Axie Infinity Case Study to $50/Day

Since a lot of my projects are on content creation these days I wanted to do something a little different. I don't normally talk about crypto because it's just not something I'm really that excited about. Buy a coin, wait to see if it increases. I was waiting for a project that actually looked interesting.

Or, as my girlfriend would put it, I spent $3,000 on Pokémon so I could play games and call it ‘work’.

She’s only half right.

If I’d started this journal a month ago - that $3,000 would probably have bought me a house by now. They did something like $50,000,000 in a month so this is some late FOMO action you guys are seeing here but GME was good to me so if I burn my money, at least you guys get to see that.

If you haven’t heard of it Axie Infinity is a crypto-based ‘Play to Earn’ game. I was looking for some speculative investments in the NFT space and I got interested in NFTs with actual use. This one has been all over the news recently because of the insane money in the last couple of months. I'm not at all getting in at the start, but I do still think it's early days and there's potentially a lot of room for the game to grow.



Blockchain and gaming seem like an obvious mix to me. My first online money was buying and selling digital currency and items so I feel pretty at home with this.

Gamers are no strangers to paying money for digital items. If they actually owned those items and could not only trade them but actually earn money playing the game... I can see a case for this idea disrupting the gaming market. It might not be Axie, but they are some of the earliest movers and the game is pretty polished for this early stage.

I won't get into the nitty-gritty details. If you're interested in crypto you've probably already seen it. I do have a video on why I wanted to invest rather than just going to the casino and sticking it all on red or XRP.


The video will get into it in more detail but the game gives you several potential ways to earn:

• There are two currencies within the game $SLP and $AXS that you could buy and hold if you think the game is going to grow (staking to come later).
• You can actually play the game and be paid every 2 weeks (or pay someone else to play for you).
• The creatures within the game itself (called Axie’s) are NFTs and I bought mine for about $300 a pop. I can hold them and hope they increase in value or breed them to sell the newly minted NFTs.

I don't think holding a bunch of coins and waiting to see what happens makes for an interesting journey so we're going to take a slightly more active approach and either outsource the farming of coins or by breeding and selling the NFTs themselves.

I don't spend much time in the game itself. Since starting I have spent more time on spreadsheets. Far more fun.

So we have an overall P/L tracker:

The TL;DR is we've invested $3,151 so far to get our first couple of Axie's and a breeding chain setup to allow us to produce and sell more.



And some calculations on breeding vs farming:

The TL;DR here is farming isn't worth it at the moment and we're already making about $36/day breeding and selling Axie's to the marketplace.




I have two potential strategies in mind for this case study.

If the NFT marketplace keeps at this level then we’re already on about $35/day by breeding and selling the Axie’s and that requires about 30 seconds a week to click a few buttons. If the marketplace changes and the breeding margins are squeezed then it's probably more worthwhile to scale the size of the teams and pay someone to actually play the game for us and farm the tokens to sell. This is common within the game known as a 'scholarship' it's people who want to play without putting in $1,000 to get their team started.

It's not going to be hard to find a kid who plays games anyway and wants to earn a few bucks doing it.

The numbers on the spreadsheet above are accurate at the moment but it's a volatile market so who knows what it's going to end up looking like.

There have been some changes to the game right before I joined which I expect will also change the marketplace. I've gone into them (and the strategy in more detail) in the first update video:


But the TL;DR is the marketplace price might drop before we're able to start scaling our breeding pairs but it might improve the value of actually playing the game so we'll quickly pivot to that.

I've got the breeding started now and over the next couple of days, we'll update on the price movements and maybe start setting up farming teams for the tokens if it looks like it's going that way.

Obvious Disclaimer: Obviously I’m an idiot and this is not financial advice. Don’t YOLO into something because you want to make money with a game. This is an investment I’m completely prepared to lose.

Interesting

Nice detailed post! You should check out other axie infinity related threads. There is a lot of potential with this game an others alike, but only if you're willing to spend big money on them. If you ever open your scholarship, give me a pm cause I'm looking to find a open spot in a scholarship.

good job with case study

Prize Poet said:

Interesting

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It’s a bit different. Nice break from constantly working on content projects.

DarkStarzz said:

Nice detailed post! You should check out other axie infinity related threads. There is a lot of potential with this game an others alike, but only if you're willing to spend big money on them. If you ever open your scholarship, give me a pm cause I'm looking to find a open spot in a scholarship.

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digitaImind said:

please make me a scholar, you will not regret it that is for sure!

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If I go down the scholarship route (if SLP farming makes more sense than breeding) I’ll give BHW members first dibs. I think we’ll need a JV thread or something for that but we’ll see what the market is like.

Fair warning though I don’t have time to be chasing people so for scholars going AWOL they’ll be forfeiting their cut of the next payout. I’ve been looking through what other teams are doing there and I’ll cover the scholarship plan in the next update if that’s the strategy I go with.

chrono01 said:

good job with case study

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Cheers. Now I just need to work on my FOMO self control.

After finishing my first week with Axie Infinity (and spending more time in spreadsheets than in the game itself) it was time to look at the market and see how my first breeding chain was doing.

There’s been a couple of changes in the first couple of days and you can see my full update here:


Price Changes and AXS Staking

To start with, the AXS prices shot up I’m assuming because they just announced the AXS staking going live and there was almost $1 billion staked in there already.

I’ve only a couple of AXS coins on the Ronin wallet but I staked the spare 2 I have until the next breeding cycle in another 5 days' time.

Sold Some Axies At a Loss

This is the bit some won’t like.

I sold all of the Axie’s that weren’t part of the breeding chain. One or two at a profit (we’ll get to that) but I know some of them were at a slight loss.

I know some people are going to hate this idea but it was a calculated decision and a hedge against the market going down.

If the Axie market doesn’t go down then the breeding chain we started a few weeks ago is more than enough to cover the slight loss from selling the extras and I have the extra capital to start a second breeding chain.

To hedge against that — I wanted to work with the assumption that the NFT market will go down. In that case, I can rebuy the Axie’s at a lower price and have a bigger team for the same amount.

Flipping NFTs

I actually did this by mistake with some of mine but I’ve noticed people doing it intentionally. Some of the Axie’s I sold were immediately listed for a higher price and I have seen cases where similar NFTs with the exact same stats are selling for $1–200 differently on the same day.

If you watched the trends of what players and farmers wanted for their teams and watched the value on something like axie.tech/axie-pricing you might be able to pick up a few deals.

There’s potentially a market here for picking up deals and just flipping the NFTs and that’s something you could even automate but that’s a little beyond my workload right now.


The first generation breed is now finished and I think I might have even underpriced them because we sold very quickly. The next cycle has begun and I'll get the sheet updated for the next update.

I'm definitely behind on an update for this so I'll bang one out quickly.

Let's start with the bit everyone wants to see.

We're up about $700 so far.

Breeding

Overall, good. We've made a profit of a few hundred bucks however the market has gone up so even if we did nothing we'd have made that. Our first-generation breed was a crazy start. You can look at the genes and get an idea of how your breed will turn out and the odds were great to get the cards we wanted but - it didn't work out.

Skills mutations changed the cards and I don't know the game well enough to know how badly. I sold them at a rough market price and they went very quickly so I probably sold them a little too cheap.



Still, that generation made a profit and I rolled that into a replacement breeder to continue the chain. 5 days later we had two more and no mutations this time.

The market is up a bit so we're selling the breeding pair at higher than expected which is good.

The coin prices have increased so my breeding costs are currently up but (so far) the market has risen as well.

We're still averaging about $40/day from the breeding but this doesn't account for the gas prices yet - I'm going to have to transfer more SLP in and I'm down to 2 AXS as well so I'll do another breeding set then I'll need more there as well.

I need to learn when to time the gas times better. If I pay $20 to get a few weeks worth of breeding sent in - that's an easy margin to eat. I don't want to hold too much in there at once however as it's stilla crazy volatile market.

I am tempted to scale up the breeding pool and try and double these numbers with a little more diversity into another breeding type as well but I'm going to hold off for a while. I've no need to take profit out so whatever we earn can be rolled back in - if breeding stays profitable I'll keep it going.

Flipping Floor Axies

I screwed around with this a little.


While watching TV I bought a few axie's that hit the market and had sold for more recently. Made $40ish and I think there's only one left to sell.

You could definietely look at automation for this kind of thing. I've no doubt at all that it doesn't already exist. Even just some alerts to spot deals for you. I was tempted to get more into this but I've too many other projects going on to fall deeper into the NFT rabbit hole.

As a hedge to this I figured if the Axie's didn't sell there's still a big demand for scholarships so even with a sub-par team if I cut down the SLP expectations I can still throw them into farming:

(I'd say those numbers are pretty conservative. If you pay a little bit of attention to the Axie's you're buying you can probably expect more SLP than this).

How in the world did I miss this journey

Following

I'd loaded up to try and mint a Mekaverse NFT last night which is handy. Going to YOLO a bit and load 6,000 SLP into the account which is enough for 20 days of breeding. At 40/day that's $800 profit so that'll cover the $100-150 gas fees I'm going to have to pay.

Starting a new breeding cycle and will check in again next week.

TheVigilante said:

How in the world did I miss this journey

Following

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It's a crypto journey. Not usually my style but I wanted something a bit different.

Was you lucky enough to get a meka? I wasn’t

whothefisalex said:

Was you lucky enough to get a meka? I wasn’t

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Sadly not. Considering the money at play I’m sure there were a shit ton of bots on the raffle so my hopes weren’t high.

Best of luck, following this journey

Hope you make some good profits. As I don't understand anything in this stuff , it will be something new to learn.

try to use axie freak extension to check more or your axies genes D, R1 and R2

Looks like a promising journey, happy to follow!

I’m slow on updating case studies lately I’ve bitten off a couple of projects at once. Luckily this one is pretty passive although I really do think there’s an opportunity to flip floor Axies for anyone with a few spare hours familiar with GraphQL.

Current breeding cycle ends in a day or two and I’ll do an update. Hoping the bridge between Binance and Ronin works because I’m going to need some AXS in there and would like to avoid the midweek gas fees.

Leader777 said:

Hope you make some good profits. As I don't understand anything in this stuff , it will be something new to learn.

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Stumbled into Alex Becker’s YouTube last night. Love or hate the guy, he’s not dumb and is bullish as hell on crypto within gaming. It might not be Axie - but it’ll be something. Worth looking into.

vahoo23 said:

try to use axie freak extension to check more or your axies genes D, R1 and R2

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Yep, of course.

I’m not spending $1,500 on a 100% pure genes but I’m like 90%+ to get the cards I want.

I've not been great at keeping up with case studies lately. Too many projects on at once I guess I kind of burned out a little.

I'll get a proper update together but this project is still running.


This was the last month or so. It really should have been higher but there's been some problems in the setup and it's not been a huge priority lately.

I moved away from breeding (I'll get into why later) and moved to flipping instead. It's not a pile of money but there's some room to grow there if I make a little time and it's a decent passive return for ETH I was holding anyway.

This eventually led me into some projects on OpenSea as well. From copytrading profitable traders to mass bidding on NFT collections based on rarity. It's been a fun project and made some extra pocket money.

Compound further by investing in more crypto games.

Splinterlands for one is easy to automate and market, Illuvium is big in the up and coming side of things.

Interesting journey thread, all the best!

I think you are too late to axie game, but maybe are profits to be made

good luck