How to Value Axie Infinity NFTs?
Axie Infinity is a blockchain-based game about collecting, breeding, battling, and raising fantasy creatures called Axies. More specifically, Axie Infinity is an NFT game and ecosystem that is built on the Ethereum blockchain. It is the leading Ethereum game by daily, weekly, and monthly active users and has generated more than 6,400 ETH in revenue (2M+ USD) so far.
The Axie Infinity game has its in-house official marketplace - Axie marketplace. It brings a revolutionary step in the game industry as players can earn profits while playing the game. Axie marketplace generated over $20.98M million in transaction volume over the last 7-days.
Table of content:
Introduction to Axie Infinity
What is so special about Axie Infinity?
What’s an Axie?
Stats
Classes
Body Parts
Breeding
More Axie Infinity features
Land plots of Lunacia
Land types
Genesis Land
Axie Infinity Items
All-Time Top 3 Axie Sales
Play-to-earn: how to get started?
Summary
Introduction to Axie Infinity
According to Trung Nguyen (lead engineer of Axie Infinity) – “Axie Infinity is an Ethereum-collectible universe where players will raise, battle and breed fantasy creatures called Axies. Each Axie has a unique genetic code that determines its strengths and weaknesses in battle. Players can position their Axies prior to battles and choose which battle moves their Axies take to each fight.”
Axies compete in 3 vs 3 battles. In each battle, the Axies make their moves in a predefined order that is set by the player before the battle. The first Axis team to defeat all the opponent Axis wins. The team constitution, positioning and moves are all key strategic factors in the determination of the outcome of each battle.
Axie Infinity has some unique features. Players can breed and raise their Axies. Players can also house their Axies in Terrariums that give special bonuses. Players will accumulate the rewards by performing small tasks such as feeding, washing and putting their Axies to sleep the night before a battle. These rewards impact the breeding and combat systems.
Trung Nguyen remarks, " We were able to come up with solutions to some of the flaws we feel exist in the centralized mystical creature games like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! that we grew up with.”.
It is important to keep in mind that Axies have a real purpose in the game, unlike other NFT benchmarks where items are strictly collectible. Axie Infinity also has its own governance token: Axie Infinity Shard tokens (AXS). Basically, the game itself has an internal economy with different levels of interaction. Further on, a detailed consideration will be given to the value of Axies.
What is so special about Axie Infinity?
Let the numbers be the proof of the project's success. Axie Infinity was worth over 50,000 ETH traded on its in-house marketplace. The most expensive Axie was sold for up to 300 ETH. Since then over 90,000 players remain active monthly.
What is unique about Axie is that the new economics behind the blockchain is being used as a reward for the players' contributions to the ecosystem. This new game model has been baptized "play to win".
As the whitepaper states players can earn by:
Competing in PVP battles to win leaderboard prizes.
Breeding Axies and selling them on the marketplace.
Collecting and speculating onrare Axies such as Mystics and Origins.
Farming for the love potions that are needed to breed Axies. These can be sold on exchanges such as Uniswap and Binance.
Starting in 2021 players can earn a governance token, AXS, which represents a real slice of the game universe as it has governance rights and fee-sharing built into it. Since players can earn this token by playing, a Ready Player one-type quest emerges where players can actually earn part of the universe. However, these quests are not winner takes all and rewards each player based on their effort and skill.
Axies are very sophisticated NFTs, therefore there is no doubt that they have the potential of being highly valuable.
So what’s an Axie?
Axies have a double role. First of all, they are the fantastic creatures that inhabit the world of the game. Thus, they can be used for multiple purposes: in-game combat, breeding and collecting. Secondly, they possess some unique characteristics such as stats, classes, body types, parts and abilities. The rarest ones do have some mystical parts. These elements add extra value to the NFTs and determine their role in battle.
Stats
Each Axie has 4 stats, Health, Morale, Skill, and Speed. These are used for combat purposes. For example, HP refers to the amount of damage that an Axie can take before being KO. While morale increases critical strike chance and so on.
An Axie’s stats are dependent on two variables: its class and its body parts. Each class possesses various stats that might be beneficial in the battle. Certain classes are more valuable than others.
Classes
Each Axie has a class that defines the role of the Axie within the game. Each of them has a weak and a strong suit against the other classes. The classes also affect the stats of an Axie. There are 9 classes available in the game, which may be divided into 3 main groups.
Group 1 contains Plant, Reptile and Dusk, representing the "tank" respectively defense functions. When considering average sales, Plants were the most valuable. Though Dusk Axies are the rarest of the group. This price difference is likely due to the fact that plants are mostly used on the front lines in battle.
Group 2 contains Beast, Bug and Mech Axies, which aim to cause the most damage to the opponent. Beasts lead in terms of average sales. By the way, the Beasts are the most expensive NFTs on the platform, because they are usually the first pick to form a backline.
The remaining group 3 of Aquatic, Bird, and Dawn stand for Axie’s speed and damage within the game. By number of sales, the Aquatic and Bird Axies are the most popular. Whereas Dawn is the rarest and most expensive.
Body parts
In addition, Each Axie has 6 body parts: eyes, ears, horn, mouth, back, and tail. Some of them have an ability for example horns, mouths, backs, and tails determine which cards an Axie can use in battle, so it can be game-changing when attacking the opponent.
The impact of body parts with abilities is very apparent. No surprise that body parts endowed with abilities are more valued by players than by collectors. On the flip side, some of these body parts have collectible value despite the lack of abilities, especially because of their rarity or “mystic” nature. Some Axies possess special body parts known as mystic parts that make them unique and are most frequently purchased for collection or resale purposes. The more mystic parts each Axie possesses, the rarer and more valuable it is. There is only a 25% chance that an Axie will have 1 mystical part and only a 0.0127% chance that it will have 4.
Breeding
Breed count is another factor that slightly impacts the value of Axie NFTs. One more unique factor about Axies is that they can be purchased at different levels of maturity. Like real-world pets, Axies can be bred to create new offspring. In order to maintain the population of Axies, breeding requires certain resources. Each Axis can be bred a maximum of 7 times.
Breeds cost AXS as well as Small Love Potions…
Here’s where it gets interesting:
In fact, when playing Axie Infinity, players can earn both AXS and SLP tokens via various means. For example, when you win, you gain an asset called Small Love Potion (SLP). SLP is also an ERC-20 token. These tokens can then be traded, or exchanged on the decentralized market for other cryptocurrencies.
Axie Infinity CoinMarketCap's current ranking is #234, with a live market capitalization of $250,901,705 USD. It has a circulating supply of 60,907,500 AXS coins and a maximum supply of 270,000,000 AXS coins. The best exchanges for trading Axie Infinity are currently Binance, Huobi Global, FTX, Upbit and DigiFinex.
SLP CoinMarketCap's current ranking is #421, with a live market capitalization of $58,656,337 USD. It has a circulating supply of 404,090,637 SLP coins and the maximum supply is not available. The best exchanges to trade Small Love Potion are currently Binance, Bilaxy, Uniswap (V2) and Hoo.
Besides, if you don’t want to use your tokens to breed, you can instantly sell them.
More Axie Infinity features
The first Axie Land sale started on Jan. 21st 2019. Players were given the opportunity to purchase plots of land in Lunacia, the Axie homeland. There are still some quadrants left, which will be put up for sale. According to the Axie Infinity whitepaper, additional details about land will be released in time.
Land plots of Lunacia
Lunacia is divided up into tokenized plots of land (Terra), which can be purchased, rented out, and developed by players.
Landholders can upgrade and customize their territory to host stores, produce resources, house NPC’s, and even act as access points for dungeons!
These Land plots are represented as Non-Fungible Tokens and can be freely traded by players. 17,217(25%) of plots were available for sale. There are 4 types of lands: savannah, arctic, forest and mystic. The price of a land varies from 0.777 ETH ($1,966) to 10,700 ETH ($26,839,479) depending on its characteristics, including the chances of receiving a Genesis land.
Land types
Here are the four types of land:
Savannah – 5349 Plots, (initially sold for .05 ETH each). These are furthest from the center.
Forest – 5459 Plots, (initially sold for 0.16 ETH each). Next closest to the center.
Arctic – 4171 Plots, (initially sold for 0.45 ETH each). 2nd sector from the center.
Mystic – 2338 Plots, (initially sold for 1 ETH each) ETH each. Closest to the center.
The location of land plays an important role since it impacts boss spawn and in consequence resources earned from this adventure. Initially lands were offered in “crates” with up to 10 items per crate. Currently all areas are all sold out.
Genesis land
Genesis land is extremely rare and is capped to 220 plots. It directly borders Luna’s Landing. Rare bosses will spawn on Genesis Land and the owners will get a cut of all the resources that are collected on their Land. On the Axie marketplace, the price of Genesis land starts at 160 ETH ($397,086)
Axie Infinity Items
With the introduction of the land sale, items have been added that can be used to decorate these land plots as well! With a wide variety of items already available on the Axie Marketplace, the ability to customize the visual appearance of the land plots is bound to be impressive.
Every plot of land consists of 64 blocks(8x8). In fact, item and structure in Lunacia has a space requirement. Some require 1 block of land while others require more space and resources to build. The interesting point about resources is that they are earnable, tradeable, and sellable as in-game items which reinforces the idea of Play-to-earn concept. Every structure will have a base set of demands which need to be fulfilled for it to be functional.
Land Items can be placed on a Land Plot to enhance your Axies abilities. Each item has its own rarity (common, rare, epic, mystic) and type (Savannah, Forest, Arctic, Mystic).
Here you can see an item list showing the detailed description of its features:
https://www.virtualgoods.info/
Axie Marketplace
The Axie marketplace is an essential element of the Axie ecosystem providing more liquidity, price discovery and merchandise ownership for the community. It only sells characters and items from the Axie Infinity ecosystem. On the Marketplace, players can easily find Axies, Land and other various items used in game as well as take Axies and sell them in an auction. When placing a trade on the Axie Infinity Marketplace, a market fee of 4.25% is charged to the seller (but not the buyer).
In June 2021, the number of sales on Axie Marketplace has reached 145,665 with an average price of 0.1212 eth (312.62) per sale.
Play-to-earn: how to get started?
Joining the Axie Infinity community requires several steps – setting up your digital wallet, buying Axies, and downloading the application. In order to store tokens, users must download a digital wallet to play the game and load it with some ETH. To start playing the game, you will need at least 3 Axies. Thus, you will need to acquire at least 3 Axies from the Axie marketplace. Once you have 3 Axies, you are ready to download the application and start playing!
Vietnamese video game studio SkyMavis recently released a short documentary titled "Play-to-earn," which follows several Filipino players of the game that is partially owned and operated by the players themselves. The documentary frames the game as something everyone can enjoy, yet there are critics of the project. One common complaint is the volatility of crypto-currencies and how it can affect players trying to earn some extra cash during the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights how the play-to-earn phenomenon is creating new opportunities for thousands of players around the world.
For more details better have a look at:
All Time Top 3 Axie Sales
Let’s take a look at 3 most expensive Axies ever sold. As it can be observed the class of two out of three are Breast, while the other one is Plant. All of them have three mystic body parts, and the breed count is just 0 and 1.
Consider the example of the most expensive Axie ever sold. What is the reason behind the buyer's decision to pay such a high price? According to Andy (the buyer of axie angel, a student from Nanchang, Jiangxi) "Axie is very cute, especially my Angel, with the golden eggshell on the head. It's so cute." Andy has invested around 500 ETH in total in Axie Infinity. He feels very optimistic about the game's future. Andy remarks, “Axie's own combat gameplay is also very good, combined with the cute style of painting, it makes us like this 00 generation can not stop”.
1. Axie #1046 - Angel - sold for 300 ETH ($ 124778.33) on 06/11/2020
Class: Beast
Breed count: 0 / 7
Stats:
Health 37
Speed 44
Skill 31
Morale 52
Body parts:
Mystic Dreamy Papi
Mystic Pointy Nyan
Cupid Level 1
Goda Level 1
Mystic Golden Shell Level 1
Tiny Dino Level 1
2. Axie #3224 - Handsome Bob – sold for 200 ETH ($78233.35) on 22/10/2020
Class: Plant
Breed count: 1 / 7
Stats:
Health 59
Speed 37
Skill 31
Morale 37
Body parts :
Gecko
Curved Spine
Bidens Level 1
Mystic Lam Handsome Level 1
Mystic Pinku UnkoLevel 1
Mystic Namek CarrotLevel 1
3. Axie #2761- Devil Jack – sold for 200 ETH ($78233.35) on 22/10/2020
Class: Beast
Breed count :0 / 7
Stats:
Health 34
Speed 43
Skill 31
Morale 56
Body parts :
Zeal
Larva
Nimo Level 1
Mystic Starry Balloon Level 1
Mystic Skull Cracker Level 1
Mystic Laggingggggg Level 1
Summary
A key factor in determining the future of the Axie Infinity game is its playability and popularity. The game is both fun to play and has a lot of scope for growth. The collecting part of Axies, especially rarity and visual appeal play an important role in determining the value of Axie's NFTs. Moreover, Axie Infinity can be viewed from two perspectives. One is for investment purposes and the other one is for gameplay purposes. The first one takes into account an investment appeal and the second one takes into account a wide range of gameplay possibilities.
No matter which prism suits you best, the constant is that the Axie infinity continues climbing the rankings, providing food for thought for potential investment interest. Easy to anticipate a continuous growth of the players. As can be seen from the data regarding the total number of visits to axieinfinity.com there are 1.85M visitors. This means an increase of 105.2% in the last 6 months.