This NFT game is helping Filipinos earn above minimum wage

By CREATEPhilippines
June 23, 2021

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Whether or not the recent craze in cryptocurrencies has caught your attention, it’s already making a real difference to the lives of Filipinos.

Created by Sky Mavis, a Vietnamese game studio, Axie Infinity is a digital pet universe where players breed, battle, and trade digital creatures called Axies. The concept sits somewhere between Pokémon and Tamagotchi, but with a crucial difference: Axie Infinity is a decentralized application on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain where Axies are non-fungible tokens (NFTs) — cryptographically unique, unreplicable, and scarce. While still in early access, Axie Infinity has already generated $4 million in revenue.

Axie Infinity is the first blockchain game applied as a mobile application, which makes an appealing incentive for the average Filipino online. Filipinos spend an average of nearly eleven hours a day on the internet, making them the most active users in the world, while 74% of the online Filipino population play games on mobile.

The most common way you can earn money on Axie Infinity is by acquiring Small Love Potions (SLPs) through daily quests, which can be sold in secondary markets like Binance and Uniswap. As of writing, SLPs are trading for around 11 PHP. In an article published by Coindesk last year, when SLPs were traded for 2 PHP, an Axie player named Ijon Inton earned 10,000 PHP a week by farming SLPs for twenty hours a day. More seasoned and risk-taking players can trade Axies in the marketplace, which range between 0.05 ETH (Php 9,000) to .90 ETH (Php 17,400). 

The returns from playing Axie Infinity may not mean much to a crypto investor, but it makes a world of a difference to Filipinos living the minimum daily wage where it is, on average, 434.47 PHP and 366.20 PHP in the National Capital Region (NCR) and outside of NCR, respectively. This means, in theory, playing four hours of Axie Infinity reaps higher potential earnings than the minimum salary in most regions.

We stress the phrase “in theory” because cryptocurrencies are only as valuable as the market makes it. But clearly, there is an opportunity — one that is already being seized.

Axie Infinity is available on Windows, Mac OS, iOS and Android. For more information, visit https://axieinfinity.com/

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