most confusing thing. AXS was first listed on Binance Exchange in November 2020, with an initial price of about 11 cents. For those long-term investors who owned some AXS at that time and held it until now, the total return rate was as high as 1318 times. According to the comparison terminal data, as of press time, the price of Axie is $140.56. Many people think that something that has doubled a thousand times in a year must have a serious bubble.
As a result, a large amount of hot money has flowed into the so-called"next Axie": From the best projects in crypto, like Illuvium and Star Atlas, to ambitious up-and-comers seeking to solve Axie's obvious pain points as a game, these projects often promise better UI, better games Sex, better token economics, better everything - and of course spending less money.
This is pretty much the past few years"ethereum killer"and"ethereum killer"A reprint of the plot. History doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but often the results are pretty much the same.
But it seems that Axie has just started,"Next"first level title。
Don't be fooled by the price
The charts are mostly about coin prices — that is, the value of the company: a publicly listed stake in a company that has traditionally been in business for many years, enough to satisfy exchanges and regulators. And if such a mature enterprise achieves a rate of return of 1318 times within one year, this is absolutely ridiculous, and there may even be some shady things. This price tag is well above valuations, and it's worth ringing alarm bells for any investor.
The reality, however, is that Axie Infinity is still in its infancy, and the studio behind it, Sky Mavis, is theoretically only an early-stage venture. Cryptocurrency is only an early-stage investment, and what investors are facing is actually a real-time market with huge liquidity. In this context, companies that attempt to use traditional stock market analysis methods to study the encryption market can only be said to be desperate, which is extremely ridiculous.
A16Z is a top VC focused on early-stage investing, and their recent $152 million investment in Axie’s game studio, Sky Mavis, puts it clearly in the"early stage"Within the range: Is the entry of A16Z just for 30% profit? Obviously impossible.
Our trading thinking stereotyped by the traditional market has allowed us to indulge in the illusion formed by the trading price for a long time, and thus ignore that we are in a completely different market.
One of the greatest structural advantages of cryptocurrency businesses over traditional businesses is their ability to effortlessly transcend physical constraints, and have a rapidly changing global addressable market, as"the Internet"Just as businesses tear down their brick-and-mortar stores, it will also create a much larger addressable market than a generation ago thought it would.
Blockchain games bring a whole new set of game economics, not only for players, but also for game developers. Axie Infinity successfully pioneered"Play to Earn"Mechanics fundamentally invert why people play games, and what players and developers expect from each game delivery. Reasons why people play games"for fun"On a much broader scale, gaming suddenly became a way of making a living that never existed before (it used to be only qualified for professional gamers, e-sports athletes). Conversely, the economic model of game design has also changed dramatically for developers: the game needs to be monetized in an unusual way, it targets a larger audience, and allows players to participate in the construction of the economic ecology Here, you can also get a lot of money and make a living.
All of these new dynamics come together to give a game like Axie Infinity a much larger addressable market than traditional AAA titles. It's clear to anyone who knows the game, or tries to play it, that this isn't a well-crafted, gameplay-heavy traditional game like Call of Duty or World of Warcraft. Axie Infinity is much simpler to play; Hardcore players might say it"boring". But from another perspective, this is a source of income for some unemployed people due to the epidemic, especially in Southeast Asia, this is a job! If you can think this way, I believe your point of view will change.
This is why "Axie Infinity" can have a huge player market, although it only has a very"Simple"game mechanics, but it's not like any other game. What Axie Infinity has is not"like playing this game"of players, and not by"Casual vs Hardcore"divided by players. The essence behind the game ecology is:"How many people would find the income from playing this game attractive?"
At present, the income of "Axie Infinity" players is about 100 US dollars / week, which is equivalent to 10 times the average annual income of the bottom 50% of people in the world (World Inequality Report: https://wir2018.wid.world/ ). Despite the skewed global income distribution, for many people, playing games can create an incredible income channel. And how many of these potential users are there? There are billions of people.
When Axie Infinity first started, they had just crossed the 1 million Axies breeding milestone, with less than 300,000 daily active players. Today, those numbers are closer to 9 million Axies, with 2 million daily active players.
Rapid growth rate? indeed so
Already a saturated market? far from reaching
The team behind Sky Mavis and Axie is just getting started, and they are well prepared for their future development path: not only do they have a top-notch team and $152 million in investment from A16Z, they also have a lot of AXS and ETH. Yes, according to the current market price, the team holds about 20 million AXS and about 45,000 ETH, which add up to more than $3.1 billion in liquidity, which can meet any of their development needs.
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Reform, not just for yourself
Axie Infinity is an era-defining platform. Perhaps, many projects will claim that they can do better in a certain way after it, and this is likely to be true in the end. But Axie Infinity, as a transformative force, is not only for the game industry, but also for the encryption field, and even the whole world. This kind of influence cannot be replicated or broken through.
Now, many ecosystem owners have demonstrated that they can achieve many things by controlling users. Facebook and Google are the most typical examples. They first accumulated a large number of users, and then found a way to monetize. as"old world"is represented by the previous generation of Internet giants, including Facebook and Google"Internet"Like the antithesis of Axie Infinity, captive ecosystems like Facebook and Google are now in turn the antithesis of decentralized games like Axie Infinity.
normal"normal"Time spent at work is just as meaningful.
From this reality, especially those players in developing countries, are experiencing first-hand the benefits that the encryption field has always promised, although these benefits seem trivial in the eyes of developed countries:
Have a bank account, be able to save (stake in exchange for yield),
Ability to buy and sell in the online marketplace and deposit the proceeds in the bank,
be able to use these benefits for very specific"real world"goods and services.
In short, having a financial identity for those who were previously dismissed by the banking system, considered a frivolous, time-wasting market.
In other words, every player of Axie Infinity, as part of their journey to start playing, earning and cashing out, has gained more knowledge and experience about the world of cryptocurrencies than most people in the world, and certainly more than those who continue to deny The effectiveness of a decentralized cryptocurrency system is far greater.
With the launch of Katana - the native decentralized exchange on Ronin, Axie's dedicated sidechain - players have more and more reasons to participate in the Axie Infinity metaverse.
The developing world is in the process of leapfrogging the developed world in terms of cryptocurrency knowledge. Most Axie Infinity players understand the importance of a native DEX on the Ronin sidechain, and how this heralds integration with existing DeFi protocols, attracting more and more new users by circumventing the high transaction costs on the Ethereum base chain, This fact already speaks to their high level of understanding of how decentralized networks work. And the list of things to learn in this field keeps growing.
As more and more people use the Metaverse as a source of employment and income and spend more and more time interacting with the crypto ecosystem, the interactivity of the ecosystem will continue to grow geometrically. Now, you can even use this ecology to participate in elections. Yes, Bitui previously reported that a governor candidate in northern Venezuela promised to provide a learning center for Axie Infinity, so that locals can have more job opportunities, and This is for votes. This is not the only example. There are also officials in the Philippines who directly use Axie as their own feature as a bargaining chip.
In the same way, companies doing business in the Axie Infinity world have natural advertising effects, even greater political influence, and penetration of financial products and services. From this perspective, Axie Infinity is still far from its final form. very far away.
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There are many fish in the sea, but none can compare to Axie
Skeptics will still argue at this point that Axie was indeed a trailblazer, opening a door to things previously thought impossible. That's fine, but it's a game after all, and this game is actually pretty boring. There are a large number of imitations of Axie Infinity on the market. They have almost the same gameplay, but they are endowed with 3A-level graphics and more attractive plots. It is only a matter of time before Axie is eliminated.
Yes, there will certainly be brand new games popping up on the market, and they will probably be very well made and will compete fiercely with Axie Infinity in the future. But considering that the entire blockchain game field is still in the growth stage, Axie Infinity is not only the leader in this industry, but also the game with the most ability to dominate: in terms of its economic model, the scale of its resources and the size of its user base. There is no way to imitate these scales. Of course, the quality of the team that Sky Mavis is building is also extraordinary. In view of the above, Sky Mavis has abnormally sufficient cash flow, and it is not difficult for them to recruit talents.
And more importantly, Axie Infinity as a game is still in alpha: it may be an open alpha version that the public can participate in, but traditionally, alpha versions are given as gifts to a small number of eligible of gamers (e.g. internal testers, loyal fans, etc.), who stress test very limited gameplay in a largely controlled environment, report bugs to developers, because even the largest game studios make Games also have bugs that need to be patched later, and the process repeated over and over again.
Therefore, the "Axie Infinity" we see now is just the tip of the iceberg of the game's full form. And Axie's existing large user base once again makes it not seem like an "early" project, because in"Tradition"In the world, only the final release version of a large game can have more than 2 million daily active users. Which developer would dare to release an incomplete game version directly to users?
But this is the crypto space: openness and community input are at the heart of the crypto ethos. And this kind of openness and deep participation of users, as well as the economic model design of the game, made high gas fees (at the beginning), server overload, extended delay of land gameplay and other things that even the iron fans of large and prestigious companies Unbearable bugs (example: CD Projekt and Cyberpunk 2077), are viewed lightly by the Axie player community.
Of course, none of the above is the most important thing. The most important thing is that being able to make a living from Axie offsets the lack of gameplay, and the development team's ability to respond to the needs of the player community in a timely manner continues to build a good reputation, even when making minimal improvements. They can also respond quickly and reasonably to difficult decisions such as thresholds required for skill levels. But it's the infinite possibilities of Axie Infinity's future that are most intriguing.
Axie Infinity has achieved what other projects only dream of: critical mass. When the user's dependence on the project reaches a certain critical value, other users will be attracted involuntarily. That's what separates it from new projects that give countless promises.
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Enjoy the future of Axie Infinity
To wrap up, and let our imaginations run wild, here's what to expect from Axie Infinity:
Ronin becomes Ethereum's largest sidechain: The Ronin bridge contract is already the largest bridge contract on Ethereum L1, with $8.2 billion in assets locked in the bridge and transferred to Ronin (Source: https://dune.xyz/ eliasimos/Bridge-Away-(from-Ethereum)), not to mention the total value created within the Axie ecosystem. Will Ronin become bigger than Ethereum? Why is it impossible? .
Katana becomes the largest DEX in the world: Regardless of whether Ronin can become the first, Katana's recent miracles are worthy of attention. Katana was launched on November 2, and the platform’s liquidity quickly grew from zero to $1.2 billion within 4 days. These liquidity was provided by users who pledged ETH and AXS/SLP to the liquidity pool. In order to more accurately demonstrate the miracle created by Katana, it provided 25% of the current liquidity on Uniswap v3 within 4 days, and Uniswap is a DEX pioneer project driven by AMM (Automatic Market Maker). Ronin, as a sidechain, is architecturally the same as something like Arbitrum. Will more tokens be bridged and traded on Ronin in the future? It's not impossible. If this bridge is opened, more transactions will be conducted on Katana, and it is not impossible for Katana to grow into a DEX giant.
NFT lending: Generally speaking, NFT is mainly a work of art, which is"right click and save"The player's assets. But in Axie Infinity, they're definitely a full-fledged means of production: the same thing as cars, tractors, or airplanes. They are the main means by which players make a living. Can they be borrowed? Of course, and now a large number of game guilds are engaging in their own NFT loans, so that low-income players have a channel to enter the game.
Microloans and financing: Even more attractive than mortgages for those with modest incomes are unsecured loans against expected income. Lending is done with actually liquid collateral that has a defined market price and most are 150-200% overcollateralized. After all, in the encryption field, it is very difficult to try to make a loan against future income if you only know the wallet address of the other party, but it is not so difficult when the wallet address is tied to the game and the history of income generation. Could we see the first cryptocurrency-based income loan implemented among Axie Infinity players? For players in developing countries, having access to start-up capital in this way will be a huge boon, especially if they are strapped for cash and have no collateral to offer.
New business models: We’ve seen the emergence of leading guilds like YGG that help unite players into an organization that allows them to play in an orderly manner, receive training and financial support, and ultimately make a living doing it. Around these players, an ecosystem of trainers, managers, and service providers has begun to grow, and as long as this ecosystem remains intact and exceeds critical mass, we will see an incredible explosion of growth.
These are just some speculations about how far Axie can go, and the reality may be very different from what we can imagine right now. But they all have one thing in common, Axie is bringing cryptocurrency into the mainstream, and the initial audience is those who have been left behind by the traditional financial system.
This article is from Bitpush.News, reproduced with authorization.
This article is from Bitpush.News, reproduced with authorization.
