Axie Infinity Shards (AXS) is the native governance token of the Axie Infinity network, which is a platform built by Vietnam-based company Sky Mavis for trading resources earned in the Axie Infinity video game. The play-to-earn feature of the game, coupled with a successful marketing strategy, drove a 200 times increase in the price of the token in 2021.

The AXS price rose rapidly in the summer of 2021 and surged again at the start of October 2021, when Axie Infinity’s creators announced that they had distributed 800,000 AXS tokens to users who had played the game before Oct. 26, 2020. Those tokens were worth more than $60 million at the time.

Also in early October 2021, Sky Mavis announced that it had raised $152 million in a Series B funding round that was led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation of $3 billion. The company also introduced a staking function for AXS that gave users the ability to earn yield and gain governance voting rights by locking up their tokens.

As of January 2022, the all-time high AXS price was $164.90, recorded in early November 2021. It started 2021 at less than $1.

AXS supply is capped at 270 million. Player rewards will account for 20% of the supply and staking rewards for 29%, while the creators of the game at Sky Mavis will be gradually allocated around 20% over a period of years. The rest has been distributed in public and private sales or is being held in reserve for developing the Axie Infinity ecosystem.

AXS is hosted on the Ethereum blockchain and has its own sidechain named Ronin to avoid creating congestion issues on the main blockchain. Its use case is built around the Axie Infinity game that Sky Mavis describes as an open-ended digital pet universe. Players earn AXS in the game and use it to acquire in-game assets, stake to participate in governance or sell in external markets. The AXS token economy was designed by cryptocurrency research firm Delphi Digital.

The game revolves around collecting pets called “axies,” represented by non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and “breeding” the pets to make new ones with characteristics derived from the parents. Trading and breeding the NFTs incurs fees in the form of the AXS tokens and another in-game blockchain token called smooth love potions (SLP), which can be traded for fiat currency.

Players pit their pets against other players in battles. The company says it is skill-based, making it “good fit for competitive play and esports.” The virtual setting of Lunacia consists of “land” resources, also represented by tradable NFTs.

The company claims that “Axie is already the largest community of people who understand how to use blockchain technology in the world.” It also says that players have collectively spent more than 1 million Ethereum tokens to advance in the game, equivalent to a value of more than $3 billion.

Sky Mavis created Axie Infinity in 2018. Since then, the possibility of earning AXS and subsequently dollars through in-game achievements has fueled Axie Infinity’s popularity in low-income countries. Some users in the Philippines and Venezuela have even adopted it as a core source of income, and authorities in the Philippines have floated the idea of taxing Axie Infinity players’ income.

In November 2021, after the price of AXS had rapidly increased over several months, a single “land” NFT in the Axie Infinity game sold for ETH tokens worth $2.5 million.