Unpacking Axie chat, episode 55

I was out for a run on a beautiful sunny Sunday listening to one of my favourite podcasts - Axie chat, with my friends baronar and enjoi - not IRL friends but two guys I feel like I know as I've listened to pretty much every episode since they began over a year ago. Back in the early days there was less to talk about (so - paradoxically - they talked more). They even answered one or two questions I posted on twitter, which was pretty awesome. Anyways ... Episode 55 was a bit of a throwback to those days as there was not much news to speak of - no major updates, no crazy mystic or land sales ... a bit of a lull. They talked about a few things that resonated with me that I was going to respond to in a twitter thread but the more I thought about it, the more it became clear it might be more appropriate as a long-form blog post.

Launch / build season

When Jiho was on the show a month or so ago he mentioned build season (or was it launch season?). Build/launch season is now. The team and community are heads down, focusing on building for upcoming major releases. That means things are coming, we just don't know when. It appears timelines have stretched out a bit from the original roadmap. For some months now the monthly development updates have taken a very similar form - reporting on crazy growth and referencing Battles V2, Ronin DEX, staking and landplay developments without any clear ETAs. Axie's crazy growth has exposed scaling issues that need to be addressed before any other releases can happen so undoubtedly this has been the main reason for their delay. Recently the team have tweeted out messages to this effect to address unrest in the community.

They're not ready for another crazy ramp-up in growth yet. This lull buys them a little time to build out the infrastructure to allow Lunacia to scale to meet the insane growth.

Also baronar alluded to the fact that Axie is never dead anyways. Even during quiet periods, folks keep grinding away earning SLP and breeders keep breeding to grow the player-base. It's completely different from most NFT projects that don't yet have working products, which brings us to the next topic.

Why is Axie left out of lists of 'OG' and/or 'Blue-chip' NFTs?

Both baronar and enjoi were frustrated by the fact that lists and timelines of early NFT projects that have been doing the rounds on twitter and other platforms exclude Axie Infinity. There may be some element of snobbery or folks being jealous that they missed out on the sick gainz but I think it's more to do with the fact that Axie Infinity is a working project and the NFTs (Axies) are yield-bearing assets, not just static jpegs. Furthermore, a lot of these 'relics' that have been 'discovered' recently are fascinating for the fact that they were never popular in the first place, whereas everyone knows about Axie - it’s been popular for a long time. If this lull is a good thing to buy some time for Axie to build out infrastructure, then why are we so concerned with what others think? Let them think that during build season. Eventually mystics and land will have their day again and no-one holding them will care what others think. Baronar did mention that tweet (Axie = Pokémon) from Kyle Samani (without mentioning his name) and I think it was fair enough to call him out on this just because he has such a large following and it was a blatant troll tweet for attention (as opposed to ignorance or lack of understanding) and needed to be shot down (which Psycheout did very well).

LOOT = lazy?

LOOT is an NFT collection that was recently launched - a ‘fair launch’ they call them now. LOOT NFTs were free (minus gas), they just needed to be minted from the contract. LOOT NFTs are static jpegs with a list (text) of items that could potentially be used for a game one day. That’s it. These are going for a lot of money so - firstly - I have learned from this that: if a lot of smart (and not-so-smart) people on crypto-twitter obsess over something and it’s free, then don’t pass on the opportunity. I did not get it but I should not have ignored it. A similar thing happened earlier this year with Mooncats - I didn’t get it, I ignored it and I missed out (later bought one). I didn’t learn my lesson with Mooncats but I hope that after LOOT I will be more on the ball when the next (free) craze hits us.

It took me a long time to understand LOOT. Probably over a week. I felt a bit of a dope really. But eventually I did get a bit of an a-ha moment. The metadata in these NFTs (LOOT items) can be used as the building blocks for games and these games can natively build in economic models for value to flow through to the NFTs. It’s all a bit out there and abstract though. Anyways baronar dismissed LOOT as lazy, saying things like it’s “crazy how much people are paying with the idea that there could possibly be someone out there who decides to create utility” - he’s totally right. Who’s to say value will flow back to LOOT holders anyways? And what are the chances of anyone creating something better than Axie Infinity from just text files? Thousands of teams could have a go at building things (some have started) and fail before something engaging and sustainable comes along - I suppose that’s part of the attraction.

If you use your imagination, though, you can see this drawing comparisons with the ‘composibility’ of DeFi. From this basic layer, one can start to stack layer upon layer until something vaguely resembling a game is born. And if another layer was stuck onto the first layer a completely different game might be built.

This also got me thinking,

What if Axie started this way?

What would the starting point even have been? First I thought of names for cards but then I thought it would start with parts - so it would be a text file with names of parts. What if an ‘Origin’ Axie started life as an NFT that was a list of parts? Then a whole bunch of stuff would need to have been created just to conceive the idea for basic gameplay, breeding, etc.

If my mystic Axie, RØZE, started as a text-based static jpeg.

So the sequence could have been -

1. Names of body parts.
2. Names of classes.
3. Schema mapping body parts to classes.
4. Some lore around who these parts are for (cute creatures called ‘Axies’), what Axies do (battle, breed), where Axies are from (Lunacia), etc.
5. Artwork created showcasing Axies with different body parts.
6. Schema mapping stats to classes/Axies.
7. Creation of moves for card decks.
8. Schema mapping cards to body parts.
9. Creation of breeding/genetics algorithms.

Etc, etc, etc.

Each one of these could be separate composible layers created by separate developers and after each layer is added, there is the potential for it to ‘fork’ off on a tangent to something completely different. So then what are the chances that something as awesome as Axie Infinity would ever be conceived with such an open, decentralised ecosystem? It’s crazy to think about.

SLP

There wasn’t much talk of SLP price on Axie chat this week - I honestly think they have done it enough and baronar and enjoi have said all that they want to say on the matter. However there has also been a ramp-up in discussions on social platforms on SLP price and the Axie economy lately with a lot of negative vibes that I want to unpack in a separate post (next time).