Axie Infinity

About Axie Infinity (AXS)

What Is Axie Infinity (AXS)?

Axie Infinity is a collectible-creature game and player-owned economy built by the Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis, where the creatures, called Axies, are NFTs that players own, breed, battle and trade. It began on Ethereum in 2018 and now runs primarily on Ronin, a chain Sky Mavis built for it. AXS, formally Axie Infinity Shards, is the ERC-20 governance token of that universe.

Official resources:

• Website
• Whitepaper
• Support documentation
• Sky Mavis GitHub
• AXS on Etherscan

Who Founded Axie Infinity? (History)

Sky Mavis was founded in early 2018 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Its whitepaper team page names Trung Thanh Nguyen as CEO, Aleksander Leonard Larsen as COO, Andy Ho as CTO, Tu Doan as Art Director and Game Designer, and Jeffrey Zirlin as Growth Lead. The team started on Ethereum, built the Ronin sidechain once it concluded a game economy could not scale there, launched AXS in late 2020 and opened the Community Treasury in early 2021. The whitepaper was last updated in November 2021, so current rules live in support documentation.

How Axie Infinity Works

Each Axie has six body parts plus a body shape, each carrying a dominant, recessive and minor recessive gene, which pass to offspring with a 37.5, 9.375 and 3.125 percent chance respectively. Breeding costs AXS plus Smooth Love Potions, and an Axie can be bred at most seven times. Rather than selling items, Sky Mavis routes 4.25 percent of marketplace transactions plus the AXS portion of breeding fees into a Community Treasury.

Key Ecosystem Components

• Ronin, the chain built for Axie, which per its documentation returned to Ethereum as a Layer 2 in 2026 on the OP Stack
• The Axie Marketplace and App.Axie, where assets trade and Axie Core actions are performed
• Axie Infinity: Origins, the land systems that replaced Homeland, and Atia's Legacy
• Smooth Love Potion (SLP), the gameplay resource, and bAXS, the bonded form of AXS

AXS Token Utility

AXS is used for governance voting, staking and breeding fees. The whitepaper caps total supply at 270,000,000 AXS, with 29 percent for staking rewards, 21 percent to Sky Mavis, 20 percent to play-and-earn issuance and 11 percent to the public sale, unlocking over 65 months.

Since early 2026 Sky Mavis has documented a second form, bAXS or Bonded AXS, earned from games and leaderboards and not transferable between wallets. Every bAXS is backed one-for-one by AXS in a smart contract, and spending it burns the bAXS and releases the underlying AXS. Converting AXS to bAXS is always one-to-one, while converting back applies a rate tied to the account's Axie Score, with the difference going to the Community Treasury.

What Makes Axie Infinity Unique?

Few games have gone as far in handing the economy to players: assets are player-owned NFTs, the resources that create new assets are earned by playing, and the studio monetizes a fee on player-to-player trade rather than selling items.

How Axie Infinity Differs from Similar Projects

The Sandbox and Decentraland are virtual worlds where the token buys land and governs a platform rather than funding one game loop. Axie is a first-party game, so AXS is exposed to one franchise in a way an infrastructure token is not.

Use Cases of Axie Infinity

• Playing the battle game and progressing through Axie Core systems
• Breeding and trading Axies as tradable digital assets
• Governance voting and staking AXS or bAXS for rewards

How Axie Infinity Is Secured

The AXS and SLP ERC-20 contracts were audited by Quantstamp in April 2021. Ronin security was rewritten by experience: in March 2022 an attacker obtained enough validator signatures, via a spear-phishing compromise of a Sky Mavis employee plus a third-party Axie DAO validator, to drain 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC from the bridge, undetected for six days. Sky Mavis raised 150 million dollars led by Binance to reimburse users, expanded the validator set, and rebuilt the bridge so large withdrawals require human review.

Risks and Considerations

The economy depends on sustained player demand rather than external revenue, and the 2021 to 2022 cycle showed how quickly a reflexive play-to-earn loop unwinds when new entrants stop arriving. Documentation is fragmented, so published mechanics should be checked against the live version. bAXS is not transferable and converting it back to AXS is deliberately lossy for less active accounts.

Why Axie Infinity Matters

Axie is the reference case for blockchain gaming, both as proof that a token-denominated game economy can reach global scale and as the clearest lesson in how one fails when rewards outrun demand.

Where Can You Buy Axie Infinity (AXS)?

AXS trades on major centralized exchanges including Binance, Kraken, OKX, Upbit, Crypto.com Exchange and MEXC. On-chain it trades on Katana, the decentralized exchange native to Ronin, on Uniswap v3 on Ethereum, and on PancakeSwap on BNB Chain.

Storage Options After Purchase

For the Ronin version, which the game uses, Sky Mavis documents Ronin Wallet and Ronin Waypoint; its developer documentation does not describe hardware wallet support for those, so size holdings accordingly. The Ethereum version is a standard ERC-20 and works in any EVM-compatible wallet.

Related Coins

• The Sandbox (SAND)
• Decentraland (MANA)
• Gala (GALA)
• Immutable (IMX)
• Ronin (RON)