Scholarships are not a formal mechanic, but instead a program developed by the community: Some players simply breed Axies or have too many Axies while many—typically players in countries like the Philippines, Venezuela, and Thailand, which together make up more than half of the game's playerbase, according to estimates—can't afford to buy an Axie team."I can't specifically call it a boss/employee. It's more of a partnership, or let’s call it a joint venture. One party puts up the capital and the other puts up the time,” Conor Kenny, an Axie Infinity manager and a YouTuber who documents crypto trades, told Motherboard. “The scholar grinds daily, you split the profits. Everybody wins!"In his YouTube videos, however, Kenny strikes a different tone. “I employ them,” he enthusiastically says of his scholars in a September video agonizing over whether Axie Infinity was still a worthwhile investment for managers. “As we stand right now, Axie Infinity is a Ponzi scheme. It’s built on new players coming into the world,” Kenny added in the video. This attitude was echoed by other managers Motherboard spoke to, who see their profits in Axie as depending on a constant influx of new players, many of whom will be scholars.“The first bunch of people who invested in the game have better profit than the people who invest at the end.”
Iguano plays almost every day himself on top of managing his scholars and views Axie Infinity both as an opportunity to make money and a game he says he enjoys—at the same time, he has 25 Axies, which have cost him over $2,500, and he's logged a net loss of just over .5 ETH, he said. Iguano is from Maracaibo, Venezuela's second-largest city, and he pulls his scholars from a small town nearby. Like many managers, both offline and on, he sees the relationship between managers and scholars as being essentially benevolent.Do you play Axie Infinity as a scholar or a manager? Are you involved in another play-to-earn game? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, contact Edward Ongweso Jr securely on Signal at 202-642-8240 or email edward.ongweso@vice.com.
Axie Infinity's NFTs, for example, have seen a spectacular collapse in trading volume: Volume jumped from $4 million in April to $848 million in August, then crumbled before a second peak in November of $753 million, finally dropping like a concrete block to $82 million in February. Volume doesn't seem to have recovered in March, with trading down even further to shy of $30 million. Axie NFT floor prices are down 96 percent from an all-time high of .24 ETH and now sit around .01 ETH.Since its all-time high in July of $0.39, SLP has crashed nearly 100 percent and sat at $0.01 until February, when the development team announced key fundamental changes to its economic model in a desperate bid to salvage the prices of its tokens and NFTs, as well as its user base. This sparked a rally that took the coin all the way up to a recent peak of $0.039, which was still ten times less than its all-time high. That rally has since evaporated, with the price spending the weeks since floating around $0.02.“The Axie economy requires drastic and decisive action now or we risk total and permanent economic collapse. That would be far more painful."
Among managers with large teams—anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of scholars—attitudes vary widely, but a common thread is that while managers can, and often do, earn big, scholars see only a fraction of those earnings, which are now declining.Near the peak of the market, Rafar spent $3,000 on his initial team and made it back earning just above $1,000 a month with two or three scholars, he said, while today he’s earning $300 a month. His scholars earn $25-50."I don't really understand why some people hold, I've asked them and they tell me they are 'saving for something big'―essentially a big purchase."