For those that have read my articles, welcome back. For those who haven’t, I am happy you have joined us.
It has been almost 2 months to the date since I published my last article, Why Axie Will Change the World and I am starting to think with all that has been happening recently, we already have. I think this article is just going to be a reflection on whats happened in the last 2 months, which looking back on it seems like years. I will try to get back into writing more consistently, writing about news and try to create more in-depth conversations around important topics in Axie.
To start, the biggest and most significant change since the time of that writing is the release of Ronin, our very own sidechain. The team delivered on Ronin and then some. The pains of it costing gas and using ethereum for breeding have already been forgotten. That just goes to show you how amazing of an upgrade this is, its become normal to have free transactions. The growth result of ronin has been nothing less than exponential, both in axies and players. We are hitting well over 150,000 daily active users, and closing in on 1 million axies. If you are new to the community it is easy to gloss over how significant it is, if you have been around for a long time, it is sometimes a jaw-dropper to think about. We used to have the same handful of people in the discord every single day talking about what it would be like to have some sort of mainstream adoption. I could literally see the same message that I saw the night before when I checked the next morning. Now I can’t even keep up with the general conversations that are going on.
Not only can I not keep up with the discord, but also I can’t even keep up with all that is going on with Twitter, too. There are so many scholarships, so many twitter profiles with axies, so many content creators that have taken over my feed. Its overwhelming at times. It used to be AxieAur, myself, Artic, and a couple others (sorry if I am forgetting you) that were fighting the good fight on Twitter shilling to our small follower counts by ourselves. Now we have a cavalry behind us that shows up in force. From YouTube to Twitch, the amount of videos and streams shows how strong the community is. There used to be streams where only 5–10 people would show up to watch. I saw that now we are close to 1,000 people watching. I don’t even know the numbers that Axie Chat is pulling in but I am 100% sure its a lot more than when they first launched.
While some growing pains are good, like having to upgrade the servers to handle the rapid increase in players, some like this may be not-so-good. The one place where you can have deeper conversations around the game and truly map out the future as a community is much harder to find when you have 250,000 people all being a part of the same chat. The friendship and community aspect like this is what drew so many in. I do not want to see this disappear as we continue to grow. I believe it is a sincere problem worth brainstorming over. How can we maintain the deep sense of community as we attempt to onboard the entire world? How can we create long developed, personal conversations around the game, while making it scalable for millions of people?
This ties into the tweet that I had the other day:
I think the goal post has moved. Or better yet, I think we stepped on to a completely different field, one that has not been domesticated before. Traditional gamers are not quite ready for this new style of gaming. They want to continue paying for $60 games or free to play games where they buy in-game skins that do nothing for them. Which is fine. They are not the target anymore. Play to earn has opened up the possibility for millions of people around the world (dare I say billions) to earn while playing a game. These people were driven to find new means of making a living because of the pandemic. They found a way to make the same, if not more, than they were before with Axie Infinity. I mean this documentary, which was a tremendous job by the emfarsis, Leah Callon-Butler, and YGG, explains it all. This game is truly changing lives.
Scholarships, enabled by ronin and cheap transactions, have created a way to lower the barrier to entry for thousands of players to play the game and be a part of it. Yield Guild Games is truly showing the way when it comes to this. The 70–30 split, the treatment from the managers, the training, the coaching, everything they are doing is creating not only a better life for people, but also allowing them to have autonomy over their own lives. I believe scholarships are more than just people playing a game, we are generating jobs that have never existed before for people that need them now more than ever.
With crypto, what has only been 2 months seems like 2 years, especially with the exponential growth that we have seen in those 2 months. I think its important to take time to reflect on where we are versus where we started to get perspective on how far we have left go. We are still just beginning.
With that being said, I think its important to think about where this path takes us and where we can steer this ship towards next.
YCB 