With the recent rise of Big Time and Fusionist, the GameFi market is heating up again. So, what new activities are Axie and StepN – two once famous projects in the market – doing? Let’s find out with Weakhand in this article.
Before jumping into the article, everyone can refer to some of the following articles to understand better.
- What is Axie Infinity (AXS)? The game started the explosive Play To Earn movement
- What is StepN (GMT)? StepN cryptocurrency overview
- What is GameFi? GameFi’s operating mechanism
Axie And StepN Are Trying To Return To The Golden Age
During the GameFi boom in 2021/2022, to point out the most impressive names on the market, it is impossible not to mention Axie and StepN – two projects that, despite having very different development directions, have both achieved success. successful and attracted a large number of participants in just a short time.
Axie leads the Play To Earn game movement with the story of playing games to make money, even a lot of money with the famous story of Filipinos playing games and being able to buy a house during the difficult covid pandemic. For StepN, it is the Move To Earn trend. Although it is not the first name to appear on the market, the launch at the right time and the right strategy has helped StepN explode and attract hundreds of people. Thousands of people joined after only 1 month since launch. GMT token and shoe price also witnessed rapid growth dozens of times.
Axie Infinity – The game that started the explosive Play To Earn movement
StepN – Open up the new Move To Earn trend
After a while, at the present time Axie and StepN can no longer maintain their unique position in the market but are replaced by new projects such as Big Time, Shrapnel or the recently launched project, Fusionist. With the change in the general market, Axie and StepN also strive with different strategies to help the project return to its former glory.
For Axie, we see 3 things: On the one hand they are trying to develop Ronin Network, on the other hand they are upgrading the classic game Axie Classic and trying to expand their influence on the traditional Web2 market through through IP sales. As for StepN, it is focusing on launching their second game Gas Hero and using GMT token as an in-game token. During the general recovery of the market, the two tokens AXS and GMT also witnessed good growth, reaching about twice the bottom.
Axie Aims for Three Axis, Ronin Network Witnesses Strong Growth
Since September 2023, we clearly see Axie Infinity’s focus on their 3 main areas. The first is Ronin Network – a Blockchain platform initially created to serve the development of Axie Infinity that has now oriented itself to become a Blockchain Games and is actively attracting game projects across the market. Enter Ronin. We can mention some typical names recently such as Pixels, Apeiron or Wild Forest.
According to Coingecko data, the RON token price also had impressive growth from the bottom of 0.4 USD set in October 2023 to a peak of 1.8 USD, increasing more than 4 times in just 2 months. In addition to token growth, Ronin’s onchain data is also very good. According to Jef Zirlin – Co Founder of Ronin and Axie Infinity posted on his X platform on December 9, 2023 that the number of monthly active wallet addresses on Ronin Network has reached 572,000 and the number of active wallet addresses Daily movements have reached 144,000.
RON token has witnessed impressive growth in recent times
At the present time, Ronin Network is continuously making upgrades to improve performance on its network. In October 2023, Ronin announced the launch of the Lucas upgrade (v2.6.2) and the Shillin hard fork on its mainnet. This version of Lucas implements Optimistic Fast Finality (REP – 0003) and many improvements to the REP – 0002 protocol. Among them, the latest fast finalization mechanism proposed by REP – 0003 will greatly increase the speed Confirm transaction on Ronin.
On the other hand, Ronin Network is also actively cooperating with famous game studios and many famous games to attract them to the Ronin Network ecosystem. First, at the end of October, the game Pixels moved from Polygon to Ronin or most recently, Apeiron also arrived at Ronin. Some recent rumors, The Sandbox – a famous Metaverse game is also planning to move to Ronin Network.
In addition to expanding games on its ecosystem, Ronin is also actively building additional infrastructure. We can mention some outstanding activities such as:
- In mid-November 2023, Ronin launched the Ronin domain name service (Ronin Name Service) and was publicly sold to all users.
- On December 1, 2023, Ronin Wallet also partnered with BinancePay to allow users to exchange BTC, ETH and other assets held on Binance with assets on the Ronin Blockchain such as AXS, SLP and USDC.
- On December 6, 2023, DeFi protocol Impossible Finance will also deploy Launchpad on Ronin Network and this will allow new projects to deploy their own ERC 20 tokens on Ronin Network.
In addition to Ronin Network, Axie Infinity is also having active activities to bring Axie Classic back with some updates on new mechanisms to attract more players. In addition, in recent times, they have also followed the example of Pudgy Penguins, Doodles and other Blue Chip NFTs in declaring their IP in the real world through the Merch Store online store, used to sell physical products. The IP is Axie Pets.
In addition to selling official physical products, Axie Infinity also tries to go down the UGC route, encouraging owners of specific Axie NFTs to create and sell their own products. Axie NFT owners can now use their NFT characters as mascots for various types of businesses such as coffee shops, comics, restaurants or Axie-themed toy lines.
To reach more users, Axie Infinity also announced a partnership with giant Grab in the Philippine branch to launch a reward program for users, allowing them to access the Merch Store in the Grab application to Purchase.
Collaboration between Axie Infinity and Grab
Currently, Axie is becoming one of the most prominent Blockchains in the GameFi segment. Recently, OKX launched the Futures contract for Ronin and many users in the community are looking forward to the RON Token being listed on larger exchanges such as Binance or Coinbase.
StepN – Focus on the new game Gas Hero
Compared to Axie Infinity’s multifaceted approach, StepN seems to be focusing more on its second self-developed game, Gas Hero. In July 2023, the development team behind StepN Find Satoshi Lab first announced plans to launch a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game called Gas Hero.
The game is launched on Polygon and stated that they will not launch a new token but will use StepN’s GMT as the in-game token. In addition, StepN’s generous support for Gas Hero also reflects its importance. When the game sought creators for their character images in the game, the Find Satoshi Lab development team gave away about 2M GMT tokens and promised to pay 2% royalties.
Less than a year since development, Gas Hero launched the community beta test version on November 27, 2023. This testing round is open to a total of 3,000 users in the community. It is known that the official version of the game is expected to be released in December 2023.
Gas Hero – Find Satoshi Lab’s second official game after StepN
Gas Hero puts all players into a social system set up in a tree structure where there are 9 players per settlement, 9 settlements per guild, and 9 guilds per region. Gas Hero hopes to attract millions of users to the game so this scale needs to be considered when designing levels such as cities, jurisdictions, guilds, settlements and bases.
In addition, the core design in the game lies in resource supply and demand. There are many types of resources in Gas Hero, and each resource has its own specific consumption requirements. How to grasp the cycle and change of each resource will become an important link in the market economy.
According to feedback from Community Beta test participants, the Gas Hero game has a richer story and modes to play for money. According to Snap Finger’s analysis, Gas Hero’s current playing model is very similar to mobile games “Princess Connect Re:Dive” of the famous Japanese game company Cygames.
It can be seen that after experiencing a death spiral with the Ponzi economic model, StepN is making many efforts to revive the GMT ecosystem including launching the Dooar decentralized exchange and NFT Marketplace Mooar but both did not achieve the desired success.
The launch of Gas Hero comes at a time of recovery for the entire Crypto market. Increasing use cases for GMT with its use in new games promises to create more motivation for price increases if Gas Hero is successful and attracts users.
summary
For Axie and StepN, the huge user base that these two projects accumulated in the previous cycle is their biggest advantage. With the rise of the new GameFi wave like Big Time or Fusionist, the current Blockchain game structure has changed. This makes Axie and StepN need a new approach if they want to maintain their position in the industry.
