The Axie Infinity Founders: How Five Friends in Vietnam Built a $3 Billion Pet Game

In early 2018, a small team in Vietnam released a game about cute, blobby creatures that fought in turn-based battles and could be bred, bought and sold as NFTs. Hardly anyone noticed. Three and a half years later, in October 2021, the studio behind it, Sky Mavis, raised $152 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz that valued it at about $3 billion.

That studio's founders became the face of a new idea, "play-to-earn", and for a few months they ran one of the most talked-about companies in games. This is their story, from the money to the morning after.

Five founders and a cat game

The game is Axie Infinity, and its CEO is Nguyen Thanh Trung (usually written Trung Nguyen). He led development from 2017 with co-founders Tu Doan, Aleksander Larsen, Jeffrey Zirlin and Andy Ho, and Axie went live in March 2018.

The spark was another blockchain game. Trung had spent money on CryptoKitties, the 2017 craze in which people bred and traded digital cats on Ethereum. Axie took that idea of collectible, breedable pets and added the thing CryptoKitties lacked: an actual game, borrowing from the creature battles of Pokémon and the pet-keeping of Neopets.

The founding team mixed Vietnamese engineers with Western community builders. Larsen, a Norwegian, became the studio's operations chief and its most outspoken voice on crypto gaming. Zirlin, known online as "Jiho", led growth and became the public face of the game's community and, later, of the Ronin blockchain.

The 2021 explosion

Axie's real breakthrough came during the pandemic. In the Philippines, lockdowns had wiped out jobs, and players discovered that the game's reward token, Smooth Love Potion (SLP), could be sold for cash. By May 2021 CNBC was reporting on a town north of Manila, Cabanatuan City, where shopkeepers, students and a pedicab driver were playing to pay bills. At that point the game had nearly 60,000 players there and elsewhere, Zirlin said; within months the global count was in the millions.

Because you needed three Axies to play, and Axies cost hundreds of dollars, a "scholarship" system grew up: owners lent teams to players and took a cut of the rewards. Guilds such as Yield Guild Games turned that into a business (read about its founders).

The numbers in 2021 were extraordinary:

• Daily players peaked at about 2.7 million.
• In May 2021, Sky Mavis raised $7.5 million in a round that included the billionaire investor Mark Cuban.
• In October 2021, the $152 million Series B led by a16z valued the company at about $3 billion. Paradigm and others joined.
• In November 2021, a single plot of Axie virtual land sold for 550 ETH, about $2.3 million at the time, a record for one plot (more record sales).

How the founders made their money

It's important to be precise here. Sky Mavis is a private company, and none of its founders has been given a verified personal net worth by Forbes or Bloomberg. Their wealth was largely on paper: shares in a company valued at $3 billion, plus holdings of the game's governance token, AXS, which climbed to well over $100 in November 2021.

The company itself earned money from fees on every Axie trade on its marketplace, and from breeding fees paid in AXS and SLP, much of which flowed into a community treasury. In a game where hundreds of thousands of people were buying teams to enter, that was a fast-growing pile.

What the founders did not do, as far as any reporting shows, was walk away. All of them stayed to run the company through what came next.

The fall: crash, hack and a long winter

The model had a flaw that critics had pointed out all along: rewards were paid in SLP, and SLP only held its value while new players kept arriving to buy it. When growth slowed, the token collapsed. By February 2022, SLP had lost more than 99% of its peak value, and AXS was down about 99% from its high at its worst. By September 2021 already, many scholars were earning less than the Philippine minimum wage.

Then, on 23 March 2022, attackers drained about $620 million in ether and USDC from the Ronin bridge. The theft went unnoticed for six days. In April the FBI attributed it to North Korea's Lazarus Group. Sky Mavis raised fresh money, in a round led by the exchange Binance in April 2022, and reimbursed affected users, but the hack became one of the largest in crypto history.

For the founders, this was the moment the paper fortune met reality. A company valued at $3 billion in October now had a broken bridge, a collapsing token and a community that felt burned. The decision they made, to repay players rather than let the losses stand, was expensive, but it is the main reason Sky Mavis still has a business to run.

Daily players fell from that 2.7 million peak to about 250,000 by April 2023, according to Reuters.

Where the founders are now

Trung Nguyen remains CEO, steering Sky Mavis away from pure play-to-earn and towards Ronin as a home for many games, not just Axie. In November 2024, the company cut 21% of its staff while confirming a new Axie title, Atia's Legacy, a combat-focused MMO it has said is due in 2026.

Aleksander Larsen announced in February 2026 that he was stepping down from his operational role at Sky Mavis, Axie Infinity and Ronin. He stays on as a shareholder and board member and said his energy is going into defence technology.

Ronin, meanwhile, became a home for other games. The farming game Pixels moved to the network in late 2023 and briefly became one of the most-played blockchain games anywhere, a sign that the infrastructure the founders built during the boom outlived the boom itself.

Jeffrey "Jiho" Zirlin is still the co-founder most associated with Ronin and the community, and remains a prominent voice for the network as it changes shape.

By the numbers

• 2017: development begins; March 2018: launch
• $21 million: revenue in the first two to three years
• $485 million: raised by the project in July and August 2021
• 2.7 million: peak daily players
• $3 billion: Sky Mavis valuation, October 2021
• $620 million: stolen in the Ronin hack, March 2022
• 99%+: SLP's fall from its peak by February 2022

What to watch

The Sky Mavis founders are among the very few in this story who got rich on paper, lost much of it, and kept building in public. The next test is Atia's Legacy: whether an Axie game can win players who come for fun rather than income. If it can, the founders' bet on Ronin as a gaming network looks smarter. If it can't, Axie will be remembered as the brightest, shortest boom in blockchain gaming.

Token prices are highly volatile. Nothing in this article is investment advice.