Axie Infinity Becomes Ethereum's First NFT Game to Hit $1 Billion in Sales

Ethereum-based NFT game Axie Infinity has crossed $1 billion in sales, data from CryptoSlam! shows.

As of this writing, $1,055,735 worth of tokens from the Pokémon-inspired NFT game have traded hands through 2.4 million transactions. There are 324,850 buyers, 936,065 owners, and more than a million daily active users.

The milestone is the latest piece of evidence to show that the blockchain game, launched in 2018, has truly gone viral this summer. Almost a fifth of Axie Infinity's sales took place in the past week and three quarters concluded in the past month.

Axie Infinity is the first NFT game to surpass $1 billion in sales. The next best-selling game is NBA Top Shot—the basketball trading card game, which runs on the Flow blockchain, has racked up $675 million in all-time sales—and Ethereum-based CryptoPunks, with $657 million.

What is Axie Infinity?

Shed the blockchain from Axie Infinity, and the game plays like a simple monster-battler. Axies have various stats that determine their fate in battles with other players, just like Pokémon.

The inclusion of cryptocurrencies makes the game a lot more lucrative than Pokémon, incentivizing players to spend and, with any luck, earn.

Crypto also makes Axie Infinity incredibly expensive. While a new Pokémon game costs well under $60 for a 100+ hour experience, a single Axie Infinity monster costs a couple of hundred dollars. Even this green shrub costs $60.

However, unlike Pokémon monsters, players are free to sell their Axie Infinity tokens on secondary markets—and, given today's high milestone of $1 billion, they clearly are. Developer Sky Mavis calls the model "play to earn."

In November 2020, the Vietnamese developer launched Axie Infinity Shards (AXS), a governance token that lets players vote on the future of the game. The token has boomed in the past month. On July 20, AXS had a market cap of $900 million; now, it has a market cap of $2.6 billion.

Sky Mavis has also launched a decentralized market for 90,601 plots of virtual land, from which players can develop their bases of operation, gather resources and craft items. Plots frequently sell for well over $10,000—even though most gameplay features for land haven't been implemented yet.