Crypto Comes Roaring Back in Philippines
QUEZON CITY, Philippines — On a recent night, around 20 people crowded into the second floor of Joniel Bon’s newly opened internet cafe in Quezon City, 16 kilometers from Manila. Seated at computers with 86-centimeter curved monitors, they began playing video games such as Heroes of Mavia and Nifty Island, as music from Taylor Swift and Maroon 5 hummed from the speakers.
Playing these games can be a full-time job, and some of Mr. Bon’s customers had settled in for the night with slices of pizza to fuel them.
The games reward players with cryptocurrency tokens for completing small, daily challenges. Often, players convert their tokens to pesos, the country’s currency, earning around twice the Philippines’ minimum wage of $11 a day.
Mr. Bon, 40, had dreamed about the buzz of activity at his own business after cryptocurrencies crashed spectacularly two years ago, dashing his hopes for a thriving game collective at the time.
“There was a point I had to say, ‘I believe in this.’ I had to hope,” said Mr. Bon, a former information-technology worker. “We survived.”
Mr. Bon’s new internet cafe is a sign of how crypto has begun booming again in the Philippines, which has long been a center of crypto activity. Bitcoin reached a record high in early March of about $73,000, capping a comeback from the 2022 market meltdown and bringing other digital currencies like Ether along with it. (At the end of the month, Bitcoin was trading at around $64,000.)
New billboards for crypto companies have now popped up around Manila. People have started harvesting virtual crops from a crypto farming game called Pixels as a fresh source of income. Overseas Filipino workers, known as O.F.W.s, are also returning to the country to earn crypto as M.F.W.s, or metaverse Filipino workers.
In November and December, the value of crypto transactions in the Philippines increased 70 percent from September and October, to $7.3 billion, according to data from the research firm Chainalysis.
Crypto became especially popular in the Philippines during the pandemic lockdowns. While over 40 percent of the country’s population does not have a bank account, the majority of Filipino households have internet access, which has allowed crypto to spread to rural areas.
At the time of the lockdowns, people began playing the crypto-earning video game Axie Infinity, made by a Vietnamese company, Sky Mavis. In the game, players battle Pokemonlike characters to earn a cryptocurrency called Smooth Love Potion.
At the peak of Axie’s popularity in 2021, Smooth Love Potion was accepted by landlords, gas stations and some restaurants in the Philippines as an alternative to pesos.
But when crypto collapsed a year later, thousands of Filipinos lost the savings they held in Smooth Love Potion. The game’s characters, which some players would trade to sell for thousands of dollars — so valuable that some Filipinos took out loans to buy them — became worthless.
“The game worked well when everyone was getting in,” said Ian Dela Cruz, 30, a farmer in Pampanga, a province north of Manila, and a former Axie player. “But when everyone tried to get out, that’s when it stopped.”
Some Filipinos who successfully earned money through Axie became entrepreneurs, building their own companies and gaming collectives called “guilds.” Now some of those efforts are taking off.
Teresa Pia, 27, a former Axie player, left her job as a preschool teacher in 2021 to run a crypto gaming guild called Real Deal, which has 54,000 members on the social media platform Discord.
Ms. Pia said she saw her Discord channel “as a new classroom” where she taught members, many of them Filipino women who work overseas, to trade and invest in crypto.
As crypto recovers, many of those women are now earning enough money to return home to their families, she said.
“The amount of money that they receive, it may seem small, but when you convert to pesos, it’s big for them,” Ms. Pia said.