"Chain game king" returns? Learn about Axie Infinity's new on-chain upgrade system, AXP

Written by: WILLIAM M. PEASTER

Compilation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Axie Infinity has just launched its on-chain upgrade system, AXP. This new mechanism is not only of great significance to Axie Infinity itself, but also has potential impact on the NFT ecosystem as a whole.

First, let’s review Axie Infinity…

Axie Infinity is a turn-based tactical card battle game where players compete against each other by forming teams of creatures called Axies. “Axie Classic” is the first official release of the game and will run for 21 seasons from December 2019 to June 2022.

Axie Infinity: Origins is the next evolution of the series, starting in April 2022.

Origins provides a new adventure mode (player vs. bot) and arena mode (player vs. player) experience, and forms the basis for several new game mechanics, including free starting Axies, equipable trinkets and runes, and more .

Origins Season 1 begins in September 2022, and as of July 2023, Season 5 is about to begin.

In December 2022, Axie Infinity announced Axie Core, a vision for the fundamental experience of breeding, raising, equipping and upgrading Axies, all centered around “Axies have on-chain genetics that can be permanently changed by on-chain actions.” code".

If the announcement of Axie Core was the outline of a vision, last week’s launch of Axie experience points is the next big step in realizing that vision, with Axies transforming from passive assets into digital creatures that can evolve through in-game activity.

What is AXP

“Now there are millions of Axies. We We’ve always seen Axies as an important part of who we are: digital pets, digital friends. To truly make this happen, we needed to create a system where you could inject your time, effort, energy and skills into your Axies Medium. This is a system of vertical progression rather than horizontal progression, depth rather than breadth. AXP lays the foundation for Axie Progression. At its core, Axie Progression is about channeling time, effort, skill and resources into making our Axies stronger , cooler, rarer and more personal." — From Lunacian’s perspective on AXP

Axie Experience Points (AXP) is a new on-chain upgrade mechanism to facilitate Axie progress and component upgrades.

By playing Origins, AXP is earned, with each winning team’s Axies earning 150 AXP per Ranked Battle. Initially, each Axie can get up to 4,500 AXP per day. These points are non-transferable and tied to each Axie.

These points are used for leveling up, an evolutionary process that syncs Axie’s level on-chain, increases its level cap, and allows for parts to be upgraded.

Upgrades can be activated through transactions on the Ronin sidechain when Axies reach levels 9, 19, and 29, and these syncs require a total of 13,310, 110,480, and 334,170 AXP, respectively.

The introduction of AXP and Axie upgrades makes Axies dynamic NFTs that can improve and personalize over time, marking a shift from passive characters to characters that evolve and personalize through the game experience.

Additionally, Axie creator Sky Mavis can now use AXP as a strategic tool in its ecosystem to incentivize desired in-game behaviors, such as completing more dungeons and rewarding third-party game developers for achieving specific milestones .

AXP and the big picture

I used to work at JPG, an NFT management platform, and we developed a dynamic “Canonicon” NFT with a built-in JXPG upgrade system. The more you curate, the more experience points you get, you can customize your Canonicon and more, but we embed this system directly into the smart contract.

So, from my personal perspective, I find Axie Infinity’s AXP interesting on multiple levels - firstly, it’s crucial to making the gameplay of the Axie ecosystem deeper, a factor that shouldn’t be underestimated, But it also provides a common blueprint for other NFT games and NFT projects to adopt their own XP systems even if they don’t have such systems embedded directly in them at launch.

Assets like Axies are stored on Ronin, while Origins game logic happens off-chain. So, with the introduction of AXP and upgrade sync, Sky Mavis is using transactions to regularly on-chain the game’s progress (currently levels 9, 19, and 29).

This kind of system can be generalized and applied to new games, or added to existing projects, I believe we will see more similar efforts, because Axie Infinity is still the largest Web3 game, and many other game projects will investigate Its approach to AXP.

Over time, this approach to on-chain upgrades is likely to become the norm not only in Web3 gaming, but also in other areas of the space, from curation to PFPs to Web3 social. I think that approach will become as obvious as Uniswap-style decentralized exchanges are to us now. In a similar way, I think the arrival of AXP marks a turning of the tide, and soon we may all be upgrading on-chain in various ways.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for AXP to be offered in other Axie ecosystem games such as Axie DoLL, Homeland, Raylights, and more.