The $625 million hack on Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge was seen as the beginning of its woes as hundreds of thousands of players started leaving the platform. However, the cracks had started showing way before the hack, and as a new report reveals, thousands of players were plunging into debt playing the game, many of them from the Philippines.
The report by Time cited interviews with over a dozen Filipino Axie players, many of whom have had their lives wrecked by the game. Most were introduced by friends with the promise that they would earn five times more playing the game than they did with their day jobs. For some, this was true, but Axie’s unsustainable (even Ponzi-like) model finally caught up with them, and they lost way more than they ever made.
One of them, 26-year-old Samerson Orias, told Time he was lured by promises that he could make up to $600 a month, up from the PHP4,000 ($80) he was making from selling takoyaki (octopus balls).
Soon, he got into the game and spent hours playing with his cartoon monster. For some time, he earned some good money and started playing into the wee hours of the night after selling his takoyaki. His battles with other cartoon monsters resulted in him earning Smooth Love Potions (SLP), the native token of the platform, which he would then trade for pesos.
However, it would later go downhill for Orias, as it has for hundreds of thousands others in the Philippines and beyond.
For one, the entire model was based on SLP and its…
