While current cryptocurrency play-to-earn projects on Telegram continue to gain popularity and new active users fast, offering tokens for tapping, there are crypto projects which allow users to earn coins for playing and they emerged the market much earlier than games like TapSwap and Hamster Kombat.
One of these popular projects is called Axie Infinity (AXS), whose founders drew inspiration from popular mobile games of the past.
About Axie NFTs and the game
Axie Infinity is a blockchain-powered trading and battling game whose partial ownership belongs to its players. They also operate the game as they play it. Axie Infinity was inspired by Tamagotchi, Pokemon and similar types of games and cartoons popular in the 1990s. The game gives players an opportunity to collect, breed, battle creatures called Axies. The peculiar thing is that these creatures are based on digital tokens.
Those token-based creatures take different forms and are creatures of various classes – animals, birds, etc. Players can get more than 500 various body parts available for them. Those include bug, bird, plant, aquatic, reptile, etc parts. Body parts for each class come in several types of scales depending on their rarity level: rare, ultra rare, common, and legendary. Besides, players are allowed to combine body parts, thus making their Axies rare and unique.
Each Axie is a non-fungible token (NFT). It has its own attributes and strengths. Players can use their creatures to set up battles between them (3 versus 3), where they can fight in teams and the winning team would earn points. Those can be used for leveling up an Axie’s stats or for obtaining new body parts. Besides, the game mechanisms allow players to breed their Axies together in order to make up new offspring that would be unique and then could be sold on the marketplace created for such creatures in the game.
Each Axie can be bred up to a total of seven times in order to help control the overall population of the game. There is a mating hub in the game to help players breed their Axies. Breeding is not free of charge, though. It costs 0.005 ETH and several Small Love Potion (SLP) tokens to do that.
Aside from using those NFTs, the Axie Infinity ecosystem is powered by its own governance token called Axie Infinity Shards (AXS). These coins are necessary to take part in key votes related to governance and decision making as to how funds in the Axie Community Treasury get spent. These expenditures include making gameplay changes and the overall evolution and development of the Axie Infinity platform.
History of Axie Infinity creation
In 2018, a tech-focused game developer Sky Mavis with a team that was mostly located in Vietnam created Axie Infinity. His co-founders were Trung Nguyen and Aleksander Larsen. At present, Nguyen is the platform’s CEO. He is a BS in computer engineering and before co-founding Axie Infinity, he wrote software codes at Anduin Transactions.
Aleksander Larsen is the chief operating officer (COO) of Axie Infinity, who has been working in the blockchain sphere since 2017. Apart from the above-mentioned game, he is also on the Board of Directors at the Blockchain Game Alliance as its secretary. Overall, the game boasts 25 full-time staff members and many of them have a background of a game developer.
The native governance token AXS was launched in November 2020 in an Initial Exchange Offering (IEO, which gradually came to replace ICOs) on Binance and it is used as the central mechanism for running the game. Players are welcome to buy, trade and earn AXS by simply playing Axie Infinity. Besides, the best players of the season can be rewarded in AXS.
Soon, crypto staking will be introduced to enable token holders to stake their AXS to receive regular rewards in the future.
The total supply of AXS comprises 270 million coins. After the launch, there were almost 54 million AXS in circulation. 11% of the supply of the tokens was allocated in the Binance Launchpad IEO sale to be sold to investors at the price of $0.10. 4% was sold privately. Besides, 29% AXS was set aside for staking rewards, 20% was given to the play-to-earn pool of the game, 21% was allocated for the team. In accordance with the release schedule, 100% of all AXS tokens will be launched into circulation by the start of 2026.
AXS price prediction
Currently, AXS occupies the top 78 position on the CoinMarketCap scale and is trading at $5.41 with a market cap of $798,877,749 and trading volume standing at $24,701,770.
Over the past week, the AXS price has shown an increase of 17.12% and has overall shown a good potential as of late. Experts believe that AXS may start 2025, reaching $7.34. A maximum price prediction for January 2026 that has come from various analysts is $11.69.
