Made in Vietnam, Played in the Philippines: The Two Rulebooks Behind Axie Infinity

In the summer of 2020, as the pandemic closed shops and offices across the Philippines, some Filipinos found an unlikely job: breeding and battling cartoon creatures. Axie Infinity paid out tokens that could be sold for cash, and by June 2021 some players treated it as their main income.

The game behind that boom was made across the South China Sea, in Vietnam, by Sky Mavis. The story of Axie is usually told as a story about tokens and hype. It is also a story about two neighbouring countries with very different crypto rulebooks, and about what happens when a game's economy becomes a labour market.

The Vietnamese studio

Axie Infinity began development in 2017 and launched in 2018. Sky Mavis, the Vietnamese studio behind it, was led by co-founder and CEO Nguyen Thanh Trung, with Tu Doan, Aleksander Larsen, Jeffrey Zirlin and Andy Ho.

Vietnam's rules on crypto have long been split. The State Bank of Vietnam has declared that issuing, supplying or using bitcoin and similar currencies as a means of payment is illegal, with fines of 150 to 200 million dong. Trading crypto as a virtual good or asset, however, has not been banned in the same way. That gap is part of why a Vietnamese team could build a global token-based game while the coins themselves could not be used to buy a coffee in Ho Chi Minh City.

The Philippine boom

The Philippines became the country where Axie was most popular. It started becoming an income source there around August 2020. But the boom did not last: by September 2021, reported earnings had fallen below the national minimum wage, and the March 2022 hack of the Ronin network, which took about $620 million, caused a large drop in players (the hack's legal aftermath).

The Philippine government's response focused on money, not gameplay. The Department of Finance clarified that income from playing Axie Infinity is taxable, and suggested that the Securities and Exchange Commission and the central bank, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), might classify the game's tokens as either a currency or a security.

Scholarships: a game economy as a job market

Because getting started in Axie required buying creatures, guilds and individual owners began lending them to new players, known as scholars. Scholars played, earned tokens and paid the owners a share, sometimes as high as 75 percent, often with earning quotas.

Critics compared the system to gold farming, the practice of paying people in poorer countries to grind items in online games, and called it potentially exploitative. Supporters saw it as a way in for people who could not afford the entry cost. Either way, it turned a game into something that looked very much like employment, without any of the protections that come with a job.

What the two countries teach

Neither Vietnam nor the Philippines banned Axie Infinity. Vietnam restricted crypto as payment but let a crypto game studio grow. The Philippines watched a game become a source of income and responded by reminding players that income is taxable. Compare that with Korea, where the same kind of game cannot be legally distributed at all (Korea's ban).

Why it matters

For players, the Axie boom is a cautionary tale about treating a game as a salary. Earnings in token games depend on token prices, which are highly volatile, and on a game economy that can collapse. For regulators across Asia, it was the moment play-to-earn stopped being a niche and became a policy question.

WGC's take: Axie's story is often told as hype and crash. The more lasting part is the people who played it for rent money, and how little the rules of the time had to say about them.