Axie Infinity hits $4 billion in NFT sales and rebalances its token economy

Play-to-earn game Axie Infinity has completely removed the token rewards from its classic game mode to attract its users to a new game mode called Axie Infinity Origin. The team also described the move as part of its efforts to balance the economy for the SLP token. Meantime, the in-game NFT sales so far have exceeded $4 billion, all-time statistics show.

On Friday, the Axie Infinity team announced that, there will be no more SLP tokens to be minted on its classic mode. Per the team, the SLP rewards will be migrated to their new game mode. Although minting will be unavailable for 30 days as the team conducts a monitoring phase to search for bugs, abuses, and exploits.

Further, the team highlighted that moving from classic to the new game mode will help “balance the SLP economy.” In addition, the team will enable using SLP to craft various in-game boosts such as runes and charms in the new mode to add utility to SLP.

In February, the Axie Infinity team already removed the SLP rewards for the adventure mini-game and daily quests reward, leaving the rewards only in PVP mode, in an earlier attempt to balance the SLP token economy. Despite these efforts, the token dropped 98.7% from last July’s all-time high of $0.39.

Although the SLP and AXS tokens have not performed well during the crypto winter, the NFT transaction volume for the project surged 205% in July. Its co-founder Jeff Zirlin said that the project is “healing,” referring to the positive reception of the game’s NFT land staking feature.

Axie Infinity is one of the most popular P2E games that incorporate NFTs. The game’s NFT collection so far has seen $4.24 billion in all-time sales, according to data from dappradar.com. The $4 billion in sales took place across 17,038,131 transactions to date, and there are 2,291,087 NFT owners.

In 2021, when the NFT game popularized the P2E model, it accounted for nearly two-thirds of all blockchain game NFT transactions.

According to cryptoslam.io, Axie Infinity is the top NFT collection as Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) follows behind Axie Infinity in sales with $2.36 billion, and CryptoPunks has $2.35 billion in all-time sales.