Bankless: Understanding Axie Infinity's New On-Chain Upgrade System
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Bankless: Understanding Axie Infinity's New On-Chain Upgrade System
The arrival of AXP marks a shift in the trend.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: WILLIAM M. PEASTER
Translated by: TechFlow
Axie Infinity has just launched its on-chain progression system, AXP. This new mechanism is not only significant for Axie Infinity itself but also holds potential implications for the broader NFT ecosystem.
First, let's recap Axie Infinity...
Axie Infinity is a turn-based tactical card battle game where players compete by building teams of creatures called Axies. "Axie Classic" was the game’s first official version, running 21 seasons from December 2019 to June 2022.
Axie Infinity: Origins is the next evolution in the series, which began in April 2022.
Origins introduces new Adventure Mode (player versus AI) and Arena Mode (player versus player) experiences, and serves as the foundation for several new gameplay mechanics, including free starter Axies, wearable items, runes, and more.
Season 1 of Origins started in September 2022, and as of July 2023, Season 5 is about to begin.
In December 2022, Axie Infinity announced Axie Core—a vision for the fundamental experience of breeding, raising, equipping, and upgrading Axies, all centered around the idea that “Axies have on-chain genetic code that can be permanently altered through on-chain actions.”
If the announcement of Axie Core was an outline of a vision, then last week’s launch of Axie Experience Points (AXP) represents the next major step toward realizing it—marking the shift of Axies from passive assets into digital creatures that evolve through gameplay.
What is AXP?
“There are now millions of Axies. We’ve always thought of Axies as an important part of our identity: digital pets, digital friends. To truly achieve this, we need to build a system that allows you to inject your time, effort, energy, and skill into your Axies. This is a system of vertical progression rather than horizontal expansion—depth over breadth. AXP lays the foundation for Axie Progression. At its core, Axie Progression transforms time, effort, skill, and resources into making our Axies stronger, cooler, rarer, and more personalized.” — From a Lunacian perspective on AXP
Axie Experience Points (AXP) is a new on-chain progression mechanism designed to facilitate Axie advancement and part upgrades.
By playing Origins, players earn AXP—each Axie on the winning team receives 150 AXP per ranked match. Initially, each Axie can earn up to 4,500 AXP per day. These points are non-transferable and bound to each individual Axie.
These points are used for leveling up—an evolutionary process that synchronizes an Axie’s level on-chain, increases its level cap, and enables part upgrades.
When Axies reach level 9, 19, and 29, they can activate these level-ups via transactions on the Ronin sidechain, requiring a total of 13,310, 110,480, and 334,170 AXP respectively.
The introduction of AXP and Axie leveling transforms Axies into dynamic NFTs that can improve and become personalized over time—marking a shift from passive assets to characters that evolve and gain uniqueness through gameplay experience.
Moreover, Sky Mavis, the creator of Axie, can now use AXP as a strategic tool within its ecosystem—to incentivize desired in-game behaviors such as completing more dungeons, and to reward third-party developers who achieve specific milestones.
AXP and the Bigger Picture
I worked at JPG, an NFT management platform, where we developed a dynamic “Canonicon” NFT with a built-in JXPG progression system. The more you curated, the more XP you earned, allowing you to customize your Canonicon, etc.—but we embedded this system directly into the smart contract.
From my personal perspective, I find Axie Infinity’s AXP interesting on multiple levels—not only is it crucial for deepening gameplay within the Axie ecosystem, a factor that shouldn’t be underestimated, but it also offers a general blueprint that other NFT games and projects can adopt for their own experience systems—even if they didn’t embed such a system directly at launch.
Assets like Axies are stored on Ronin, while the game logic for Origins runs off-chain. With the rollout of AXP and level synchronization, Sky Mavis is now using transactions to periodically record game progress on-chain—at levels 9, 19, and 29.
This kind of system can be generalized and applied to new games or added into existing projects. I believe we’ll see more such efforts, especially since Axie Infinity remains the largest Web3 game, and many other game projects will study its approach with AXP.
Over time, this model of on-chain progression will likely become standard not only in Web3 gaming but across other areas of the space—from curation to PFPs to Web3 social. I think this approach will soon become as obvious and ubiquitous as Uniswap-style decentralized exchanges are today. In a similar way, I believe the arrival of AXP marks a turning point—one where we may all soon be leveling up on-chain in various forms.
Meanwhile, it will be important to watch whether AXP will be extended to other Axie ecosystem games such as Axie DoLL, Homeland, Raylights, and others.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
@WPeaster
