Everything you need to know about becoming an Axie team manager
Just like any other investment, it is important to follow fundamental rules and know the risks
Disclaimer: This is in no way financial advice. Please understand the risks by doing your own research or contacting a financial advisor for help.
P50,000 per week without working a single hour. It may sound crazy—but some Filipinos have managed to achieve exactly that.
Over the past few months, more and more Filipinos are swarming around the new blockchain-based video game Axie Infinity. In exchange for winning matches in the game, players receive Smooth Love Potion (SLP), which they can trade for Ethereum (ETH) or Philippine peso.
But to play the game, players have to shell out around P60,000 to P80,000, the initial cost of buying an Axie team, characters in the game. And where some have difficulties in shouldering the initial cost, others have difficulties in finding the time to play the game. Players must often play around six to 10 hours every day of the week to earn around P15,000 to P20,000 worth of SLP.
So for everyone to be able to reap the rewards of the game, the Axie community in the Philippines found a new solution: Axie scholarships. Team managers, those who can afford Axie teams of their own, give scholarships to players by lending out their teams. In return, managers receive a 40- to 60-percent stake in the earnings of players, or almost P50,000 per week for five scholars as of July 28.
If you are interested in becoming an Axie team manager, here is everything you need to know to help yourself and others earn:
Buying your first team
Opening your own scholarship begins with acquiring ETH through different cryptocurrency exchanges. Exchanges like Binance, Huobi and Coinbase could do this for you through credit card payments or its Peer-to-Peer (P2P) exchange, which is a marketplace where people can trade crypto directly with each other usually through online bank transfers or e-wallets like GCash.
Once you have converted your allocated budget to ETH, add the Ronin and Metamask wallet extensions to your browser. These can be found in the Chrome web store for browser extensions.
Create your parent accounts on these extensions. Make sure that you write down your account seed phrases and private keys, which are secret codes, unique to each account, that would serve as the key to retrieving your cryptocurrencies from either Ronin or Metamask in the event that you cannot access your accounts through your password.
Now, to create your Axie account, you can visit the Axie Infinity marketplace website marketplace.axieinfinity.com.
In order to create an Axie account, you will need to link your own Ronin wallet by clicking on the “login to Ronin Wallet” button and linking a Metamask account by accessing the account settings and attaching the wallet. When it asks for an email and password, you need to create a unique email address and password for it.
After this, fund your Metamask account by first withdrawing your ETH from your crypto exchange wallets, inputting the corresponding Metamask address and depositing it to your Metamask wallet.
Once your funds arrive at your Metamask wallet, you must access the Ronin Bridge through the toolbar on top of the marketplace webpage and deposit all your ETH. It is important to note that the ETH value you receive may be less than what you sent due to Ethereum network gas fees, which are transaction fees for Ethereum. You will know that you have received the funds properly when they reflect on your marketplace profile dashboard as Wrapped ETH (WETH).
With the WETH, you can now purchase Axies from the marketplace. Remember that each team requires at least three Axies, so budget and choose your Axies wisely.
Opening a scholarship
You can now move on to setting up your scholar accounts. Start by logging out of the Ronin manager account. Access your Metamask and Ronin extensions to create another wallet within each extension. Note that one Metamask and Ronin can hold multiple wallets, so feel free to maximize this for the amount of scholars you choose to have. The steps from here are similar to how you set up the Ronin account, so simply make sure that you take note of the email address, password, QR code, private key and Ronin wallet address unique to each account.
Finally, access your manager Axie account which contains the scholar Axies again. When you have sorted your Axies into teams of at least three each, you can finally send them out to the scholar accounts. This can be done through selecting each Axie, and selecting the gift option on its information page. When it asks for the Ronin wallet address, just access the previously noted scholar addresses. Usually, the account name that receives the Axies will appear under it.
Now that you have your scholars and they start to earn SLP rewards, the process of converting it to peso is the inverse way of how you cashed in except that you should transfer your SLP in the Ronin wallet to your chosen crypto exchange, then using the spot wallet to exchange it to any other cryptocurrency of your choice or using the P2P exchange so change your SLP to peso.
Finishing all these steps will ensure that your scholarship is up and running. YouTube also carries external resources for setting up your scholarship program. We recommend the video “Scholarship Program—Paano MagSet Up” by Kookoo Crypto TV.
The risks
First, it is important to consider what SLP is used for. Breeders use SLP as an ingredient to essentially breed Axies which can be sold for a profit in the marketplace for new entrants. However, as the game naturally loses players, demand for SLP from breeders will decrease, which translates to lower prices. If managers sell their SLP at the wrong time, they can see a severe reduction in their profits, maybe incurring a loss.
Second, it is still prone to competition. Axie Infinity is evidence that blockchain games have a place in the digital economy. However, other games such as MyDefiPet and CryptoBlade have already entered the market. In a booming blockchain game industry, the market dominance of Axie Infinity may be affected, resulting in the same reduction of demand.
So, it is important to consider what you believe to be demand for the game in the near future as you decide how much to invest. The play-toearn model of the game allows Managers to receive their SLP every two weeks, which they can immediately sell while demand is up.
Last, there is always the risk of the game having server issues or losing your earned SLP. Although losing your SLP has never occurred yet, the game has had bouts of server issues. This makes it difficult for players to earn SLP. However, the game developers have since fixed these issues. And considering that the game is still in its alpha mode, not even being released in the App Store or Google Play Store as of yet, the game developers are currently still polishing the game.
Just like any other investment, it is important to follow two fundamental rules: One, do your own research by making sure that you never invest in something that you do not understand and two, invest money that you can only afford to lose.