Axie Infinity spokesperson: "It is a little bit dependent on capital inflows."
Er, yes. All those players are paying about $1000 to get into the game and then grinding away to get Smooth Love Potion tokens. This is the SLP price graph.[1] Down 92% since the peak. A lot of suckers lost big. Many of them poor people in the Philippines, where Axie is big.
Axie is frantically trying to obfuscate this with a second token, PR, claims of new revenue sources, etc. It's not working. In the end, it's a classic Ponzi scheme, and it collapsed after only a few months.
I can't believe the buy in is $1000, it would have to be a AAAA game to demand that price tag, but it's not so it's just a disguised Ponzi scheme. The way the media have been reporting this as a way for Filipinos to earn income is disgusting, because they're tricking financially challenged people to fall for this Ponzi scheme by making it look legitimate with the media attention.
It works kind of like Pokemon. You need some starter Axies to breed and fight.[1] There are people offering "scholarships" where they loan you Axies to grind. This was profitable last summer but is now a lose for both parties.
Not just financially-challenged, but under-educated too. If your education was sub-par then it's easy to get tricked, especially with something as complex as the crypto world, where someone like me who had a great education, minted Satoshi's finest like they were water from a firehose, and almost 40 years of coding, still has a really hard time understanding the current plethora of blockchain shenanigans.
This. Axie Infinity only had traction, because the earned coin had speculative value. The traction was from people "playing-to-earn" as a job. I doubt that there are that many people playing for the fun of it. When the token loses value, there isn't a reason to continue playing.
Er, yes. All those players are paying about $1000 to get into the game and then grinding away to get Smooth Love Potion tokens. This is the SLP price graph.[1] Down 92% since the peak. A lot of suckers lost big. Many of them poor people in the Philippines, where Axie is big.
Axie is frantically trying to obfuscate this with a second token, PR, claims of new revenue sources, etc. It's not working. In the end, it's a classic Ponzi scheme, and it collapsed after only a few months.
[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/