How to TradeAxie Infinity(AXS)

Trung Nguyen, Aleksander Larsen, and Jeffrey Zirlin founded Sky Mavis in Vietnam and launched the first Axie NFT pre-sale in April 2018. The trio met while playing CryptoKitties and recognized a shared problem: all value in mainstream games belonged to the companies, not the players.

The AXS token launched via Binance Launchpad in November 2020 at a starting price of $0.10 per coin, distributing 11% of the total supply. This marked the first step in making AXS accessible to global investors.

Sky Mavis launched the Ronin mainnet in February 2021 and migrated all Axie NFTs to Ronin in April. As an Ethereum sidechain, it made transactions near-instant and nearly free, solving the gas fee issues on Ethereum that had hindered the game's growth.

During COVID-19, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos turned to Axie Infinity as their main career. At its peak, players from the Philippines accounted for 40% of all users, with some earning more than the country's minimum wage before SLP prices plunged late in the year.

AXS price surged to an all-time high of $165.37 on November 6, 2021. In the same month, Andreessen Horowitz led a $152M Series B round, valuing Sky Mavis at $3 billion, while the game reached nearly 2.8 million daily active users.

On March 23, 2022, hackers stole 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC totaling $625M from the Ronin bridge by obtaining the private keys of 5 out of 9 validator nodes. The FBI linked the event to the North Korean hacker group, Lazarus Group. It was the largest DeFi hack in history at the time.

Sky Mavis raised $150M led by Binance along with a16z, Paradigm, Animoca Brands, and Accel to fully compensate victims of the Ronin hack. The Ronin bridge reopened on June 28, 2022, after passing three audits.

Sky Mavis launched the Axie Infinity Governance Portal in May 2024, allowing AXS holders to officially participate in voting on policies and ecosystem direction. This was a significant step toward the decentralization promised from the beginning.