Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

by Zeke Faux

THE NUMBERS ACTUALLY made no sense. Lapina told me that in the early days of the craze, a player could buy a set of Axies for about 5,000 pesos and earn around 400 pesos’ worth of potions a day. In U.S. dollars, that amounts to a $91 investment with a daily return of around $7.25. Most players would send the potions to a more sophisticated intermediary, like Art Art, who would swap them for Tether and then trade that for cash on a crypto exchange, but even with a bite taken out by a middleman, a player would be in the black after just a few weeks—and keep earning. The returns didn’t strike the Filipinos I talked to as unreasonable. But a more sophisticated investor would have realized the daily rate of return was 8 percent—way, way too good to be true. At that rate, with earnings continually reinvested for ten months, Lapina and everyone else who bought a single set of Axies would be trillionaires. The limits of the global money supply meant that the game’s economy was bound to collapse long before Lapina and his Cabanatuan friends turned into history’s richest men. The exact mechanics of the quests and the potions were irrelevant. Smooth Love Potions had no use other than to breed more creatures within the game. The only thing that kept the Axie economy afloat was new players buying in.