This Week in the Axie Infinity Market (Nov 3rd - Nov 10th)

During this past week, I had the pleasure of meeting up with people in the Axie Infinity community in NYC to talk shop. I loved getting the opportunity to have conversations with people whose entire lives have changed because of the game and got to meet people I've interacted with on Axie Twitter longer than I've been writing this recap. Listening to stories and picking the brains of streamers and content creators like @brycent_ in person was such a cool culmination of so much digital interaction surrounding the game.

But sprinkled in the excitement of NFT.NYC, Axie Infinity decided to detonate an absolute bomb of an announcement.

The largest game in the NFT space dropped one of their biggest updates yet in the form of their own decentralized exchange (DEX), Katana.

Katana allows Axie Infinity players to swap tokens and get rewarded for adding liquidity into the ecosystem. This is huge for the underlying ecosystem and market; instead of cashing out, SLP players will be able to swap for AXS and be able to stake and have a say via governance. As of this writing, over $1.26B of liquidity has been added to the DEX.

The numbers in this recap were sourced from Katana analytics and Axie's Marketplace Tracker.

As of this writing, in the past week, over $236 million worth of Axies and land have been traded—with over 738,000 Axies trading in the past seven days and less than 300 lands changing hands. Compared to last week, we're seeing a hell of a volume increase. NFT.NYC fervor along with the Katana implementation has reignited the market of trading. I can not recall the last time we saw this large of a spike in both $ volume and Axies trading. Let's see what's going on in the other metrics.

The absolute cheapest or lowest price of Axies is what we call the floor.

In the first few iterations of this market recap, I took the cheapest one or two Axies on the market and analyzed that as the floor. After crunching my numbers, I have found that it’s better to focus on the lowest ten (10) Axies on the market instead.

This week, the floor range is from $135-$167. This reflects a new interest in players wanting to get as many tokens as possible to flip to their desired currency. Maybe breeders are listing so they can swap ETH to AXS or players want more/better Axies to earn SLP. It's a win-win for all right now.

To breed your Axies, you need to spend the in-game currency SLP, which can be earned in-game or bought/sold on crypto markets like Binance. 

SLP enjoyed a large spike up to nearly 12 cents last week thanks to Katana going live. The coin cooled off, but the overall macro trend is trading sideways in the 7 cent range. As more users stop selling their SLP and instead swap straight into other currencies, we will see if this reduces the sideways trading.

Another barometer of the Axie economy is their governance token AXS. Users who hold these tokens can vote to shape the direction of the game. They can also now stake this token to vote and earn more AXS. 

AXS also enjoyed a nice bounce thanks to the Katana announcement—actually breaking its ATH on Saturday around $160. The price has since cooled off a bit to roughly $150 at the time of this writing, but the governance token has continued its 30 day upward trend. As more people start to add AXS to liquidity pools, it'll be interesting how this affects the price and volume.

Out of roughly 65.4 million AXS circulating, we have over 20.18 million AXS staked. The dashboard has estimated APR being 116%. It's the first time in weeks that it has been below 120%. This becomes one of the most interesting categories to watch, because previously if large amounts became un-staked, it was presumed that they'd be sold on market. But now it could be un-staked and STILL stay in the economy via liquidity pools. Absolutely wild.

We're going to suspend tracking land sales until lands are integrated in game so we can spend more time studying/tracking the liquidity pools going forward in the short term.

This has been this week’s Axie Infinity Market recap. If you have any questions or requests for future editions, be sure to follow us on our NFT centered Twitter @NFT137 for your NFT fix!