Original author: WILLIAM M. PEASTER Original translation: Deep Tide TechFlow
Axie Infinity has just launched its on-chain upgrade system AXP. This new mechanism is not only significant for Axie Infinity itself, but also has potential implications for the overall NFT ecosystem.
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Axie Infinity is a turn-based tactical card battle game where players can compete by assembling teams of creatures called Axies. “Axie Classic” is the first official version of the game, which had 21 seasons from December 2019 to June 2022.
Axie Infinity: Origins is the next evolutionary stage of the series, starting in April 2022.
Origins provides new adventure mode (player vs. AI) and arena mode (player vs. player) experiences, and serves as the foundation for several new game mechanisms, including free starting Axies, equipable accessories, and runes, among others.
Origins Season 1 started in September 2022, and as of July 2023, Season 5 is about to begin.
In December 2022, Axie Infinity announced Axie Core, a vision for the foundational experience of breeding, nurturing, equipping, and leveling up Axies, all centered around “Axies having on-chain genetic code that can be permanently changed through on-chain actions.”
If the announcement of Axie Core was an outline of a vision, then the recently launched Axie Experience Points (AXP) is the next significant step towards realizing that vision, as Axies are about to transform from passive assets into digitally evolving creatures through gameplay activities.
What is AXP
“There are already millions of Axies. We’ve always seen Axies as an important part of our identity: digital pets, digital friends. To truly accomplish this goal, we need to build a system that allows you to inject your time, effort, energy, and skills into your Axies. This is a system of vertical progression, not horizontal progression, depth rather than breadth. AXP lays the foundation for Axie Progression. The core of Axie Progression is converting time, effort, skill, and resources into making our Axies stronger, cooler, rarer, and more personalized.” – From Lunacian’s perspective on AXP
Axie Experience Points (AXP) is a new on-chain upgrade mechanism used to facilitate Axie’s progression and component upgrades.
By playing Origins, players can earn AXP, with each winning team’s Axies earning 150 AXP per ranked battle. Initially, each Axie can earn a maximum of 4,500 AXP per day. These points are non-transferable and bound to each Axie.
These points are used for upgrading, which is an evolutionary process that synchronizes Axie’s level with the blockchain, increases its level cap, and allows for part upgrades.
When Axies reach levels 9, 19, and 29, upgrades can be activated through transactions on the Ronin sidechain, requiring a total of 13,310, 110,480, and 334,170 AXP respectively.
The introduction of AXP and Axie upgrades makes Axies dynamic NFTs that can be improved and personalized over time, marking a transition from passive roles to roles that evolve and personalize through gaming experiences.
In addition, Sky Mavis, the creator of Axie, can now use AXP as a strategic tool in its ecosystem to incentivize desired in-game behavior, such as completing more dungeons, and reward third-party game developers who achieve specific milestones.
AXP and the Overall Situation
I used to work at JPG, a NFT management platform, where we developed a dynamic “Canonicon” NFT with an embedded JXPG upgrade system. The more curation you do, the more experience points you earn, and you can customize your Canonicon, etc., but we embedded this system directly into smart contracts.
Therefore, from my personal perspective, I find AXP in Axie Infinity interesting on multiple levels – first, it is crucial for deepening the gameplay of Axie’s ecosystem, which is not to be underestimated. But it also provides a universal blueprint for other NFT games and NFT projects, even if they did not directly embed such a system at launch, they can adopt their own experience point system.
Assets like Axies are stored on Ronin, while the Origins game logic is off-chain. Therefore, with the introduction of AXP and synchronized upgrades, Sky Mavis is using transactions to regularly track the progress of on-chain games (currently at levels 9, 19, and 29).
This system can be promoted and applied to new games or added to existing projects. I believe we will see more similar efforts because Axie Infinity is still the largest Web3 game, and many other game projects will study its approach to AXP.
Over time, this on-chain upgrade approach is likely to become the norm not only in Web3 games but also in other areas of the space, from curation to PFPs to Web3 social. I believe this approach will become obvious, just as Uniswap-style decentralized exchanges are obvious to us now. Similarly, I think the arrival of AXP marks a shift in the trend, and soon we may all be upgrading on-chain in various ways.
At the same time, it is worth paying attention to whether AXP will be offered in other Axie ecosystem games, such as Axie DoLL, Homeland, Raylights, etc.
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