There have been some crazy developments over the past few days within the Axie infinity ecosystem. In my previous post about breeding, I touched on the fact that the high price of ethereum transactions is negatively impacting several moving parts within the ecosystem. And so it is today. Breeding is a lot less profitable. Selling the in-game token Small Love Potion (SLP) was also not profitable unless done with big bags.
However, that has now changed because the SLP price pumped like crazy this week!!! One to two hours’ gameplay can earn 100+ SLP (thanks mainly to the ‘Daily quest’ - on completion of the daily quest, one earns a bonus 50 SLP on top of the SLP they earned along the way towards completion of the quest). At time of writing 100 SLP is worth over 10 USD. Ten bucks an hour for playing a game. Insane!!!
There’s been a bit of a dump but still massively up for the week. Source
How or why did this happen?
The Axie infinity team emailed an update a week or so with lots of exciting developments. That led to some crazy hype about Axie on the meme-investor’s playground, 4Chan Biz. Word got out that you can earn money by playing a game. I spotted a few tweets on Tuesday that alerted me to the SLP pump. I had over 4000 SLP offchain that I wasn’t thinking about selling but decided to have a look on Uniswap to see how much I could get for it - about 0.5 ETH. Not bad ay. So I sold. Turns out if I’d done it 24-36 hours later I could’ve got a whole lot more, but that’s OK. In the few days since I earned another 350 SLP or so from gameplay and sold them today for 0.11 ETH. I missed the top again but that’s OK too!
Crazy SLP meme. Image seen on Axie discord server this week.
Is this good for Axie infinity?
For starters, there are a whole lot more people playing. Axie infinity is currently the most popular dApp on ethereum! This is a good thing. The 4chan pumpers were asking lots of questions in the Axie discord server. Unfortunately a lot bought in without knowing the purpose of SLP. It is not a governance token (which is the thing in DeFi at the moment). It is just used for breeding. The Axie OGs were frequently repeating that mantra. Incidentally, there is another token (LUNA) which will be used for governance in future. LUNA is hard to come by. I believe it was only issued to people that participated in the initial Axie land sale. I think more will be issue further down the line.
The thing is who will be buying when SLP is near all-time highs? FOMO-ers? Pump-n-dumpers? Who will the pump-n-dumpers sell to? Greater fools. A high SLP price does not help with the moving parts. It will not help with breeding. Hopefully when the PnD-ers sell they will leave and SLP will find a floor price somewhere (presumably significantly higher than it was a week ago). But maybe some of the PnD-ers will fall in love with the game-playing experience and stay. That is a good thing. For now, the OG flippers/breeders won’t be buying SLP, but they they might get back into gameplay to earn it instead.
Anyways, I’m just stoked with the ETH I have accumulated this week unexpectedly and happy just to keep earning SLP. In a way it’s similar to my view on Hive as an investment. I have never been a Hive buyer but I’m happy to earn through content creation and curation.