Original Source: MetaverseHub
Original Source: MetaverseHub
On March 23, 2022, attackers stole 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC from the Axie Infinity sidechain Ronin Network, with a total value of more than $600 million.
Afterwards, Axi Infinity disclosed the existing security vulnerabilities through its official Discord and Twitter accounts, as well as the Ronin Network.
The incident became the largest hacking incident in the history of DeFi, and the amount once exceeded the PolyNetwork theft incident last year. Axie Infinity and Ronin chain development company Sky Mavis stated that the attack on the Ronin bridge was not due to a vulnerability in the smart contract. Rather, it has to do with social engineering and human error, and the company itself will take full responsibility for the Ronin attack.
The stolen amount in the previous PolyNetwork hack has been fully returned, and it is unknown whether the Ronin Network theft will be as lucky as PolyNetwork.
But recently, Axie Infinity development company Sky Mavis still completed the latest round of financing of US$150 million led by Binance.
This incident does not seem to have made other investment institutions lose confidence in Sky Mavis, so why is Sky Mavis frequently favored by capital?
As a phenomenal product, Axie Infinity is currently in the leading position in the GameFi field.
The "Play to Earn" model is precisely the core value of GameFi. By integrating the concepts of DeFi and NFT, users can accept GameFi in the form of playing games to realize wealth realization.
In addition, GameFi has its own virtual scene attributes, which can become an important entry point into the metaverse, which is one of the reasons why investors are optimistic about GameFi, so how does Sky Mavis, which is favored by capital, do it?
Who is Sky Mavis?
Axie Infinity is a collectible card game based on blockchain technology that collects pets to fight. Last year, a documentary titled "Earn while Playing - NFT Games in the Philippines" aroused the interest of many people. focus on.
This documentary tells about the unemployment rate as high as 25.8% in the Philippines under the epidemic. Under such circumstances, a resident discovered Axie Infinity, a blockchain game that can be "Play to Earn", and earned a lot of money in the game. own living expenses.
As word got out, entire towns, even 75-year-olds, joined the game to earn money to keep their families afloat.
As a result, this game called Axie Infinity began to explode all over the Internet.
According to data from Token Terminal, Axie Infinity earned as much as US$334 million in just 30 days, which once surpassed the US$231 million income of "Glory of the King" in July.
Axie Infinity has become the darling of the digital asset chain game track, so what kind of company is the development company behind it, Sky Mavis?
Founded in early 2018, Sky Mavis is a technology-focused game studio that builds the future virtual world and the infrastructure that makes it possible, so Sky Mavis can also be seen as an infrastructure builder.
Headquartered in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Sky Mavis has a team of 40 full-time employees.
Trung Thanh Nguyen is the CEO of Sky Mavis, co-founded the e-commerce startup Lozi.vn at the age of 19, which is still in operation today, and Trung also represented Vietnam in the ACM-ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest) World Finals .
It can also be seen from the side that the Sky Mavis team has excellent technical support and rich operating experience, and they are full of great enthusiasm for NFT, blockchain games and digital property rights.
Therefore, the explosion and success of Axie Infinity is actually not accidental.
Axie Infinity is the flagship product of developer Sky Mavis and has grown it into the #1 game on Ethereum by daily, weekly and monthly active players.
In addition to blockchain games, Sky Mavis also focuses on the following aspects:
Marketplace: A trustless marketplace for unique digital assets
Hub: The infrastructure that enables products to reach millions of players around the world
RoninWallet: is the official sidechain wallet of Axie Infinity, which can store digital items and currencies
Ronin: An Ethereum-related sidechain made exclusively for Axie Infinity, kicking off an explosion of blockchain games and collectibles
The Sky Mavis team once clearly stated in the white paper: "You can think of Axie Infinity as a country with a real economy", and now, this gathering place like the "oasis" in "Ready Player One" is changing millions of people human life.
first level title
Why is Sky Mavis favored by capital?
After being born in early 2018, Axie Infinity has been polished and developed for more than a year, and has finally become one of the most popular blockchain games.
And in November 2019, game assets worth more than 1.1 million U.S. dollars have been sold, and the transaction volume between players has also exceeded 1.8 million U.S. dollars. Such achievements will naturally be noticed by capital.
And at this point in time, it is the stage when a hundred schools of thought in blockchain games are contending, so we have to mention Animoca Brands, a listed company in the game industry.
After it entered the blockchain industry in 2018, it started the buying, buying and buying mode, focusing on investing in and acquiring blockchain game teams. This is the best time for it to capture high-quality teams. Naturally, it will not miss Sky Mavis. team.
So, on November 7, 2019, Axie Infinity developer Sky Mavis announced that it had raised $1.465 million in a funding round led by Animoca Brands.
The new funds will be used to accelerate the development of the Axie Infinity universe, build out the company's development team, and reach a wider audience through targeted marketing.
In addition to Animoca Brands, a capital giant in the blockchain game industry, Hashed, the top Crypto capital in South Korea, and Consensys, a well-known blockchain software company in Ethereum, also supported Sky Mavis.
Although Sky Mavis is a small studio in Vietnam, after a difficult one-year early stage of development, they received the industry's top capital support in the first step in the capital market, ushering in a good start. Since then, Axie Infinity's development is on the fast track.
Only half a year later, Axie Infinity's daily active users exceeded 40,000, and the monthly NFT transaction volume exceeded 15 million US dollars, which quickly attracted more capital investment.
On May 11, 2021, Sky Mavis, the developer of Axie Infinity, announced the completion of a US$7.5 million Series A financing. This round of financing was led by Libertus Capital. Sky Mavis said that it will use the funds to incubate more high-quality NFT blockchain games.
With the injection of a new round of capital, Axie Infinity is at full strength, ushering in exponential growth.
In less than 5 months, the number of daily active users has skyrocketed from the previous 40,000 to more than 2 million, the monthly revenue has exceeded 100 million, and the transactions on the NFT market have also exceeded 2.2 billion US dollars. Logically, Sky Mavis ushered in the industry's top capital.
On October 5, 2021, Sky Mavis, the developer of Axie Infinity, completed a US$152 million Series B round of financing (valued at US$3 billion), led by a16z, with participation from Paradigm, Accel, etc. Establish a distribution platform for other blockchain games.
Unfortunately, on March 29, 2022, Axie Infinity's Ethereum sidechain Ronin announced that it was hacked, and about $600 million worth of Crypto was stolen.
However, the main reason for the theft was mainly due to social engineering attacks and human errors, not due to the mechanism of Axie Infinity itself. Therefore, the theft of funds this time did not dissuade the capital from continuing to be optimistic about Axie Infinity idea.
On April 6, 2022, Axie Infinity development company Sky Mavis raised $150 million in financing, led by Binance, with participation from Animoca Brands, a16z, Dialectic, Paradigm and Accel.
This round of financing will be used to compensate user funds affected by the Ronin attack, and the funds of Ronin Bridge have been restored.
With the help of Axie Infinity, Sky Mavis is constantly creating new records in the game industry. A creative team will always be the darling of capital. Let us wait and see what kind of boundaries Sky Mavis will explore with the help of capital.
What are the groundbreaking initiatives of Sky Mavis?
A new revolution in the game industry
Sky Mavis not only launched a successful game Axie Infinity, more importantly, some of its explorations have brought a subversive innovation to the entire game industry, which will lead to a huge change in the game industry.
In traditional games, the equipment, props, pets and gold coins we get in the game seem to belong to us.
But in fact, these virtual assets belong to the game development company, and the data represented by these virtual assets is also controlled by the company.
Sky Mavis tries to introduce blockchain technology into the game, making the gold coins in the game become Crypto, and the equipment, props, and pets in the game become NFT.
The data of these digital assets is also stored on the decentralized blockchain, so players have ownership of these virtual assets.
It seems that blockchain technology is simply integrated into the game, but this method actually changes the nature of the game itself.
On the one hand, Sky Mavis popularized a concept called "Play To Earn", which is to earn while playing.
Players can obtain valuable digital assets by playing blockchain games, and these digital assets can be converted into legal currency in some regions, allowing players to obtain a considerable income.
Take Axie Infinity as an example. It has helped many people in developing countries such as the Philippines and Venezuela, which are deeply affected by the epidemic and have high unemployment rates, to tide over the difficulties.
And Axie Infinity has also received more people and financial support.
In July 2021, Axie Infinity's daily active users once exceeded 2 million, and its monthly revenue also surpassed the glory of the king, reaching an astonishing $300 million.
This fully proves how the concept of Play To Earn will impact traditional online games.
On the other hand, blockchain games like Axie Infinity have also changed the relationship between players and development teams.
In the past online games, if the development team wanted to make money, they would set up some payment mechanisms to attract players to spend, and players could spend money to get a better experience.
But in this way, players and the development team are in a zero-sum game of confrontation. Once the game is too expensive or not so fun, the balance will be broken, and the loss of players will be very rapid.
But with the blockchain game of digital assets, the development team can design an economic model for the game, allowing players to earn while playing.
The development team holds these digital assets in advance. As more and more players and funds enter the game, the digital assets in their hands will naturally rise, and the development team will therefore be able to obtain good revenue.
In blockchain games, the relationship between the development team and players has changed from a traditional confrontational zero-sum game to a relationship of co-construction and sharing. Both players and the development team will share the development dividends from the game's better and better development. .
It has to be said that the success of Sky Mavis on Axie Infinity has indeed brought a new concept to the game industry and verified a new direction of development. A new revolution will sweep the game industry.
The prototype of the metaverse economic model
Last year, after Roblox was the first to go public in the U.S. stock market with the concept of metaverse, it attracted a lot of attention, and then Epic Games, Nvidia, and Facebook also announced their entry into the metaverse.
In particular, Facebook even changed its name to Meta to show its determination to enter the metaverse with all its strength. As a result, the concept of metaverse quickly became popular all over the world.
However, the metaverse is composed of many complicated technologies, many of which are old technologies that have been developed for many years, and some have been accumulated.
For example, the VR head-mounted display device that can intuitively show the appearance of the metaverse has been brilliant as early as 2016, the so-called first year of VR, and many VR-related games and content have also been launched one after another.
In 2018, Steven Spielberg directed a science fiction film "Ready Player One", which depicted a virtual world called "Oasis".
People can enter the oasis to play by wearing VR head-mounted display equipment and other equipment, and can fight monsters and upgrade to do tasks in the oasis, so as to obtain valuable gold coins, equipment, props, etc., it can be said that "Top Player" depicts The way the metaverse should be.
Looking at the development of various technologies in the existing metaverse, the development of hardware and software has its own merits.
Although the visual effects presented by display technologies such as VR/AR are far more than real ones, the sense of immersion it brings is still unsatisfactory.
However, the metaverse depicted in "Ready Player One" still lacks a very important link in reality, that is, a complete and self-consistent economic model like "Oasis", allowing players to Earn while playing.
The Axie Infinity launched by Sky Mavis has achieved unprecedented success. On the one hand, it has verified the feasibility of building such an economic model, which allows players to work hard in the virtual world and get paid, as if they are living in the real world. in the virtual world.
On the other hand, it also provides successors with a prototype of a metaverse economic model that has been verified to be feasible.
Now we can see that there are many new blockchain games or applications, all of which are micro-innovations based on the economic model of Axie Infinity. It can be said that Sky Mavis has filled an important part for the development of the Metaverse industry. Since the development of the industry there are new paradigms.
GameFi's Precursor
If it is said that Sky Mavis’ creation of “P2E” games is a realization of a value model, building an economic model of the metaverse is a kind of ecological self-harmony.
Then the integration of blockchain technology, games, various protocols and NFT constitutes an increasingly powerful model behind Axie Infinity.
We know that blockchain games (GameFi) often require the integration of many elements, first of all, the application of the blockchain itself, but this is another grand story theme.
It includes the application of smart contracts, the creation of NFT, the development of Dapp and the guarantee of transactions. Of course, Sky Mavis could have relied on NFT markets like Open Sea, but they chose to build their own DEX to trade various NFT (game) items .
The second is the originality of the game itself. We saw that the various characters in the Axie Infinity game were created by the Sky Mavis team, which is full of fun and conforms to the public aesthetic through accumulation in the game circle.
So this also attracted some female players to join. However, from the current point of view, playability is still what Axie Infinity lacks, and it is also where Sky Mavis needs to spend follow-up efforts to build, but this does not prevent it from becoming the current leader in GameFi.
In addition, as we said above, Sky Mavis successfully tried an endogenous game economy in Axie Infinity, which also made the in-game currency SLP (interchangeable with ETH) and the game governance token AXS complement each other.
This is a feat that many traditional games have never done in the past, and it is also the place where blockchain games failed in the early years. After all, most GameFi in 2018 are just "spinach" with a game coat.
Therefore, the real strength of Sky Mavis may not be the development of such a fun game, nor the creation of such an interesting trading market.
Instead, the above-mentioned originally separated things were truly integrated, creating a new world like building blocks, and also creating a precedent for GameFi, which made everyone suddenly realize, "It turns out that blockchain games can be played like this!"
Incremental innovation with Axie Infinity
When it comes to the further future, let’s share a passage that Animoca Brands expressed in the recent renewal of Sky Mavis. They wrote, “Axie Infinity is not just a game, not just a community, it is a A prototype kingdom with a governance system, a large population, and a vibrant economy."
Perhaps, in the future, Sky Mavis will lead Axie Infinity to a higher dimension, including a better governance system, which will enhance the decentralization of the game and improve the playability of the Axie Infinity game itself, thereby attracting more Mainstream players join in.
Of course, they can follow the growth of Crypto and open up more interesting directions, including horizontal expansion (expanding the Crypto group), and vertical digging (expanding players in the game market).
In addition, the highly original characters in the Axie Infinity game may usher in IP creation like "boring ape" due to the expansion of the user market. After all, the boring ape has rushed out of the NFT itself, so why not Axie Infinity?
As for the Sky Mavis team itself, we need to be clear that Axie Infinity is just one successful game it has developed so far.
No one knows if they will create a more interesting and economical GameFi with the accumulation of experience in the future. Perhaps this is also the reason why capital still chooses to overweight after a major hacking incident.
After all, instead of investing in an emerging team that has not experienced setbacks, it is better to invest in a team that already has some successful experience. This is the answer from the perspective of investors and a story that the public likes.
Thus, the groundbreaking of Sky Mavis not only shapes the present, but will also create the stitches of the future, which is inspired by Axie Infinity.
But it does not mean that Sky Mavis can create the same success, so will the GameFi spirit or "P2E" game method advocated by Sky Mavis be the future of the industry?
This will be the final point of thought in this article, and it is also a sign to put Sky Mavis and Axie Infinity in the long history.
Is P2E the future of gaming?
Axie Infinity co-founder Jiho once said, “If we can build a community of millions of blockchain-educated users by bringing in new people, then we can build a behemoth that swallows other products.”
The implication of this sentence tells us that what Axie Infinity needs is not to create a unique game, but to build a great community.
This point goes back to traditional games, because the prosperity of a game community determines how far it can go in the end.
The key to "P2E" games is "Play" on the one hand, but "Earn" on the other hand. Without the blessing of "E", the playability of the game will determine the final orientation.
Therefore, we have to answer a question, from the perspective of the game industry itself, whether "Play" is important or "Earn" is important.
Perhaps, the development of GameFi in the past six months has told us the answer. Just "Earn" is not enough to support another Axie Infinity. Only with the premise of Paly can the next Axie Infinity be created.
Although Sky Mavis has almost created and defined a new market, this field is not a maverick innovation, but the result of integration. Therefore, we are optimistic about GameFi with playability in the medium and long term, rather than a few JPGs. The completed blockchain game is ultimately empty.
That's why GameFi investment giant Animoca Brands acquired racing game studio Eden Games last week.
You should know that Eden Games has developed well-known racing games such as Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed and F1 Mobile Racing.
The purpose of its acquisition is to use Eden Games' professional knowledge and capabilities to develop the ecology of the racing chain game REVV Motorsport.
But now, we have come to a point where the old and the new alternate. Whether it is a new player like Axie Infinity or a large number of traditional game giants, a handshake or a hug between the two is the bright future of the game industry.
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