Jarindr Thitadilaka says he made as much as $2,000 a month last year from his collection of digital pets, which he would breed and send into battle to win cryptocurrencies.
The 28-year-old from Bangkok was playing Axie Infinity, one of a new breed of blockchain-based online games, dubbed “play-to-earn,” which blend entertainment with financial speculation.
These games can make for lucrative businesses amid the hype around NFTs and virtual worlds, attracting millions of players plus billions of dollars from investors who see the games as a way to introduce more people to cryptocurrency.
In Axie Infinity, users buy virtual blob-like creatures with varying attributes as non-fungible tokens — digital assets known as NFTs whose owner is recorded on the blockchain — for anything from tens of dollars to hundreds of thousands.
An image from the blockchain-based game Axie Infinity | SKY MAVIS / VIA REUTERS
Players can then use the pets to earn money by winning battles, as well as creating new pets, whose value depends on their rarity. The assets can be traded with other players on the platform, which says it has about 1.5 million daily users.
“It’s not just a game any more. It’s more like an ecosystem,” said Thitadilaka. “You can even call it a country, right?”
The dangers of this speculative ecosystem, and the largely unregulated crypto-gaming industry, were brought into sudden focus last month when Axie Infinity was hit by a $615 million heist. Hackers targeted a part of the system used to transfer cryptocurrency in and out of the game.
Axie Infinity’s Vietnam-based owner, Sky Mavis, said it would reimburse the lost money through a combination of its own balance sheet funds an ..
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