'Axie Infinity' is the Perfect NFT Game for 'Pokémon' Fanatics

Even though it’s in the middle of an early access lay period, the game has quickly ascended the charts and become the #1 Ethereum (ETH) game by monthly and weekly active users. Axie Infinity’s accomplishments are many - 25,000+ ETH ($44,435,250+ USD) has been traded on the game’s in-house marketplace thus far, the most expensive Axie ever sold went for 300 ETH ($533,916+ USD), a virtual property from the game sold for 888.25 ETH ($1.5 million USD), and it regularly attracts 19,000+ monthly active onchain users. Judging by those impressive numbers, Axie Infinity looks like it’s set for even bigger wins as it continues to grow.

To gain an even deeper understanding of everything Axie Infinity has to offer, we spoke with Sky Mavis co-founder and growth lead Jeffrey Zirlin.

ONE37pm: Give us an overview of what Axie Infinity is and how it initially came into existence.

Zirlin: Axie [Infinity] is a battle pet universe that leverages NFTs and Blockchain technology to empower our players in new and exciting ways. On the surface, the game is about battling fierce (but adorable) pets called Axies and earning cryptocurrency rewards, collecting super rare Axies with limited edition skins, and building a land-based kingdom where you can ally with friends and fight for control of resource nodes (this game mode is still in the pipeline).

However, what we’re seeing is that Axie [Infinity] is becoming its own digital nation with a complex economy and emerging tight-knight social structures. We believe this is because of the unique behaviors that emerge when you give gamers more stake in the games that they play. The founding team actually met each other playing a game called Cryptokitties. We realized right away that NFTs would be huge and knew that whoever could build out a fun game with an interesting in-game economy would play a major role in defining the future of gaming. Axie [Infinity] is our answer to that mission.

ONE37pm: What are some of the major milestones that have taken place within the game's community thus far?

Zirlin: There are a bunch but here are a few - Axie [Infinity] is currently the most played blockchain game, we have about 22,000 daily active users. There are around 33,000 people who own Axies. A bundle of nine land plots sold for 1.5 million dollars last month (February), which we believe to be the most expensive game asset sales of all time. And finally, we’ve released an Alpha for a card-based battle game, racked up over 25M USD in Marketplace volume on our own in-house marketplace, and launched Ronin - a scaling solution built specifically for NFT games.

ONE37pm: Are there any future updates in the works for Axie Infinity?

Zirlin: Building a city/base for your Axie’s, gathering resources, fighting in epic battles with allies, and fighting monsters. In the future, we’ll also make a portal to different games built by community members using our map editor / SDK. We’ve seen how passionate our player base is when it comes to creating content so we want to make it even easier for them to participate in the economic growth. Roblox comes to mind as an immediate inspiration or parallel here. We’re also working on an upgraded battle system that will be faster, more skill-based, and easier to get started with.

Ubisoft believes the new battles are a massive improvement over the current experience! On-boarding, which is our #1 barrier right now, has been significantly improved with social login, a fun tutorial, and free starter Axies. Free starter Axies will allow people to start learning the game before making any significant economic decisions. However, their earning ability will be very weak, meaning that free-to-try players will be encouraged to eventually get real Axies of their own.

ONE37pm: There's a good number of major partners involved in the game's continued growth, such as gaming publisher/developer Ubisoft for instance. How did that partnership come to be? And who do you hope to work with in the future?

Zirlin: We’re always looking to evangelize and educate larger organizations on the power of NFTs and Blockchain. We got to know Ubisoft in mid-2019 and eventually joined their Entrepreneurship Labs Season 5 program in 2020. That program has been great and we had many long discussions around the future of NFTs and gaming. We hope to work with game studios, both large and small in the future. We will teach them about NFTs and how to use them to bootstrap a community. We’ve already had some great game developers reach out to us about leveraging our tools and infrastructure. Ronin, for example, is our NFT scaling solution that allows for many of the frictions associated with NFTs right now (gas, complex account setup) to be eliminated.

ONE37pm: What do you hope to see from the blockchain gaming space in the next, say, five years?

Zirlin: I believe that game developers will use NFTs to eliminate the black and grey markets that exist for game assets right now. Gamers deserve to trade their items freely without risk of being scammed or banned for TOS violations. In addition, I am convinced that Axie Infinity will spawn a trend of community-owned games that align incentives between a game’s creators and the player base.

ONE37pm: And finally, we have to give out some proper Axie Infinity strats. What are some of the best Axies that players should definitely add to their collection?

Zirlin: Axie.zone is an amazing site for stalking the top players on the leaderboard. The meta is always shifting but typically teams are made up of a resilient Axie upfront (tank), a high damage glass cannon (DPS), and a more resilient but still dangerous 3rd Axie, which is sometimes called a brawler. In terms of collecting, Mystic Axies are the ultimate digital flex in our universe. They are capped in supply and there are only about 1,400 of them. Some are even owned by famous crypto funds/researchers like Delphi Digital.