Axie Infinity guild CGU provides play-to-earn NFT game with ‘scholarships’
The monster-battling NFT game, Axie Infinity, has recently been gaining a lot of traction over the $600 million Axies traded in the last one month.
Every single of the Axie is an NFT originally minted on the Ethereum blockchain. It is similar to Nintendo’s Pokemon series, where the Axies are of different rarities having varying abilities and strengths, the strongest ones fetching the highest prices on the marketplace of the game.
Players of the game Axie Infinity are able to earn Smooth Love Potions (SLPs) once they keep completing daily quests by defeating monsters and battling with several other players in arenas with their Axies. SLPs are later able to be sold in exchange for various cryptocurrencies.
Due to the heightened initial cost of buying, borrowing or breeding Axies, in-game guilds have been formed lately in order to fund players’ overhead expenses, or offering scholarships in exchange for their SLP earnings while they are playing. One such in-game guild is the Crypto Gaming United (CGU) from Singapore, which has about 100,000 Discord users as of now. CGU is most regularly on the lookout for new scholars in the official channel of Axie Infinity Discord.
Sergei Sergienko, CGU’s Co-Founder, has explained that Axie’s players are not required to pay anything before they start playing. Instead, CGU would be funding all characters and NFTs costs via a scholarship, which basically amounts to $4,000 per player.
Additionally, CGU would also provide for education and mentoring to its partnered players for enhancing their crypto knowledge and gaming skills. In exchange, CGU would take a 50 per cent commission on respective players’ earnings. Some of these commission portions are issued to investors of the CGU token.
5 per cent of the earnings also go to local management in the countries in which CGU conducts its operation, while the players can have the remaining 45 per cent for themselves.
The company is also currently trialing a “pension plan” of 3 per cent to 5 per cent for its players for a social security initiative.
According to Sergienko, top players can easily earn up to 680 SLPs per day on a net basis after calculating CGU’s cut. The game time for top players makes up to around six hours daily.
Meanwhile, players who are on the lower end of the earnings can earn approximately $120 for 60 hours of playing duration each month. Interestingly, even this amount surpasses the full-time work’s minimum wage in countries like Russia and the Philippines on a pro-rated basis, where Axie Infinity has gained extreme popularity.
CGU has recently stated that it has attracted great numbers of Axie players from Venezuela, Cuba, Turkmenistan, Myanmar and various African nations.
While focusing on play-to-earn gaming, CGU is also operating the crypto-freelancing platform LaborX. A collection of stories, recommendations and testimonies from players partnering with CGU are available on its website.
When asked about long-term development for the CGU guild, Sergei said that the team also realizes that play-to-earn might just be “a passing phase”, which is why they are looking at towards greater opportunities for all its users.
Sergei shared that the team is hiring scholars who can provide insights on what may happen after the hype subsides. He said that having a freelancing platform and “a massive education experience” would also help them gauge things for the future.
