A Billion-Dollar Crypto Gaming Startup Promised Riches and Delivered Disaster

The interesting thing about Axie Infinity is that, just like Ponzi and Madoff, it has a fundamentally unsustainable economic model that depends on inflows from new players to fund payouts to existing players. But here’s the weird, mind-bending part of it: everybody knows! The team knows, their investors know, ordinary players know—and they talk abo... See more

But once it caught on in the Philippines, Axie’s user base increased exponentially—exactly the kind of growth venture capitalists are looking for. The game signed up 61,000 new players in May 2021, 139,000 in June, and 475,000 in July. By that October, about two million people were playing the game every day, most of them in the Philippines. Sky Ma

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