Axie Infinity is the biggest NFT project ever in terms of trade volume, but it has been struggling in recent months because its play-to-earn economy failed and its Ronin network bridge was hacked for $622 million. But there are signs that the most popular Ethereum NFT game may be coming back.
According to data from CryptoSlam, sales of Axie Infinity NFT rose by about 198 percent in the week before. Even though $1.38 million in NFTs is a small fraction of what Axie was selling last summer, when its weekly sales were often more than $100 million, it’s still a big jump from the previous week.
Jeff Zirlin, co-founder of the company that made Axie Infinity, tweeted last Thursday that 22,000 Axies had been sold in the last 24 hours. He said this was more than the 7,000 Axies that had been sold in the previous 24 hours.
He also said that more and more people were downloading the new Origin version of Axie Infinity, which has a new combat system, better graphics, and other changes, and that 90% of Axie land owners had staked their NFTs to win AXS tokens. The option to claim land went live on June 30, and as of this writing, 91 percent of the land had been claimed.
Zirlin told him, “Nature heals
An NFT is a blockchain token that can be used to show that someone owns something. In Axie Infinity, NFTs are things like unique Axie monsters that users can bring into battle and virtual plots of land that players can later customize and sell.
Since the end of 2021, when the value of its AXS and SLP tokens dropped because the play-to-earn economy was falling apart, Axie Infinity has had a lot of problems. The Ethereum-based game that runs on the custom Ronin sidechain is changing how its token rewards work to make it more practical. Still, the prices of both tokens are much lower than they were.
According to CoinMarketCap, the price of an AXS token is less than $14 right now. This is a 91 percent drop from November, when it was worth around $165, and a 22 percent drop in just the last month. The SLP token is worth about $0.004, which is a 99 percent drop from its high point of almost $0.40 in July 2021 and a drop of nearly 20 percent in the last 30 days.
On top of that, in March, hackers broke into the bridge that connects Ronin to the Ethereum mainnet and stole $622 million in ETH and USDC stablecoin. The US Treasury, which approved the wallet used in the attack, found that it was North Korea’s well-known state-backed hacking group Lazarus that did it.
Sky Mavis fixed the bridge at the end of June and paid back all the customers whose crypto funds were stolen, even though the value of ETH has dropped since the theft because of a larger correction in the crypto market. The developer gave an extra $150 million to help pay for gas reimbursements and is now working with police to get back the money that was stolen in the attack.
Philip La, who is in charge of the Sky Mavis game’s product, said in a blog post yesterday that news stories about the game’s falling token and NFT values are making “misleading narratives” about the game. He talked about how the old “play-to-earn” Axie Infinity version is being replaced by the new “play-and-earn” Origin version.
Origin is out now in a “soft launch” version that doesn’t offer any prizes. Sky Mavis also wants to get the game into official mobile app stores. This is because Origin’s new starting monsters are free-to-play and don’t require NFTs to play. He also said that Sky Mavis is actively hiring and working to build the Axie ecosystem through grants and other means.
“The game is still going strong, with big updates coming out all the time, and we’ll keep making more games that use all the things we’ve learned over time,” La wrote. “It is not true that we are in an existential crisis and that time is running out.
It’s still not clear if Axie Infinity’s short-term rise in NFT sales will turn into a long-term trend or if the game will get back to the huge popularity it had in 2021. Sky Mavis, on the other hand, seems to be building with this change in mind.
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