Axie Infinity Plunged to 16-Month Lows, Active Players Drained Massively

AXS, the main utility token of the popular play-to-earn (P2E) online game Axie Infinity, has been seeing a downward spiral for a while now. The price of the token has just dropped to a 16-month low level of $9.08 at the time of writing, per CoinMarketCap (CMC) data.

According to CMC, the last time that AXS touched the $9 mark was on July 7, 2021. Furthermore, the 58th largest crypto asset — with a market cap of roughly $880 million — has also lost many active players on its non-fungible token (NFT)-based online video game.

According to live data provided by ActivePlayer, the number of Axie Infinity average monthly players has, similarly, dropped to 22-month lows. The online video game — developed by the Vietnamese firm Sky Mavis — had around 701,000 average active players in the past 30 days.

Why this immense drop?

Per ActivePlayer data, the number of active players started dropping since the $625 million Ronin Bridge hack — an Ethereum sidechain for Axie Infinity — in March this year. 

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Moreover, according to a U.Today report, the Ronin Bridge hack was tagged as the largest decentralized finance (DeFi) exploit in history — beating the $611 million Poly Network theft from last year.

The Ronin Bridge exploit was linked to Lazarus Group, a North Korean group of cyber criminals, per a U.Today report.

While the downward movement for AXS continues, Axie Infinity plans to release more than 100 million AXS tokens — “owned by insiders and early investors” — on Oct. 24, according to Altcoin Daily.

Axie Infinity: Almost 8% of the total $AXS supply, owned by insiders and early investors, will be unlocked on Oct. 24 👀📉 pic.twitter.com/YrDHDMFgKo

— Altcoin Daily (@AltcoinDailyio) October 20, 2022