Axie 1,000,000 Decision and TOS Clarification

Last week, we passed an amazing landmark. The 1 millionth Axie was born! Many of our community members wanted a chance to breed and own this historic Axie. However, its birth was controversial. The breeder used an advanced method to interact directly with the Ronin chain and submit many breeding transactions at once using a breeding script. Many of you expressed concern that this was unfair and a violation of the TOS.

After hours of internal discussion and careful analysis of your feedback we’ve come to a solution that we believe will be beneficial to the community in the long run.

We believe that the root cause of the confusion came from a lack of clarity around enforcement of our TOS.

While our TOS said that automation was not allowed, we were clearly allowing some automation in cases that benefited the community. The community bot from #🍾・axie-purchases  is a clear example of one such exception.

People had also been using scripts to breed for years. This was good in that it burned SLP and allowed for the Axie population to keep up with huge demand from new players. This was an example of “good automation”.

However, using breeding scripts in “breeding events” clearly destroys fun for many players.

We’ve come to a solution that we believe balances:

• The demand for lots of Axies and SLP.

• Fun during breeding events.

Here are our clarified terms regarding automation:

Automation is banned when:

•  Playing the card battle game and future games (land, mini-games, etc). 

•  Buying and selling NFTs from the marketplace.

Automation is allowed for:

• Scholarship management.*

• Building publicly available tools & bots related to data transparency and analysis.

• Breeding, EXCEPT when there is a breeding event happening. We will give 1 weeks notice before a breeding automation ban window goes into place.

In order to easily accommodate the demand for data access from community developers, we will be building a 3rd party API that can be hammered without disrupting performance of our web applications (such as the marketplace). We will keep you updated on this initiative and we can’t wait to see what you build!

With regards to punishment, we've decided to ban Axie 1,000,000 for 365 days. There were many developers who contemplated using a similar strategy but believed that it would be against the spirit of the TOS. Future violations, now that the terms are clear, will result in harsher punishments.

Thanks for your patience and support during this interesting and complex chain of events!

* While Scholarship management automation is allowed, Sky Mavis is not responsible for your private keys and can't recover stolen or lost assets. Please be aware of this fact, when using such management tools.