Is Axie Infinity Regaining its Spark?

New landowner game and Sky Mavis staking could banish 2022 troubles

On October 11th, Axie Infinity dropped news about a new game for landowners and a large staking commitment from Sky Mavis. Coupled with on-chain data that shows we users are no longer leaving the platform in their thousands, is there hope that 2023 will be a good year for Axie? 

Summary

• Compared to 2021, Axie Infinity has had a tough 2022. The gaming platform was the victim of a $600 million hack and is currently suffering from a depressed Web3 industry.
• A new game launch and Axie developer Sky Mavis’s massive token staking program should help consumer confidence.
• On-chain data also shows that while things at Axie Infinity are far from perfect, the ship has been steadied and users can start to hope for a brighter future.

2022 has been a mixed bag for Axie Infinity. It started the year well but has been rocked by a stuttering in-game economy, a record-breaking bridge hack and wider systemic issues in the real world.

Fortunately, there are signs of hope. Axie Infinity has launched its Raylights game for landowners and Sky Mavis will stake 11.48 million AXS tokens as a long-term commitment to users.

DappRadar data also shows that Axie Infinity may be turning a corner. NFT trading has remained steady since April, following huge drops from November 2021 to March 2022. For anyone in search of hope, these could be positive signs.

Axie Infinity’s Raylights is live

Axie Infinity has launched its first-ever game for landowners. This has come as welcome news for the committed Axie community, who have been waiting for three years for Sky Mavis to introduce something like this.

The first Axie Infinity land sale took place in May 2019, and land staking went live in July this year. Now, according to Axie’s Substack, landowners can ‘sow minerals, grow plants, and cultivate the most beautiful land plot in Lunacia.’

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Raylights is essentially a farming game inside the Axie Infinity ecosystem. General gameplay revolves around sowing plants on your land and tending them to maturity. From these, you can reap minerals, which presumably will have some resale value in the future.

Axie Infinity is launching two Raylights competitions on October 21st at 11:30 PM EST. One will be for Most World Firsts, and the other is for the Most Aesthetic & Creative Plot.

Sky Mavis commits to AXS staking program

In other good news for Axie Infinity, Sky Mavis Ltd will be staking 11,475,000 AXS. AXS is the in-game currency for Axie Infinity. The company gave its reasoning in a series of tweets posted on October 11th.

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To reinforce our long term commitment to the Axie Infinity ecosystem, Sky Mavis, Ltd. will be staking 11,475,000 AXS which currently sits on its balance sheet.

— Sky Mavis (@SkyMavisHQ) October 11, 2022

This move can be seen in a couple of ways: either it’s a goodwill gesture that shows long-term commitment. Or it’s Sky Mavis Ltd’s attempt to reinvigorate their economy and enthusiasm for their game.

Ultimately, it’s probably a bit of both, and the move will give confidence to an Axie Infinity community that has seen the value of its AXS travel along a slow, sad downward curve all year.

Does Axie Infinity on-chain data point to a brighter future?

In January, Axie Infinity’s Ronin blockchain had 305,688 unique active wallet (UAW) connections. Four months later, this had dropped by 73% to 81,937 connections for May.

In the same period, UAW connections across all blockchains dropped by only 18%, from 3.62 million to 2.95 million. So Axie’s problems aren’t simply part of a wider industry trend; Sky Mavis has issues.

Signs of positivity and hope come from the Axie Infinity NFT marketplace, where we can see that transactions and sales volumes have leveled off over the past six months. Transaction counts (the number of individual trades taking place) have remained between the 0.32-0.52 million mark since April.

While it’s true that trading activity is still some way off the peaks we saw during 2021, the fact that the decline has stopped suggests this could be the bottom for Axie Infinity. And if this is the case, they will have left behind their troubles and could be looking forward to a bright future.

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