What Happened to Axie Infinity? A Timeline of P2E's Biggest Crash

For a stretch in 2021, Axie Infinity was the crypto game. At its November 2021 peak it hit roughly 2.7 million daily active users, a number BeInCrypto and several other outlets tracked from Sky Mavis's own dashboards. AXS, the governance token, ran to an all-time high of $164.90 on November 6, 2021, according to CoinGecko. SLP, the reward token you actually farmed by playing, had already touched somewhere around $0.34 to $0.40 earlier that year (trackers disagree on the exact decimal).

And in the Philippines, it wasn't a game. It was a paycheck.

The "scholar" model let players who couldn't afford a starter team borrow Axies from a manager and split the SLP they earned, usually giving the manager half or more. During lockdowns, people paid rent with this. That's the human weight of the story, and it's why the crash mattered far beyond the token charts.

Here's the uncomfortable bit. The collapse wasn't bad luck. The economy was built to eventually eat itself.

SLP had no supply cap. You earned it by playing, and it was supposed to leave circulation when players spent it breeding new Axies. But the breeding sink was way too weak to soak up how fast SLP got minted, and scholars mostly cashed their SLP straight out to buy groceries instead of burning it on breeding. New tokens flooded in, almost nothing left. That's a hyperinflation machine.

As early as October 2021, analysts at Naavik warned the economy was "fundamentally unsustainable," because the value of new Axies and SLP was "propped up by new players putting fresh money into the game." When new signups slow, the whole thing deflates. If you've read our breakdown of the red flags that mark an unsustainable P2E economy, this is the textbook version: rewards funded by the next wave of buyers, not by the game itself.

Analysts called it in real time. This wasn't hindsight.

This is the chapter that reframes everything.

Scholar earnings cratered first. By November 2021, typical scholar income had already dropped below the Philippines' own minimum wage line, Forkast News reported. Take Samerson Orias, one of the scholars TIME followed: he was pulling around $29 a week after his manager's cut, working as a takoyaki cook until midnight and then grinding Axie until dawn to hit his daily SLP quota.

By June 2022 a top-tier scholar was earning roughly $0.31 a day, down from $30 and up at the peak. Players below a certain rank earned nothing at all.

SLP followed the earnings down. The SLP crash took the token from its 2021 highs to around a penny by January 2022, and it kept sliding toward fractions of a cent after that.

And the players just left. Here's the stat that should be on every "the hack killed Axie" thread: by March 28, 2022, daily active users had already fallen 45%, from the 2.7 million peak to about 1.48 million, according to IBTimes. That's the day before the Ronin hack was even disclosed. The play to earn collapse was well underway while the bridge was still sitting there, quietly compromised, and nobody had noticed yet.

Then the actual disaster.

On March 23, 2022, attackers drained roughly $625 million from the Ronin bridge, Axie's Ethereum sidechain: 173,600 ETH plus 25.5 million USDC. The genuinely damning detail, per CoinDesk, is that Sky Mavis didn't notice for six days. The theft only surfaced on March 29 when a user tried to withdraw and couldn't. Weeks later the U.S. Treasury tied the stolen funds to North Korea's state-sponsored Lazarus Group, an attribution Chainalysis independently traced on-chain.

It was, at the time, one of the largest crypto thefts ever. We wrote the full technical breakdown of how the validator keys got compromised in our Ronin bridge hack explainer, so I won't re-litigate the whole thing here.

The point for this timeline: the hack was an accelerant, not the spark. It poured lighter fluid on an economy that was already burning down on its own.

The damage after the hack was brutal and pretty even-handed, which surprised people who assumed the founders just cashed out and dipped.

The Axie NFT floor fell about 99%, from $340.76 to $3.33, per Naavik's follow-up. Not a typo. Land NFTs dropped 94%. And Sky Mavis's own paper wealth in AXS collapsed roughly 81% in seven months, right alongside everyone else's. The crash didn't spare the house.

Sky Mavis reimbursed hacked users, relaunched combat as a free-to-play version called Origins that scrapped the pay-to-enter wall, and tried to rebuild without the scholar-dependency time bomb.

So here's what happened to Axie Infinity after the dust settled. Short version: no, it's not dead, but don't confuse "alive" with "back."

Sky Mavis never shut it down. The studio reported around $4 million in treasury revenue in 2024 and is now betting its next decade on a new MMO, Atia's Legacy, targeting a 2026 launch, according to BitPinas. The current player base sits somewhere in the tens of thousands, with estimates ranging from roughly 52,000 to 129,000 daily depending on which source and counting method you trust. Against a 2.7 million peak, that's a game running on maybe a few percent of its old numbers.

So it's not a zero. It's just not a comeback yet either. If you're wondering where the crowd went, we rounded up the better browser crypto games worth playing in 2026 instead.

I'm not going to pretend one game "fixes" P2E. But it's worth naming which specific Axie failure modes are just design choices, because they are.

Axie's economy needed a constant flow of new buyers to hold value, and scholars had to spend real money to enter before earning a cent. Compare that to a free-start model like Stellarch, where a brand-new account drafts a full legal team from a virtual ghost catalog with zero card purchase. Nobody's return depends on the next person buying in.

Axie's SLP economy was also something you had to take on faith, right up until it wasn't worth anything. Stellarch runs on seeded-RNG determinism instead: every match replays byte-identically from its seed, so you can verify any result from the seed yourself rather than trusting the operator's word.

And the Ronin hack was fundamentally a bridge-and-wallet problem. Stellarch lets you sign up with just email or Google, no wallet required to play, which sidesteps that entire class of risk for anyone who just wants to try the game.

Honest caveat, because that's the whole point of DegenLoot: Stellarch is a closed alpha with a waitlist right now, not an open live game. Crypto withdrawals are off and ranked earning isn't switched on, so nobody's promising you a paycheck. What's live is the fair, free-start play itself. If that's the part of crypto gaming you actually care about, join the Stellarch waitlist and grab early access. That's the pitch. No moon math attached.