July Development Update!

Greetings Lunacians!

July was another amazing month here at Axie HQ. In addition, we saw our growth enter a new phase with many new trainers joining our ranks!

These monthly development updates are becoming a key part of our communication with the members of the Axie ecosystem. We’ve had some requests from the community for a Townhall call and will be announcing one later this month. Bringing on Chief and Odin recently as mods was another move towards scaling our communication with the community. These updates will be a living, breathing method of communication and we’ll be evolving it over time as the community's needs grow. 

Growth/Adoption

July was our best month ever in terms of growth and adoption. We saw activity soar by every metric we trace. The catalyst for this, of course, was the parabolic rally in SLP on Uniswap. The increased SLP price strengthened our narrative of play to earn and brought many new eyes to our ecosystem. We were most excited to see that although many of the new community members came to speculate, they were drawn in by the game and community and have stuck around. Special shoutout to our mod team for being so responsive. EnforcerJ and wiceTroc1ty were also particularly awesome in helping out. Your efforts mean a lot to us!

Here are some charts that show the growth Visually. The last 2 charts are courtesy of Nansen.ai.

User Experience & Scaling

While growth has been strong, our playerbase is still being hamstrung by very high gas fees of late. This will continue to be a thorn in our side regarding adoption until we roll out Ronin.

We’re happy to report that we continue to make strong progress on Ronin. This month, we successfully recruited two new validators for the chain. Validators will be important in helping to secure and evangelize Axie. We also took a strong interest in the Reddit scaling “bake off” and were inspired by the hard work around scaling that we’re seeing in the Ethereum ecosystem. 

We made some key upgrades to our block explorer for Ronin. A beautiful and custom built block explorer will be an important piece of the puzzle there, increasing data transparency.

We also started working on a wallet solution for Ronin. We believe that mainstream users will need an on-boarding solution that’s slightly different than the current options. Allowing our crypto native users to choose their level of security, remains a priority as well.

Land

Before we show our work to the community, we go through many rounds of internal testing. These testing rounds get us feedback from a diverse pool of 20+ gamers, some of whom are not very familiar with crypto. We had our first major internal office release of land in late July! The release featured the first playable instances of:

• Resource gathering and collecting.

• Axie-specific inventories.

• Axies picking up and dropping items such as picks and shovels.

• Axies being able to move throughout the entire map.

We also had some new art and resources specific to the types of plots and resource nodes.

Axies are now animated and move their tails in an adorable manner as they waddle about the land system.

We want the first land release to inspire a sense of wonder and we’re still working towards this goal. We’re definitely getting closer with each passing day. Timing is key, and with the space growing rapidly, the potential userbase grows with each passing day.

Battles

We also had our first office-wide release for our upgraded card battle system. There’s a lot of work to be done, but the system is showing that it promises to be faster, more intuitive, and more skill-based. 

The remaining work centers around finishing the cards, doing some balance testing. We’re also doing a lot of work on the UI and starting to think about a tutorial/demo.

Looking Ahead

In order for Axie to fulfill its potential, we need to seamlessly combine a fun game, with simple on-boarding, and play to earn opportunities. This is to say that Axie is a place for fun, friendship, and economic opportunity. Take one aspect away, and the ecosystem cannot thrive. We’re confident that the work we’re doing is taking us in the right direction. If you have any suggestions, questions, or fun ideas please join our Discord community!

See you in Discord!

The Axie Infinity Team