What's on Deck for on Deck?

Scores of people in the Philippines and Vietnam have quit their jobs and make a better living playing Axie for hours every day. They earn Smooth Love Potion (SLP), a token earned through Axie gameplay that can be exchanged for fiat, which in turn can be used to pay for food, shelter, medical bills, and all of the other things needed to survive.

Crypto can create new economic opportunities for all types of people globally, not just whales, DeFi degens, and bitcoin maxis, delivering on the promise of a more level playing field while also capturing economic value.

Over the past 24 hours, 7 days, and 30 days, Axie Infinity has done more volume than any other NFT Marketplace, including open ones like OpenSea, Foundation, and Rarible, and asset-specific ones like CryptoPunks, NBA TopShot, and SoRare.

A typical game would spend millions of dollars on marketing and keep the majority of profits to itself; Axie spends nothing on marketing, but lets players keep most of the value created. That should lead to a stickier game and more opportunities for expansion.

The roughly 5% that the Axie protocol takes goes into the Community Treasury, which currently stands at 46k ETH or $95 million, and the Treasury is controlled by token holders, including but not limited to the developers, Sky Mavis, who hold about ~20% of the nation’s governance token, AXS.

The Axie protocol generates revenue by taking a 4.25% fee when players buy and sell Axie NFTs in its marketplace, and by charging fees for breeding Axies to create new ones in the form of its tokens, Axie Infinity Shards (AXS) and Smooth Love Potion (SLP).

Delphi projects that Axie will end the year having generated $1.1 billion in revenue, mostly from fees generated through its NFT marketplace and from breeding Axies to meet the demand from hundreds of thousands of new players each month. There are more than 600k players currently, around the world, as many as 60% of whom are in the Philippines.

In April, Axie did about $670k in revenue.

Jiho pointed out the paradox in building communities at scale: