Amidst this, another P2E game DeFi Kingdoms (JEWEL), has captured the interest of users, which is not listed on any exchanges and is seeing a gradual increase in users and transaction volume.

The popular blockchain-based play-to-earn game Axie Infinity has been seeing a decline in activity for the past five months.

The AXS token, however, is still keeping above $104. The $6.9 billion market cap coin is currently down more than 37% from its all-time high of $165 hit early last month, up 17,312% this year. This governance token has a limited supply of 27 million, and its holders can earn rewards by staking their tokens for yield.

The in-game currency Smooth Love Potion (SLP) is hit the hardest as it trades at almost $0.03, down a whopping 93% from its $0.4 ATH six months back. SLP powers Axie’s internal economy as players earn up to 75 daily SLP tokens by completing activities. It has a self-regulating supply as a burn mechanism that permanently removes SLP from the supply.

Much like the token price, the activity on the NFT game and its Ronin blockchain has been taking a hit.

Back in April, the Sky Mavis team, the Vietnamese studio that developed the game, helped the Axie entity become the most traded NFT collection ever by moving it to the Ronin blockchain. Ronin is an Ethereum sidechain that addresses the challenges of low latency and high transaction fees of the Ethereum network.

Back in July, the Ronin blockchain recorded 20 ETH ($40 million) in daily transaction volume. Since then, it has constantly been falling, but in November, a spike was recorded at just over 8k Ether (nearly $40 mln). But now, it has come back down to record a mere 1.2k ETH ($3.8 mln) in daily transaction volume, according to Nansen.

Daily active addresses have also fallen to under 300k, a drop of more than 72% since November’s peak of 1.1 million.

With activity declining significantly, so has been the revenue. The daily revenue of Axie Infinity recorded its peak at just over $17.5 million in August this year. But since the second week of December, it has only been pulling in $1 million in daily revenue, back to the level seen in July right before it had exploded in popularity.

Despite the drop in revenue, the protocol remains the second biggest earner in the crypto market after Ethereum.

P2E in Limelight

While Axie seems to be taking a backseat, another play-to-earn game DeFi Kingdoms (JEWEL), has captured the interest of users. The $866 mln market cap coin JEWEL, up 1028.5% in the past three months, hit a new ATH at $15.45 on Monday. It is currently not available on any exchanges.

During its weekly AMA, the DeFi Kingdoms team commented on the CEX listing, saying they have been reaching out to exchanges. But while this is “inevitable,” it’s not something they’re rushing into because of the volatility that comes with CEXs and perpetual contracts that gives traders the ability to short or long an asset.

The project has been pulling in $16 mln-$15 mln in volume while transactions have jumped from 40k a month back to 269k, as per Dapp Radar. Its number of users has also seen a gradual increase, currently above 20k after nearly a 3x jump in a month.

P2E is a trend that gained traction along with the overall NFT mania this year and is expected to rule the market in the years ahead as well.

Derivatives platform FTX CEO Sam Bankman Fried also sees a lot of value in the NFT being introduced in games. But according to him, the crypto industry should be “tapping into the existing userbase of video games.”

Sam has previously said that making an engaging video game is “really hard” as such, he is “bullish” on gaming publishers introducing crypto into their system.

“The real goal, here, is to take a great game, and integrate NFTs in a way that makes the game better.”