Reviewed by our editorial team. Last updated November 2026. This page may show ads; they never change a score. This review is for information only and is not financial advice. Tokens and NFTs are volatile, and you can lose everything you spend.
Many people still treat Axie Infinity AXS $0.8381 ▲ +0.7% as a way to earn money from a game. In 2026 that’s the hardest case to make. Competitive Season 16 of Axie Infinity: Classic, which began on August 12, 2026, was the last one with direct Sky Mavis development, P2E funding and Bounty Board quests. AXS traded at $1.05 on 2026-10-17. Its all-time high was $164.90, set on 2021-11-06.
If you mainly want to collect Axies and fight with them, there’s more here for you. Below we cover the Classic handover, the other games under the Axie name, the token figures, the company and its money, and the losses players have reported.
The basics in one table
| Genre | Card, Casual, MMORPG, Multiplayer, Strategy |
|---|---|
| Blockchain | Ronin, Ethereum |
| Developer | Sky Mavis |
| Status | live |
| Token | AXS |
Axie Infinity has its own page in our games catalog, and you can compare it with every other title in our ranked list of crypto games.
The short answer: who it suits
Axie Infinity works best for someone who enjoys collecting and battling Axies and counts any token reward as extra. Every Axie is an NFT you can trade or sell, and the same creatures are the units you take into card-driven battles. Ownership is the strongest reason to play.
Anyone looking for steady income should skip it. We couldn’t verify any current reward rate. The newest Sky Mavis game, Atia’s Legacy, is still listed on the official site at pre-registration.
Classic changes hands
BitPinas reported that a Sky Mavis executive confirmed Season 16 as the final Classic season with direct development, P2E funding and Bounty Board quests. The season’s leaderboard ran from August 12 to September 2, 2026, and its mini tournaments finished on September 10, 2026.
Since September 10, 2026, Classic has been under Axie Governance. The ecosystem fund pays for it, and the Community Treasury will oversee it later. Classic’s rewards and balance changes now go through community governance, and no studio-run P2E program sits behind them. BitPinas wrote that active players and scholars will notice the handover in their wallets first. We found no public record of how players reacted.
One brand, several games
Axie Infinity is now a hub for several games, and Sky Mavis no longer develops the original card battler directly. The official site lists four Sky Mavis titles: Axie Infinity: Origins, Axie Infinity: Classic, Axie Infinity: Terrariums and Atia’s Legacy, which is still taking pre-registrations. Two third-party games sit next to them, Axie Quest and Axie: Den of Mysteries. The site calls Axies tickets to new games and new content as each one arrives.
Outside studios are allowed in by design. The whitepaper says all art assets and Axie genetic data are open to third parties, so community developers can make their own tools and experiences.
Some of those developers are now being paid. The Axie Vibeathon, reported on September 2, 2026, asks entrants to build playable Axie games with AI tools and runs through November 5. Each entrant gets a Builder Resource Kit with Axie assets, engine guides and Discord support. Every Round 2 finalist receives 250 USDC to spend on AI tooling. This is the first edition, and the organisers want it to lead to more. For Axie owners, the number of games their creatures can enter depends partly on contests like this one.
What a match looks like
You collect Axies, breed them and battle with them. Fights are turn-based and card-driven against other players, and an Axie’s body parts set which cards it brings to the table. Breeding makes new Axies from ones you already own, and you can keep those for battle or sell them. Because each Axie is a tradable NFT, choosing a team is a strategy decision and a money decision at once.
Starting out
The game runs on Ronin, and Ethereum still comes into play when assets move between chains. The roadmap records a fiat on-ramp arriving on Ronin in May 2021. What it costs to start today isn’t clear from the evidence.
The newcomer reports on record date from 2022. Naavik reported plans for new tutorials and three free starter Axies. A Crypto Briefing review said Origin let people try the game for free, and cautioned: “The game can become repetitive, especially if you’re not interested in competing against other players.” We couldn’t check any recent player opinion.
AXS by the numbers
| Ticker | AXS |
|---|---|
| Price | $0.8397 |
| Past 24 hours | ▼ 3.8% |
| Past 7 days | ▲ 2.0% |
| Market cap | $147.67 million |
| 24h volume | $29.69 million |
| Fully diluted value | $227.06 million |
| Circulating supply | 175,597,599.67 |
| Max supply | 270,000,000 |
| All-time high | $164.90 (2021-11-06) |
Full live price page on egamers.io: AXS price, chart and market data.
AXS contract addresses: Ethereum: 0xbb0e17ef65f82ab018d8edd776e8dd940327b28b; BNB Smart Chain (BEP20): 0x715d400f88c167884bbcc41c5fea407ed4d2f8a0; Solana: HysWcbHiYY9888pHbaqhwLYZQeZrcQMXKQWRqS7zcPK5; Harmony: 0x14a7b318fed66ffdcc80c1517c172c13852865de; plus 4 more.
Any AXS a player earns today is worth a small slice of what the same amount fetched at the 2021 peak. Short-term swings are big too: on 2026-10-17 the token was down 1.8% over 24 hours and 15.6% over 7 days.
Supply that hasn’t been released yet is the biggest risk for a holder. On 2026-10-17, 175.6 million AXS were circulating out of a 270 million maximum, which is 65%. That gap explains why the fully diluted value of $283.7 million is 1.5 times the $184.5 million market cap. About a third of all AXS still has to reach a market that traded $10.1 million in 24 hours on the same day.
What holders get
The AXS page of the whitepaper calls it an ERC-20 governance token for the Axie Universe. Holders can claim rewards for staking, playing and voting, and players can earn it in Axie games and through user-generated content programs. The page says the issuance allocation that pays stakers shrinks over time. It names the Community Treasury, filled by fees from Axie Infinity, as a possible replacement source, and it sets no fixed schedule. Future staking rewards depend on how the Treasury gets used.
Holders have limited say for now. In the first phase of the governance plan, Sky Mavis manages the ecosystem fund, and holder input is limited to lightweight forums, trial voting and non-binding referendums. Real voting power and the long-term reward supply both depend on later phases that the documents don’t schedule.
The token has contract addresses on Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Solana and Harmony, while the game runs on Ronin. The Community Treasury can be viewed on the Ronin block explorer.
How tokens enter and leave the economy
The sources and sinks are written down. What a player actually earns from them today can’t be checked. The official site says Axies can mine tokens through gameplay.
Money coming in
According to the whitepaper, players gain resources in several ways:
- battles that pay leaderboard prizes and Smooth Love Potions (SLP)
- breeding Axies
- collecting and speculating on rare Axies such as Mystics and Origins
- making art and content
- bringing in new players
The AXS page adds staking rewards and AXS earned in Axie games, and says staking issuance would be high early on. The governance page warns that gaming issuance will eventually run dry and need topping up from the Treasury and sponsors.
Money going out
The main sinks feed the Community Treasury: 4.25% of every Axie NFT marketplace transaction, plus the AXS part of the breeding fee. Cosmetic sales, tournament entry fees and licensing are listed as future streams, and nothing shows whether they began. Burning AXS to reduce long-term supply appears only as one option holders could vote for.
When the governance page was written, the Treasury had grown past $1 billion in value. Under Phase 1 it “sits dormant”. Phase 2 needs an Axie game with more than 10 million daily active users, and the evidence doesn’t show that target being reached.
Players once spent heavily. The whitepaper, last updated November 2021, says more than 1 million ETH (over $4 billion) had been spent in the Axie universe. That number comes from the boom years and tells you nothing about what players take home now.
The company and its backers
Sky Mavis builds Axie Infinity. It’s a registered company that raised most of its outside money in 2021 and 2022. Its team page lists it as Sky Mavis Pte Ltd, registration number 201913227N, with Axie Infinity, App.Axie, Ronin, Mavis Market and Mavis Hub as its products. The captured page names no people. You can identify the company behind the game, but the sources don’t say who runs it.
| Date | Round | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-12-03 | Axie Infinity | 860000 | Not listed |
| 2022-04-06 | Series C | 150000000 | Binance Labs, Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm and 3 more |
| 2021-10-04 | Series B | 152000000 | Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, Fabric Ventures and 9 more |
| 2021-05-11 | Series A | 7500000 | Hashed, CMT Digital, Alliance DAO and 9 more |
| 2019-11-07 | Seed | 1500000 | Animoca Brands, Hashed, 500 Global and 1 more |
Round by round
- Seed (2019-11-07): $1.5 million from Animoca Brands, Hashed, 500 Global and ConsenSys.
- Series A (2021-05-11): $7.5 million from a group including Hashed, CMT Digital, Alliance DAO, Fabric Ventures and CoinGecko Ventures.
- Series B (2021-10-04): $152 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, Samsung Next, Accel and VaynerFund.
- Series C (2022-04-06): $150 million from Binance Labs, Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, Accel, Animoca Brands and Dialectic Capital. A 2022 Sky Mavis blog post said Binance led the round, the money was committed within a week of the Ronin Security Breach, and funds would be restored on the Ronin Bridge.
- 2023-12-03: another $860,000, recorded with no round type or investors.
The two biggest rounds landed in 2021 and 2022. The most recent one, from 2023, is a small fraction of either.
Inside the whitepaper
The technology page says the engineering team is made up of technical talent from Vietnam. Many met through coding contests such as the ICPC, and team members speak in Vietnam’s Rust community. The gameplay page, last updated 4 years ago, says the core team will build functionality for Axie-branded assets with the community and that “The Axie universe must be fun above all else”. We found no audit report, so we couldn’t confirm whether the smart contracts have been audited.
Promises kept and still pending
The whitepaper’s roadmap page marks every item through 2022 as done. One of them, the Lunacia SDK Alpha, only counts because it was turned into a builder’s program cookbook. Neither 2023 goal, Axie Part Upgrades and an Axie Merch Store, has a tick.
The completed list includes Origins on Google Play in December 2022, Origins on the App Store in select countries in May 2023, and Mavis Hub Greenlight in July 2023. It ends at September 2023, so it covers neither Atia’s Legacy nor the Classic handover. More recent building comes from the Vibeathon and from third-party games on the official site.
Where players have lost money
Losing money is the biggest risk. AXS and Axie NFTs can lose most of their value, and players have lost real money when that happened.
In 2023 the Taipei Times reported that a 32-year-old who had led a team of Axie players lost 1 million Philippine pesos ($18,031) when crypto prices crashed. He told the paper: “Nothing was left. My Axie Infinity assets became worthless, so I just gave them away”.
The Philippines also produced some of the harshest earlier accounts. In 2022 Time reported on a player whose friend said he was making up to $600 a month from the game, and quoted a player who said: “I felt fatigued all the time. I became more aggressive in every aspect of my life”.
Security
A 2022 Steam forum thread on the Ronin hack explained that the Ronin side-chain depended on 9 validator nodes, and that Sky Mavis had been given special privileges the previous November to sign transactions for Ronin. The studio’s blog later said funds would be restored on the Ronin Bridge. No security audit appears in the sources, so there’s no way to judge how well Ronin is protected now.
Economic doubts
Skepticism about the economy goes back years. A 2022 Naavik deep dive said: “I remain skeptical that Origin addresses the economic sustainability of the game.” Nothing in the evidence shows that concern being settled. We had no NFT price data and found nothing on regulatory action, so we couldn’t measure either risk.
A quiet community feed
| Channel | Size | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Telegram | 5,290 subscribers | latest post 2025-10-15 |
| X | 880,000 followers | latest post 2026-11-05 |
The official Telegram channel had 5,290 subscribers on 2026-10-17. None of its latest 18 posts fell in the 30 days before that reading, and the newest is dated 2025-10-15. Anyone following the main public announcement feed has heard nothing from it for a year.
The last posts
On 2025-10-03, the team thanked players who took part in the first Atia’s Legacy playtest and reminded them to send feedback. That post had 13,200 views. Chat group replies can’t be read, so this is the clearest sign in the evidence of developers answering players.
The final posts in October 2025 pointed players elsewhere. One promoted a Discord AMA with Shade, Pos2 and Jase about how Axie Core fits into the games. It came ahead of The Codex, a battle pass due on October 20th that combined two bounty boards into one Daily Bounty system. Those two posts had 15,400 and 14,400 views, more than the channel’s subscriber count, so they reached people beyond its subscribers.
Older player voices
In a 2021 Bitcointalk thread, one user wrote: “The idea of earning while playing has made me like the game itself.” A year later the mood had soured. In a thread on the game’s future, user jackg wrote: “I think axie is going to end up going down as another shitcoin but there’s probably a good incentive for the developers to make something more and build on it.” Also in 2022, a Steam forum thread about the Ronin hack mocked crypto networks that “keep getting burgled”.
Our sources and their gaps
This review is based on research. Nobody on the team is claiming hours played in Axie Infinity. We read a catalog entry, 2 official pages, the whitepaper and docs, 8 forum or blog pages, the public Telegram channels we could reach, token market data, and team, funding and audit records, all on 2026-10-17. Prices, counts and sizes carry the date they were read wherever the source gives one. Forum posts, community chats and docs pages are often undated, so each is linked where we use it for you to check.
Gaps in what we could verify:
- We couldn’t read any public Reddit discussion of the game.
- We have no NFT market reading for it.
- Only the announcement channel is public, so developer replies in the chat group can’t be seen.
- There’s no public Discord data.
Other games to compare
If card battles are what draws you in, look at Gods Unchained GODS $0.02033 ▼ -5%, Splinterlands SPS $0.003872 ▼ -2% and Alien Worlds TLM $0.001078 ▼ -3.2% next. Our research turned up too little on them for a detailed comparison with Axie Infinity.
What would move the score
The score would rise if Atia’s Legacy moved beyond pre-registration, if Sky Mavis published reward rates players could check, or if the community channels came back to life. It would fall if the ecosystem fund stopped paying for Classic, or if the Vibeathon produced no games people actually play.
Frequently asked questions
Can you make money playing Axie Infinity?
The whitepaper describes rewards from battles, breeding and collecting. The sources give no current reward rates, so earnings can’t be checked, and past reports describe players who lost money when token and Axie prices dropped.
What is AXS used for?
Holders can stake it for rewards and vote on proposals. Players can earn it in some Axie games.
Who makes Axie Infinity?
Sky Mavis develops it. The company also makes Ronin and the App.Axie marketplace.
Which blockchain does Axie Infinity use?
It runs on Ronin, an Ethereum-linked chain Sky Mavis built for the game.
Can independent developers make Axie games?
Yes. The whitepaper opens Axie art and genetic data to third parties, the official site already lists two third-party titles, and Sky Mavis has run builder programs and contests.
Browse our ranked list of crypto games or open Axie Infinity in our catalog.
This guide first appeared on CryptoGames.gg: Axie Infinity Review: Is it still worth playing?.