What happened to Axie Infinity? The SLP collapse, the Ronin hack and the Atia's Legacy reboot

What happened to Axie Infinity, in short

This article is editorial reporting, not financial advice, and it makes no statements about token prices going forward. Axie Infinity did not disappear, but the version of it that millions of people played for income largely did. Three things happened in sequence: an in-game reward token lost its value, the game's blockchain was robbed, and the user base fell sharply. Sky Mavis, the studio behind it, has since moved its focus to a new game, Atia's Legacy.

The numbers are large enough to be worth stating carefully. Fortune reports the game had 2.7 million daily users at its peak during the 2021 crypto boom. The Block puts daily active users at 2.5 million in November 2021 and 1.2 million by April 2022. Sources differ on the exact peak, and the gap between 2.5 and 2.7 million is a reminder that player counts in this space were self-reported or estimated from wallet activity.

What follows separates what the sources establish from what they do not.

How Axie's play-to-earn economy worked

Axie Infinity was a battle and breeding game in which players owned creatures called Axies as NFTs. The in-game currency was Smooth Love Potion, or SLP. Players earned it by winning battles and could swap it for real-world currency, and it was burned, together with AXS, when players bred new Axies. The model only held together if the SLP burned kept pace with the SLP created.

The Block reports players could earn up to 75 SLP a day from daily quests and adventure mode. In countries such as the Philippines, Fortune reports, thousands of young people quit their jobs to earn tokens by playing. That is what turned a game into a story about income, and it is why the later collapse was felt as a livelihood problem and not just a hobby going sour.

This is the core idea behind play to earn: the reward is paid by new money coming in, so it depends on growth continuing.

The SLP oversupply that started the slide

The Block's May 2022 analysis traces the decline to token economics before the hack. SLP's price began falling in late summer 2021. In April 2021 the game had moved from Ethereum to the Ronin chain, which cut transaction fees and drew in a rush of new players, and that rush inflated the SLP supply quickly. Burning kept pace for a few months, then fell behind.

The Block Research's Thomas Bialek attributed the oversupply to an "unbalanced mint-burn ratio." Because the game's appeal depended on earning SLP that could be sold for cash, a falling SLP price made playing less profitable, which pushed NFT prices, sales and player numbers down together.

The same article reports attempted fixes that did not stop it: staking SLP for RON and removing the daily quests and adventure battles that had paid up to 75 SLP a day.

The numbers behind the crash

The Block's data gives the shape of the fall. The average Axie NFT price peaked at $494.15 in July 2021 and was about $37.38 around April 2022, roughly 92% below the peak. Total NFT sales peaked at over $848 million in August 2021 and were $19.4 million in April 2022, a 98% drop.

Daily active users fell from 2.5 million in November 2021 to 1.2 million in April 2022. That is a decline of more than half in five months, and it happened largely before the headline event that most people remember.

That ordering matters. Many retellings treat the hack as the cause of the collapse, but The Block's figures show the economy was already deflating, which is why we treat the hack as an accelerant rather than the original wound.

The Ronin hack of March 2022

In March 2022 the Ronin network, which Axie Infinity runs on, suffered what was described at the time as possibly the largest loss in decentralised finance. Attackers took 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC, worth about $625 million at the time, according to a record kept by Web3 is Going Great, which cites Ronin's own alert.

The attackers had gained control of a majority of the validator nodes: four belonging to Sky Mavis and one belonging to the Axie DAO. Sky Mavis halted the Ronin Bridge and the Katana exchange and said it was working with law enforcement, forensic cryptographers and investors.

Fortune's later profile gives a lower figure of roughly $500 million stolen, a difference that depends on how and when the stolen crypto is valued. Whichever number you use, Sky Mavis's cofounder Aleksander Leonard Larsen told Fortune in October 2022 that the company was caught off guard by the game's growth while building Axie Origins, and that rushed development led to sloppy security. That is Fortune's paraphrase, not a direct quote.

What Sky Mavis did next

Fortune reported in October 2022 that Sky Mavis was reportedly sitting on a ten year runway and that a fundraising round had valued the game at $3 billion. Its plan then was Axie Origins, which would let players collect and redeem charms and amulets for tokens rather than breeding creatures, plus a metaverse with virtual land and tokens for other mobile games.

The studio's bigger bet is now Atia's Legacy, a combat-focused game. Its first playtest ran from September 25 to October 2, 2025 as a mobile-only alpha for about 1,000 community members. Its second playtest launched on April 8, 2026, after slipping from a mid-March target, and added a single-Axie combat system and a ten-stage extraction dungeon where losing all HP costs players their equipped items.

BitPinas reported Playtest 2 access as strictly limited, with invitations sent by email to pre-registered players. We could not verify how many people took part, and the figures floating around vary by outlet.

What the Axie story teaches about any play-to-earn game

The sources support a few practical lessons, and we label them as our analysis, not as findings. First, look at where the rewards come from. In Axie's case SLP was created faster than it was burned, so the reward only stayed valuable while new players kept arriving. A game whose payouts depend on constant growth is exposed the moment growth slows.

Second, check how fast the numbers moved. The Block's figures show daily users halving in five months and NFT sales down 98% from their peak, all before most people remember the hack. Warning signs in token supply and player counts were visible in public data for months.

Third, separate the studio from the economy. Sky Mavis responded to the hack by halting the bridge and working with investigators, and it kept building. That says something about the company's survival, but nothing about whether a player could earn a living. If you are weighing any similar game, ask what the reward is paid in, who is paying it, and what happens to that if new players stop coming.

Where Axie Infinity stands in late 2026

The most recent verified update is from October 4, 2026, when the official Axie Infinity account said: "We're focusing on PC for the next playtest, but both Android and iOS will be supported for the full release." The post gave no date for the next playtest or the full launch.

Current player numbers are the gap in this story. Estimates we found for the original game vary enormously depending on the source, from a few thousand to over 100,000 daily users, and none came from Sky Mavis in a form we could verify. So we are not quoting one.

The honest summary is this. Axie Infinity is a case study in how a reward-driven economy behaves when growth slows, not a story with a single villain. If you are researching the genre, treat any claim about earnings with the same caution that the sources above recommend, and read it alongside our guide to play-to-earn games.