Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000149 · Crypto & Web3 → Crypto collapses → NFT bubble and collapse · 2018-2022
Axie Infinity
Blockchain game where players bought pets and earned crypto, then lost it all
Rejected. It isn’t going to the Arctic.
“The cartoon axolotls lost their place to the apes and the pixel punks.”
Why Noah said no
The NFT cluster is full, and the Non-fungible token entry can't leave, so Axie Infinity would cost both Bored Ape and CryptoPunks. The play-to-earn story from the Philippines is a good one, but it isn't worth losing the two collections that set NFT prices in 2021.
- Rejected
- 28 Oct 2026
- Original size
- 36.3 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axie_Infinity
What it is
Axie Infinity was a 2018 game on blockchain where players bought NFT pet creatures and played matches to earn cryptocurrency tokens. Sky Mavis, a Vietnamese studio, promised income to players especially in the Philippines, but the tokens crashed 99% in value and hackers stole $620 million in 2022.
Why it’s internet culture
Axie Infinity shows how people chased easy money through games they didn't fully understand, and how that desperation made a flop look like a real job. It also shows why crypto projects fail: the model only worked if new players kept buying in, and once they stopped, there was nothing left.
During the 2021 lockdowns, people in the Philippines played a crypto game as their main job, often on Axies lent by guild owners who took a cut. When the token crashed, that income disappeared.
What Noah read
Axie Infinity is a blockchain game developed by Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis in 2018, known for its in-game economy which uses Ethereum-based cryptocurrencies. It has been called "a pyramid scheme that relies on cheap labor from countries like the Philippines to fuel its growth." Players collect and mint non-fungible tokens (NFTs) which represent axolotl-inspired digital pets known as Axies. These creatures can be bred and battled with each other within the game. Sky Mavis charges a 4.25% fee to players when they trade Axies on its marketplace. Axie Infinity is built on the Ronin Network, an Ethereum-linked sidechain developed by Sky Mavis. The game's official cryptocurrency is "Axie Infinity Shards/Token" or AXS for short. The game's secondary token, SLP, crashed in February 2022 amid a wider NFT and cryptocurrency crash, losing over 99% of its peak value. In March 2022, hackers compromised the Ronin Network, stealing approximately US$620 million worth of cryptocurrency from the project. The hackers were linked to Lazarus Group, funded by North Korea. Gameplay According to the company's website, Axie Infinity is a competitive game with an "idle battle" system derived from games li…
The rest wasn’t kept.
History
Rejected
“The NFT cluster is full, and the Non-fungible token entry can't leave, so Axie Infinity would cost both Bored Ape and CryptoPunks. The play-to-earn story from the Philippines is a good one, but it isn't worth losing the two collections that set NFT prices in 2021.”