The State Of Axie Infinity And Ronin In The Philippines | Webcast 39

Republished By Plato

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Recently, local e-wallet and financial technology (fintech) app GCash has inked a partnership with Axie Infinity developer Sky Mavis with ‌the aim of enhancing the Filipino web3 gaming experience.

Through the partnership, it is expected for players to transfer their cryptocurrencies from Axie Infinity and other Ronin-based games and convert them into Philippine Pesos anytime safely through GCrypto.

Video Interview

State of Axie Infinity and Ronin in the Philippines 2024 - BitPinas Webcast 39

Read our coverage about this partnership: GCash, Axie Infinity Team Up for Seamless Crypto Transactions Across Ronin Games

This seems to be a good initiative, given that Axie Infinity is so popular in the country, especially during the pandemic era, and many players might still hold their SLPs and other tokens in the Ronin ecosystem.

To further explain the things about their partnership, BitPinas has invited Sky Mavis Philippines Lead Nix Eniego and GCash’s Head of GCrypto Luis Buenaventura for the 39th episode of the BitPinas Webcast.

Episode Notes

Why Are Blockchain Games Starting to Build or Migrate to the Ronin Ecosystem?

The Ronin Network is an Ethereum-based sidechain developed for blockchain gaming by Sky Mavis. The network is expected to address key issues like Ethereum’s high gas fees and slow transaction speeds.
While everyone knows that Ronin is the home of the popular blockchain game Axie Infinity, Ronin has been attracting more developers lately who have already started building or migrating their web3 games on the sidechain.
One of the most known games is Pixels, which recently hosted the second season of its play-to-airdrop program.
Meanwhile, Korean studio ACT Games confirmed that it will be transferring its portfolio to the Ronin, starting with blockchain trading card game Zoids Wild Arena.
Then just this month, Sky Mavis announced a partnership with GMonsters, a Japanese entertainment and gaming company, to launch additional titles from the Fight League franchise on Ronin. Mixi, the Japanese mobile game and app publisher that holds the Fight League IP, will offer comprehensive support to GMonsters, overseeing the game development process planning, production, and supervision.
According to Eniego, launching a gaming-focused blockchain is one of the solutions for Sky Mavis to minimize Ethereum-related issues that affect the game.

How Did Web3 Gaming Adoption Changed For The Past Two Years in PH?

Buenaventura: The most loyal Axie Players are actually from here, especially noong binalik nila iyong Classic. I think we lost a lot of our farmers, who were individuals who played the game and benefited from its value. If you look at it, the amount of money that you earn from it right now is not enough to sustain, but it is still pretty good if you are still competitive who play for the leaderboard and wait for season rewards. But it is hard to imagine as a business that it started to become in 2021.
Eniego: I would confirm that. I think maganda iyong behavior, like iba na iyong mindset ng players na pumapasok.
Buenaventura: I think that this new cycle is going to also bring about a new bunch of people, and it will be completely different again. I’m not saying that we’re already in the bull market now, but I think that we’re getting there. I think this will bring a new kind of traditional investor. I think we’re already kind of seeing it as a result of things like the ETFs.

GCash x Sky Mavis: How Did This Partnership Come About?

According to Buenaventura, he and Sky Mavis Co-Founder Jeffrey “Jihoz” Zirlin met during the Web3 Games Summit in November. He first introduced GCash to the co-founder and then collectively agreed to have a partnership.
However, the exchange chief admitted that before, they were used to just having partnerships through handshakes, but because they are representing big companies now, they had to have contract signings.
Eniego: You know, our ambitious goals of helping Filipinos, Ronin is not just Axie, not just the game, it’s actually helping people. And a partnership with GCash, it’s just inevitable, and I’m very happy that it materialized because we do share the same goals and this is a win for the Filipino community.

What Benefits Will the Partnership Bring?

Explaining from the side of GCash, Buenaventura emphasized that the partnership’s original goal is to make it easier for an average Filipino to do what they want in the Ronin ecosystem using the e-wallet, including paying bills and actual conversion to fiat using the tokens earned from playing games.
Meanwhile, Eniego said that the idea of accessing Ronin-based assets on the GCrypto feature is nice. But he cannot confirm if it will happen, nor can Buenaventura.
Buenaventura: If you guys clamor for this, then we will work for it. If a lot of people would find that useful to have, like Pixel or some of the other upcoming stuff, then I don’t see any reason why we would say no to that, right? Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is make the most useful thing possible.

Buenaventura’s Tip: What To Do With Your Paldo Funds?

To be “paldo” means to gain a very high profit from your crypto investment or by joining airdrops.
Buenaventura: What you need to do here, you can say, is protect your capital, your original capital. So, if it was like a small amount of money, maybe you don’t have to do that. But if we’re talking a larger amount, you want to protect your original na tinaya. If you sell 20% of that you have all of your original bet back, plus you have some of nice earnings on top of it, but you also get to keep all of the starting capital, the goal is you keep a chunk of the coins as possible, assuming that anyone that’s going to continue going up.
Buenaventura is popular for giving tips, *but not financial advice*, to buy real estate from crypto profits as it is normally one of the most scarce assets in the world.

How Important is the Partnership?

Eniego: This could be the first time of a partnership of this magnitude, country-specific. That’s why it is something that you know for the Philippines—it’s a home run basically. It’s important that we do this for Filipinos talaga because we know that there are a lot of uncertainties around regulations, and certain exchanges like that, and we don’t want that situation where the Filipino players will suffer from something like that or whether their options are limited or they can’t do much because of these certain limitations.
Buenaventura: Web3 has found a very unique home here with games. I think it’s quite strange. I don’t think people keep coming up with different theories of why of all of the countries in the world, this is where Axie Infinity became popular. And my real explanation for it is that we’re close to Vietnam and we speak English. And like that was kind of enough to give us some really strong advantages and then the pandemic happened, and you had all of these—Filipino gamers.
The GCrypto Head then shared that the official poster for the partnership, which features a jeep in the background, actually has a Cabanatuan banner to highlight that Cabanatuan, a component city in Nueva Ecija from the central region of the country, is really the Axie capital of the world:
“I requested na palitan to Cabanatuan because I just felt it was. It was a nice reference to the fact that this stuff became big in the provincial cities first, more than in Manila. I guess that kind of makes us unique, because in most other countries the capital cities are where the most amount of activities are. Why is that? Well, because the most amount of money is there. And what’s interesting about the play-to-earn phenomenon specifically is that you could join that with very little money of your own in the beginning.”

Is Play-to-Earn Still a Sustainable Business Model?

Eniego: I struggled to say yes because I don’t really necessarily want it to be a business model like, but if I’m going to be real now, there are people who are achieving the success in treating it as a business, I just don’t know if it’s sustainable. I believe in play-to-earn, to be honest, because I see it on a daily basis ‌that it is that people are indeed playing. But “is play-to-earn sustainable” is a different question. If that was the question, I would say it could be like I could be playing a game that I really like and be good at it, and I could be playing and learning at the same time. I think that exists and we were seeing that work to this day.
Buenaventura: I don’t think that we even really use the word “play-to-earn” all that much anymore. These days, as a pattern, we’re trying to separate the play, which is supposed to be fun, from the earn, which sounds like work, right? And I think that when we tried to mix these things, what happened is, you’ve got a lot of people who treated the game like a job. And you know, I don’t really tried to grind it or extract value from it. And I’m not sure that those people were having all that much fun.

More Activities With the Partnership

Eniego: The announcements have gone out around the token listings, so that’s exciting for sure, and I’m seeing a lot of content on social media, people trying it out and playing around with that. So that’s exciting as far as what else can happen. So actually the possibilities are endless. One thing that we have been doing well, you know with listings when we list with exchanges, you could see some giveaway, some fun campaigns. So there‌ could be a lot of opportunities, especially now that we’re working closely together, there’s always opportunities for that.
Buenaventura: We were deliberately vague about what the next steps we would work on together were because we kind of wanted to hear from the community first what stuff they would find useful. Now that the two companies are working together, of course. I have some ideas now about what those useful tools might be, but I’d really much rather that it comes from the community, and they just tell us what it is that they want, because then I don’t have to guess. And that’s why I’m trying to be more visible as a GCash representative, but also at the same time really make sure that people know how to find me. If they wanna give feedback or if they wanna ask for certain features or improvements, I want us to build the most useful crypto app in the Philippines. And that’s gonna take time. But if you tell us what you would find most useful, then we’ll get there faster.

The Best Possible Situation of PH For Crypto Adoption

Eniego: We believe in web3 gaming as the catalyst for mass onboarding. Things will take time like that. This is based on market conditions, sentiments, and narratives that the media pushes. There are a lot of factors. We’re super bullish on gaming.
Buenaventura: I want the bull market to go slowly this time so we can get more people onboard at a price that is not ridiculously high.

This article is published on BitPinas: The State of Axie Infinity and Ronin in the Philippines | Webcast 39

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