Published on: 14/07/2022

Axie Infinity sales hit record low for 2022

P2E darling Axie Infinity saw its worst month yet as it posted a yearly low in NFT sales of $3.18 million for June, down 55 percent from May’s $7.09 million. The NFT collectible also fell by $123.32 million from its January high.

Axie Infinity is an NFT-based game launched by Sky Mavis, a Vietnamese studio, in March 2018. The game has a Pokemon-like vibe in which players battle with in-game NFT pets — Axies — to earn tokens (Smooth Love Potions and ASX) that they can convert into real-world currency.

The Axies they collect can also be bred and raised for future use to gain rewards. The game later went on and established itself as a household name and a success story in the NFT space, with a record sales volume of $4.08 billion. Unfortunately, more than $620 million was stolen from the game’s Ronin bridge in a cyberattack earlier in March, causing a confidence crisis.

Ronin bridge has since been reopened after a series of internal and external audits, and Axie said it would reimburse its players affected by the cyberattack, but it is now apparent that Sky Mavis would have to work harder to regain the level of trust they had in January.

More on why sales, SLP/AXS slumped

In terms of the number of unique buyers, Axie recorded 52,507 unique buyers in June with 307,431 transactions. These numbers were a far cry compared to January’s figure when there were 314,642 unique buyers with 1,296,870 total transactions and $126.49 million in sales volume.

Another factor in the NFT’s negative price movement is the low current number of players. In Axie Infinity, a new player needs to possess an Axie to play — whether through buying or renting — which in turn can be used to gain in-game tokens known as the Smooth Love Potion (SLP) and AXS, which means that older players need new players to maintain the demand for Axies. If there are not enough new players, older players may opt to dump their SLP and AXS in crypto exchanges, driving the price of the tokens further down, which may discourage new players whose primary motivation was to earn from entering the game in the first place.

Axie’s player number is presently still bleeding. Its player count in June 2022 is around 8,950, an almost 85 percent decline from January’s 63,240 players, according to data from DappRadar. Coincidentally, like most crypto assets during the period, Axie Infinity’s native token AXS has been slumping hard since January (from $97.54 in January to $10.34 in June, an 89 percent drop).

This implies that Axie situation is also affected by the current condition of the crypto industry, which is currently bearish due to macroeconomic factors such as inflation and recession. The current crypto bear market has crippled nearly every crypto-related establishment, including high-profile companies such as Voyager and Crypto.com, as well as tokens previously regarded as “safe” such as Terra-Luna, causing what the community calls FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in every crypto, NFTs included, which in turn causes people to fear to invest in the crypto space — Axie Infinity included — in general.

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