A mysterious whale wallet is holding 50% of Axie Infinity’s SLP supply. The secretive wallet has been silently gathering billions of Smooth Love Potion (SLP), the in-game cryptocurrency powering one of the industry’s most popular play-to-earn (P2E) crypto games, for almost a year now.

The mysterious whale wallet currently owns slightly more than 22 billion SLP – more than half of the token’s total circulating supply.

What is the issue? Nobody knows who owns it or what its goals are.

The wallet in issue was brought to the public’s notice by Axie Infinity gamer and tech co-founder Michael Benko, who discovered it on August 25.

A mysterious whale wallet is holding 50% of Axie Infinity’s SLP supply and no one seems to know why.

Should We Be Worried?

Benko expressed concern about the wallet because of the quantity of SLP it had accumulated in a relatively short period of time, which might possibly wreak havoc on the game’s environment.

“The significance of a wallet holding so much SLP, if it’s an individual person, gives that person a huge amount of control over an economy, especially in an economy where it’s so hard to mint a token.”

Axie Infinity, which is to be released in 2021, is a blockchain-based game in which users acquire NFTs of cartoon animals to breed and fight against other players in turn-based combat.

Players acquire SLP by completing daily objectives, competing against other players in the “Arena” mode, or playing against AI in the “Adventure” mode. The SLP may be used to breed Axies, produce in-game runes and charms (power-ups), and sell them on exchanges.

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.

“So it is a concern, if someone’s sitting there with 22 billion SLP […] they could really keep the price flat or keep the price down when it actually should, by natural market conditions, be going up.”

Who Is The Owner?

So far, theories explaining the presence of the wallet have resulted in dead ends.

Initially, Benko hypothesized that the wallet was “some method Axie Infinity had to automatically transfer SLP to players who earned it.”

Sky Mavis co-founder and COO Aleksander Larson, on the other hand, stated that neither Sky Mavis nor Axie Infinity own any of the game’s cryptocurrency, stating:

“All tokens in existence have been created by players.”

Yield Guild Games co-founder Gabby Dizon – one of the key DAOs for Axie gamers — stated that YGG does not control the wallet and speculated that it may be a wallet used by an exchange to store liquidity.

“Don’t think this is ours as we typically use all of our minted SLP for breeding,” said Dizon, adding that “the most likely explanation is that an exchange is holding it for their liquidity.”

Benko, on the other hand, stated that while many SLP transactions identified Binance as a sender or receiver, after reviewing the transactions, he does not believe it is a wallet controlled by the crypto exchange.

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