Axie Infinity: A Review and How to Earn Free Crypto By Playing a Game

This is the latest craze in the crypto space after a video documentaryshowed how people living in the rural areas of the Philippines were able to make ends meet by playing a blockchain-based video game called Axie Infinity.

The game’s idea and inspiration was taken from Pokemon and you can battle, collect, raise, and breed Axies. That is important to what Axie is, but the ecosystem is way more complicated than how simplistic it all sounds.

Behind the game itself, it is powered by the Ethereum blockchain, meaning it is open-source, and any player from any part of the world will be able to participate.

As long as you have a wallet that can hold ETH and buy/sell Axies or crypto tokens, you can access the game wherever you are.

Normal gaming companies want you to pay 60 bucks for a game and spend countless hours and days on it for fun, with no financial reward. But what if a game paid you 60 dollars per day to play it. The thought of that alone is crazy.

A game paying you to play? Yeah, it is and it is Axie Infinity’s vision and mission to make that happen. We have already seen it happen with players in the Philippines making cents (SLP_) _when playing Axie Infinity. Play to earn is here. The entire gaming economy will change and we are already experiencing this shifting paradigm.

The Basics

In this game, you basically have the following:

1. Axies

2. Small Love Potion (SLP)

3. Axie Types

4. Breeding

5. Axie Infinity Shard (AXS)

6. Land

I won’t dive into the details of each as that can be an entire topic of its own. But in essence, Axies are NFT monsters which are each unique and different from one another. They have different genes (Dominant/Recessive) which are huge consideration for breeding but to get started in the game, you will need a minimum of 3 Axies.

My Starter Axies (2 Plant + 2 Aqua)

1. I personally started with 3 Axies and it cost me roughly 0.5 ETH (1.2K USD) at the point of writing. You will have to go Youtube and do your due diligence on how to select the right Axies and how to build a starter team.

2. Small Love Potion or SLP for short, is the reward you earn when you play the game. It can be sold off for fiat and right now the 2 places to buy/sell them are Binance.com or Uniswap, which is a decentralised exchange on Ethereum.

But if you are into the business of breeding Axies, you need SLP to breed new Axies.

3. Axie Types

There are 6 (Main) different classes of Axies:

• Beast (Orange)

• Plant (Green)

• Aquatic (Blue)

• Reptile (Purple)

• Bird (Pink)

• Bug (Red)

Each of these classes has a specific ability tendency that they are best known for. Beasts and Bugs have higher morale, which means higher chance of critical hits in battle. Birds and Aquatics have higher speed, which means they attack first/faster. Plants and Reptiles have higher health (HP), which means more damage can be taken.

This does not mean they do not get the other traits, these are just the abilities that they are known for. The more of the class traits an Axie has, the more of that ability they have.

Body Parts

Each Axie has 6 different parts/traits. From top to bottom, they are: eyes, ears, mouth, horn, back, and tail. In battle, only the bottom 4 traits are used (mouth, horn, back, and tail). There will be future use cases for the mouth and ears, as of right now they are just for aesthetic purposes.

Purity

What does purity mean? Purity is the number of traits that matches the class of the Axie. For example, a plant with 6/6 plant traits is considered a ‘pure’ plant Axie.

4. Breeding

In Axie Infinity, Axie has 2 different lifecycles: Egg and Adult.

It takes 5 days for an egg to morph into an Adult.

Once the it grows into an Adult (also requires transaction), that is when you can battle and breed with your Axie, and continue that loop forever.

In an Axie’s lifetime, it is only ever able to breed 7 times, each time requiring more and more SLP to breed.

It is recommended to breed an Axie up to 4/7 times and maybe sell off the original Axie adult and use the 4 other virgin Axies and continue your breeding pool. Depending on how much SLP you earn, you can recoup your initial cost in approximately 2-4 months and from then on it will be profit, profit and more profits.

The analogy is the same as owning an investment property, once you pay off the initial mortgage, and you rent it out, those will be your passive income and your property turns into a money generator.

5. Axie Infinity Shard (AXS)

Axie Infinity Shards (AXS) are an ERC-20 governance token for the Axie Universe. AXS holders will be able to claim rewards if they stake their tokens, play the game, and participate in key governance votes.

Players will also be able to earn AXS when they play various games within the Axie Infinity Universe and through user-generated content initiatives, but these are currently not available yet.

With AXS tokens, you will be able to claim rewards if you stake your tokens. For those that are not blockchain native and are not familiar with this concept, as an owner of AXS, you can lock your tokens (taking them out of circulation) by staking them through Axie Infinity.

As a reward for this, you will earn both AXS and ETH and/or stablecoins. How? See the Delphi Digital Staking Report:

As a staker, you will receive AXS through staking yield and ETH/stablecoins from the treasury yield. Staking yield comes from the designed staking issuance.

Treasury yield comes from the treasury funds, which consists of fees derived from the Axie Infinity marketplace (breeding/buying/selling).

This is why it could be either ETH or Stablecoins, whichever currency is used in the marketplace transaction and accumulated in the treasury.

There are a total of 78,300,000 AXS tokens that are allocated for Staking issuance that are unlocked over 5.5 years.

In the first year, Delphi reports that the annual total yield, staking plus treasury, will be about 41.5% APY. That is not the crazy 100+% DeFi yield that we have been seeing recently, but it is still very decent returns.

AXS went to the literal moon!

There are more insane reason as to why AXS is going to be so huge and why we saw the price of the token flying to the Moon and beyond, growing almost 200% in a matter of days.

Even with the meteoric rise of the token price, it is still extremely undervalued given that it is the fastest growing ecosystem with the most number of new users, real world adoption of blockchain technology, fastest growing gaming community (Twitch/Discord), highest revenue in the crypto space (more than Aave/Curve/Maker combined)

6. Land

Now land gets more complicated. As of now, land gameplay is still in development and all land are sold out. It is digital real estate and players basically buy NFTs called land where they can build literally anything and turn it into a new ecosystem of its own.

This is the concept of Co-Creation.

Essentially, this means that the possibility is endless as players are in charge of the games future. It is a player-led movement and beyond what game developers can control, and this entire new economy will form the Axie Metaverse and I believe that is one of the largest technological advancements in our time.

It is literally ‘Ready Player One’ if you watched that movie.

I won’t go into the details but as of now, players who own land will get airdrop rewards when it launches and have real estate rights on their land.

Game Play

The game play portion consist of two main components right now:

1. PvE (Adventure Mode)

2. PvP (Arena)

In PvE (Player vs Environment), players earn EXP (Experience Points) for battling monsters known as Chimeras. When you win, you will earn EXP points but you expense your energy.

This is the recommended route if it is your first 2-3 weeks of playing as levelling up your Axies as soon as possible is incredibly important so you can scale up your SLP (crypto that can be sold) gains.

In PvP (Player vs Player), players fight against other players in an Arena. The winning side will be rewarded with SLP and the higher your rank/Elo, the more SLP you gain.

However, do note that your opponent gets harder over time the higher you climb, so if your win rate is less than 50%, it is recommended that you farm SLP from Adventure first.

Axie Battles V2

As you can see above, the basics are simple, you have 3 Axies (so does your opponent)

The goal is to defeat the opponent and you need the right strategies to do so. Each Axie class has strengths and weakness against the opponent and the meta will also be ever-changing.

If you played strategy based games like Hearthstone or Chess before, transitioning to Axie Infinity should be a breeze once you get the hang of how the cards work and the different abilities of each Axie.

Earning Potential

So this is the part everyone is excited about. How much can you exactly earn from playing this game? Well, it depends.

There are many different ways to earn. That depends on the kind of player you choose to be and your strategy to maximise it.

In Axie Infinity, you can choose from 3 roles:

1. Farmer

2. Breeder

3. Collector

Farmer

The farmer role is obvious, it basically involves playing the game, and earning SLP. The more SLP you farm, the more fiat you can get when you trade them.

The end goal of a farmer is to maximise his returns by spending the least amount of time playing the game, so you are basically trading your time and effort for some monetary gains, which is the same concept as being an employee.

You are capped at 20 energy per day if you own less than 10 Axies, meaning you have 20 games worth each day that can generate you SLP from the game. If you lose, you don’t get any SLP. Energy replenishes every 6 hours for players with less than 10 Axies.

You also get to earn a maximum of 100 SLP from playing Adventure and 50 SLP from completing the daily quest, which is to log in to the game, play 10 adventure games and win 5 arena matches.

Assuming you manage to win at least 50% of your matches, complete the daily quest and max out your 100 SLP from adventure per day, your SLP earning potential from 1 day is approximately 200+ SLP.

Even if you didn’t manage to win games in arena, as long as you are able to max out your farm from adventure and completing the daily quests, you are guranteed 150 SLP at least per day.

Playing time wise, if you spend around 2-3 hours to complete the task and fulfil the 100 SLP from adventure, it is very doable.

With 200 SLP earned per day, that would translate to approximately 6000 SLP per month. Assuming the price of SLP as $0.2 USD at the point of writing, that would translate to a nice $1200 USD if you sell the SLP off.

It’s a decent way to earn some extra income if you ask me.

Breeder

Now this is where it gets more exciting/complicated depending on how you view it.

As a breeder, you main goal is not to farm SLP but instead, to find the pure breeds with 0/7 breeding on the market place and aim to breed out Axies that are powerful and pure that will attract buyers from the marketplace.

The earning potential will be many times more than what a farmer can earn, as by being a breeder, you are an investor and a business owner yourself.

As a breeder, you will need to dish out a hefty starting capital to fund for your initial breeding pool. To get started, you need a minimum of 4 (preferably) pure bred Axies from the same class, which can easily cost up to 1 ETH-2 ETH. For the sake of this example, we will use a Plant Axie.

A plant Axie is important because almost every starter team requires Plant as a tank. This is why Plants will always be in demand and it is a good way for breeders to make consistent income from selling new Axies on the marketplace.

As a rule, the game prevents inc*st so you are unable to breed a 0/7 Axie with their parents/grandparents.

With the initial 4 Plant Axies, what you need to do is to breed the 2 separate pairs and have 4 more newborns. Once your initial 4 Axies reach 4/7 breed, it is recommended to sell them off, or you can use it to battle/provide scholarships.

With the 4 newborns, you simply let them inter-breed and the cycle repeats. The best case scenario is to breed perfect genes with strong parts that are high in demand, and hopefully flip your cost basis and profit infinitely.

Scholarships

Breeding aside, some breeders also launch scholarship programmes for people who don’t have the starting capital to play the game but wishes to earn extra income anyway. Scholarship managers will be breeders who have excessive Axies that are no longer needed for breeding and can be used to battle and earn more SLP.

Scholarships usually have a set guideline of a 50/50 split where 50% goes to the scholar while 50% goes to the manager. If a scholar does well, he can even be promoted and earn 60% while the manager earns 40% and so on, but that is based on what was initially agreed on.

In essence, scholarship managers can launch a business from launching scholarship programmes and scale up the business if they are able to recruit more scholars to play the game, which increases their earning potential since the same amount of time is used but generating more SLP.

There are more details into these but to keep it short I will just end it off here.

Collectors

I don’t think anyone has the capacity to be a collector and if you are then you shouldn’t be reading my blog. This post is for beginners and starters into the game.

Anyway, collectors are high net worth individuals who collect unique Axies which cost hundred of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars on these digital NFTs.

They seek out the most unique and rare Axies, typically with mixed parts that are unsuitable for battle or breeding, but the novelty and scarce factor is what keeps their price tags high. They typically collect rare Axies known as Mystic Axies.

These Axies have body parts that are unique from the normal Axies and have a limited supply. Mystic Axies can easily cost 100 ETH or more depending on how they look and how rare their part is. You get the idea.

Collectors hold on to the NFT in hopes that one day the game will reach critical mass adoption and eventually they can sell off the NFT at a price much higher than they bought it for. Pretty much like CryptoPunks.

Conclusion

There are so much more details which I never covered in the post, and I leave you to explore the game further to do your own research and due diligence as to whether you want to commit to the game and buy 3 Axies where the cost can be pretty significant.

It is important that you understand what you are getting into and to understand the underlying technology before diving too deep.

Axie Infinity is a blockchain-based game off Ethereum, so it is important that you understand what Ethereum is in the first place and basic things like setting up a Metamask wallet, transferring ETH from an exchange into Metamask, and purchasing Axies using ETH. I will leave a few helpful links to help you onboard faster, but do note that none of these are financial advice, and you should do your own homework if you really want to get started on this game.

If you truly want to be profitable and make extra income from it, then you will need to commit time to the game and earn your SLP to make your investments worth your while, but who knows, maybe 1 year from now, 10 million people or more will be playing this game and your Axies can easily worth 4-5 times more than when you bought it. NFT is a magical new asset class with immense potential.

Here are some links which you may find useful for your Axie Infinity journey:

Axie Infinity Whitepaper/Guide

Axie Infinity Road Map

Axie Infinity Breeding Simulator

Axie Infinity Pricing Calculator

Axie Infinity Starter Guide with Good Info

Axie Infinity Market Place

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Disclaimer:

The content here is for informational purposes only and should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice. It does NOT constitute an offer or solicitation to purchase any investment or a recommendation to buy or sell a security. In fact, the content is not directed to any investor or potential investor and may not be used to evaluate or make any investment.

Do note that this is not financial advice. If you are in doubt as to the action you should take, please consult your stock broker or financial advisor.