A secret Over the past year, Axie Infinity Wallet has secretly collected billions of Smooth Love Potion (SLP), the in-game cryptocurrency that powers one of the most popular play-to-earn (P2E) crypto games.
Today, the anonymous whale wallet has slightly more than 22 billion SLP, or more than fifty percent of the total supply of the coin.
The difficulty? Who owns it and what their objectives are are unknown.
The wallet in issue was brought to the attention of Asian Trade by Axie Infinity gamer and tech co-founder Michael Benko on August 25. Benko first became aware of the wallet on August 25.
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Should we be anxious?
Benko told Asian Trade that he was worried about the wallet because it had collected a lot of SLP in a short amount of time. This could have caused chaos in the game’s ecosystem.
If a single person owns a wallet with that much SLP, that person has a lot of power over an economy, especially if it’s hard to make tokens.
Axie Infinity is a blockchain-based game that will come out in 2021. Players will be able to buy “non-fungible tokens” (NFTs) that look like cartoon animals, which they can then breed and use in turn-based battles against other players.
Players earn SLP by completing daily missions, battling other players in the “Arena” mode, or playing against the computer in the “Adventure” mode. The SLP may be used to breed Axies, make in-game runes and charms (power-ups), and be traded on the marketplace.
Benko added that according to the most recent season update, an average Axie Infinity player may earn between 10 and 70 SLP every day, depending on their skill level.
“Therefore, it’s a worry if someone is sitting on 22 billion SLP […] because they could keep the price from going up when it should, based on how the market works.”
According to Coingecko, the price of the cryptocurrency is now $0.004, down 99% from its all-time high of $0.40 on July 13, 2021.
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Whose is it?
Theories attempting to explain the presence of the wallet have thus far gone nowhere.
Benko first hypothesised that the wallet was “some method Axie Infinity had to transfer SLP automatically to anyone who earned it.”
Aleksander Larson, co-founder and chief operating officer of Sky Mavis, told Asian Trade that neither Sky Mavis nor Axie Infinity control any of the game’s cryptocurrency.
All existing tokens have been produced by players.
Gabby Dizon, co-founder of Yield Guild Games, one of the biggest DAOs for Axie gamers, said that YGG did not control the wallet and that it might be a wallet used by an exchange to store liquidity.
“Don’t believe this is ours, as we normally use all newly earned SLP for breeding,” said Dizon, adding, “The most likely explanation is that an exchange is hoarding it for liquidity.”
Benko said that after looking at the transactions, he didn’t think the wallet belonged to the cryptocurrency exchange, even though many SLP transactions had Binance as the sender or recipient.
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“Binance appears to already have an official wallet, and this does not appear to be that wallet.”
At the time of publication, Asian Trade had reached out to Binance for comment but had not yet gotten a response.
