The price of AXS, the native token of blockchain gaming platform Axie Infinity, has reached a new historic all-time high of $32.19 today, according to crypto metrics platform CoinGecko.
At the time of writing, AXS’s price has slowed as the token is trading at $30.62, up 31.2% over the past 24 hours.
Axie Infinity is a Pokémon-like crypto game that allows players to collect and breed various fantasy creatures and pit them against other users’ pets. The game’s popularity has been surging lately, making Axie one of the hottest crypto games on the market.
Further, each of Axie pets is actually a non-fungible token (NFT), which in itself is another booming sector in the crypto industry. NFTs are a special type of provably unique tokens that can’t be duplicated or counterfeited.
Thanks to this scarcity, NFTs, which can be minted as one-of-a-kind or in small batches, became quite popular among collectors. Consequently, prices of such tokens—which can represent all kinds of digital media, such as artworks, music, video clips, or virtual pets—can reach millions of dollars.
It's not just the token that's on a tear either. Thanks to renewed interest, the overall protocol is raking in millions in revenue from in-game fees. In the past 30 days, Axie Infinity is the single most profitable blockchain application, ahead of many of DeFi's "blue chip" tokens in Uniswap, Aave, and SushiSwap.
It remains to be seen whether the trend can continue, however. AXS has outperformed nearly every other large-cap cryptocurrency on the market, including Bitcoin and Ethereum this month.