Axie

Market position

Axie Infinity was the defining title of the 2021 wave of blockchain gaming and pioneered play-to-earn, attracting millions of players before its tokens declined and the project became widely cited as a cautionary tale about web3 boom-and-bust cycles. Sky Mavis leadership maintains the project is continuing development.

Combination of turn-based tactical card battles with player-owned NFT creatures and tradable in-game tokens, operated on the company's own Ronin sidechain rather than a third-party chain, with a free-to-play, non-NFT entry version added to lower onboarding barriers.

Technology

Axie Infinity runs on Ronin, a sidechain built by Sky Mavis and bridged to Ethereum. Ronin originally operated with a set of nine validator nodes; following the March 2022 breach, Sky Mavis replaced its validators and announced an expansion to 21 distinct nodes with control split among partners, community members and other stakeholders. Ecosystem tokens include AXS (governance and staking), RON (Ronin governance) and Smooth Love Potion, alongside Axie NFTs and the Ronin Name Service. Game distribution previously ran through the Mavis Hub desktop client, launched in May 2020 and discontinued in November 2025 in favour of a web download page and the Ronin Discovery Page.

Go-to-market

Distribution has shifted from the Mavis Hub client to a centralized web download page for Axie titles and the Ronin Discovery Page and blog for wider Ronin network discovery. Axie Infinity: Origin was introduced as a free-to-play, NFT-free on-ramp intended to let new users experience the game before any crypto onboarding, with community structures such as guilds, guild wars and seasonal leaderboards supporting retention.

Consumer gamers and crypto users, including players in developing markets such as the Philippines who were drawn by play-to-earn income, NFT collectors and traders, and gaming guilds.

Geography

Headquartered in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, with a player base spread internationally; adoption was particularly strong in the Philippines. Business development activity has spanned the Asia Pacific region, including Vietnam, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan.

History

Sky Mavis was founded in early 2018 as a technology-focused game studio in Ho Chi Minh City. Axie Infinity launched in 2020 — the same year the Mavis Hub distribution client debuted in May — and early versions of the game were, per co-founder Aleksander Larsen, low quality and simple, with the team taking considerably longer than commonly assumed to get the game working. The project peaked during the 2021 bull market. In March 2022 the Ronin Validator bridge was breached, removing over $625 million in crypto from the ecosystem; the Axie DAO treasury alone lost 56,000 ETH, about $180 million. Sky Mavis raised $150 million in April 2022 to help reimburse affected users and simultaneously launched the alpha of Axie Infinity: Origin. In November 2025 the Mavis Hub client was retired.

Risks & controversies

In March 2022 the Ronin sidechain validator network was compromised in what Sky Mavis described as an externally breached, socially engineered attack, draining over $625 million from the Axie Infinity ecosystem; five of nine validators were compromised, four of them controlled by Sky Mavis and a fifth by the Axie DAO via an unclosed backdoor. Sky Mavis attributed the root cause to its small validator set. Beyond the $150 million raised, roughly $475 million was still needed to make the marketplace whole, and the Axie DAO said it would wait two years for potential recovery before voting on the shortfall. Token prices fell sharply — AXS was down about 66 percent from its November 2021 peak as of April 2022 — and declining new-player inflows raised concerns of a downward spiral in an economy dependent on newcomer spending. The wider sector has since faced funding shortages, with co-founder Jeff Zirlin predicting further studio failures in 2026.