Axies and AXS explained — AAX Academy
While most of the market has been trading sideways since the major correction that took place only a couple of months ago, some coins have bucked the trend and secured massive gains. AXS of the Axie Infinity project is one of those coins, surging 1000% between June and July 2021 reaching $53.28, its all-time high to date.
Why? Perhaps because we’re talking about a Pokémon-inspired game where fierce little NFT-based creatures called Axies battle and hunt for treasures. Over the 250,000 active users spend their time building armies of Axies, joining tournaments for prize money, breeding new creatures for auctioning off, and snapping up land to farm rare resources and tokens. Also, the most expensive Axie ever was sold on the in-house marketplace for 300 ETH. People love a good Axie.
What is Axie Infinity
Axie Infinity is a Pokémon-inspired universe where anyone can earn tokens through skilled gameplay and contributions to the ecosystem. Players can battle, collect, raise, and build a land-based kingdom for their pets.
The founding team met playing Crypto kitties which for a lot of them was their introduction to blockchains, tokens, crypto-economics. They wanted to create something that could do what Crypto kitties did for them: provide a playful and fun way for more people to learn about blockchain and crypto in the broadest sense.
Players need to build up an army of Axies, that each have a specific combination of traits which determines their role in battle. It can get a little complex, but for now all you need to know is that each Axie 4 stats, with 6 body parts that each add to a stat depending on their class — the outcome is millions of different Axies, all with different strengths and weaknesses.
The Axie battle system is turn-based card game where the goal is to eliminate all enemies your team of 3 Axies is facing. Each turn, a player must strategically play cards that maximize their chance of victory, earning leaderboard prizes when they succeed.
Like Tamagotchi or any of the other digital pet universes, Axies can be bred to create new Axies. These offspring can be used in battle, breed new offspring, or can be sold on our marketplace. In order to manage the Axie population, breeding has certain resource requirements such as AXS tokens, as well as Smooth Love Potions which are earned by playing the game. However, if you don’t want to breed more Axies, you can just as easily sell your Smooth Love Potion (SLP) on an exchange.
Lastly, there is Lunacia, the Axie homeland divided into tokenized plots of land which act as homes and bases of operation. There are 90,601 plots in total, each represented by NFTs which in turn can be traded freely among players. Plots can be upgraded over time using a variety of resources and crafting ingredients that can be found when playing the game. Land-owners might find AXS tokens on their land plots, or use the Axies that occupy the land plot to explore resource nodes on the map.
The AXS token
Axie Infinity Shards(AXS) are an ERC-20 governance token for the Axie Universe. The goal with AXS tokens is align the incentives between the players of the game and the developers in novel and exciting ways such as rewarding players for interacting with Axie Infinity while simultaneously incentivizing them to hold on to their tokens so they can claim additional rewards.
Ultimately AXS is also used for governance which if successful in a truly decentralized manner would make Axie the first game truly owned and operated by the community that plays it. According to the project timeline, the plan is to become a fully decentralized organisation by 2023, slowly phasing in more capabilities for AXS holders.
AXS tokens have a total supply of 270 million tokens. Out of this, around 53.5 million tokens were in circulation as of mid-November 2020. In total, 11% of the total supply was allocated to participants in the Binance Launchpad IEO sale and 4% was sold in a private sale. In addition to this, 29% is allocated for staking rewards, 20% to the play to earn pool, 21% to the team, 7% to advisors and 8% to the ecosystem fund. Based on the current release schedule, 100% of AXS tokens will be circulating by early 2026.
Originally published at https://academy.aaxspace.com on August 10, 2021.
