Land prices are changing so quickly that making the best decision has become a matter of precise timing
On May 3rd, Sky Mavis announced the staking process for land in its flagship and hugely successful game Axie Infinity. In the 12 hours since then, land prices have been on a volatile ride as people look for the best investment opportunities.
Summary
- Land staking update followed Sky Mavis’s recent announcement about land gameplay in Axie Infinity.
- Axie Infinity will reward land stakers from a monthly pool of 337,500 AXS. The more expensive pieces of land yield more AXS for stakers.
- Since Sky Mavis told users about its new staking mechanism, prices for the premier plots have risen sharply.
- The Vietnamese company has endured a tough 2022 so far, with the Ronin bridge exploit and in-game economic problems negatively affecting the game’s previously strong position.
DappRadar reported back in April that land gameplay was coming to Axie Infinity. Now that Sky Mavis revealed their plans for land staking, we have the opportunity to assess how it works and how they intend on taking it forward.
We’ll also take a look at what the most profitable piece of land is and how long users will have to stake their plots to recoup their costs.
How land staking works in Axie Infinity
Sky Mavis announced that ‘Axie Infinity land staking is an initiative designed to increase ownership of the native token AXS among landholders’. Players can earn rewards by farming their land; different categories of land determine the types of resources a player can earn.
Sky Mavis’s new land staking function will enable holders to lock away their land . This makes land more scarce, as it can’t be sold, which in turn maintains its value and keeps holders happy. For this, stakers are rewarded in AXS.
The table below shows the daily rewards per plot. These rewards are fixed and 337,500 AXS per month ($10,087,875 at the time of writing) that Sky Mavis has put aside to award to users for staking their land.
What’s the best land to acquire in Axie Infinity?
One Twitter user helpfully posted this table to show which piece of land is the most profitable to purchase. It shows that buying a piece of Arctic land will enable the buyer to recoup their costs most quickly, and then start making profit. Break even is at 263 days, assuming the AXS price remains around $30.
But there’s a problem. Once people worked out that Arctic land was the most profitable, they began buying it up and soon, it wasn’t the most profitable. A few hours later, the Twitter user posted an updated version of the table:\
And then another one:
Soon it became clear that trying to maintain an updated version of this spreadsheet was like trying to catch a plastic bag in a hurricane. For anyone who wanted to get the best price, they would need to do the sums themselves and execute the trade immediately. I’ve put together my own table just before publishing this article to show how the situation stands now.
These prices will change quickly, so making your own spreadsheet is strongly advised.
As we can also see from the series of tables, land prices for the three best lands – Arctic, Mystic and Genesis – have risen so quickly that purchasing one of them is out of reach for most people. Similar to Yuga Labs’ Otherside, owning a decent plot of land in Axie Infinity is now the preserve of the most wealthy.
2022 has been a tough year for Sky Mavis and Axie Infinity
Sky Mavis’s two recent announcements – land gameplay and staking – have come amid a string of crises that have rocked the once-supreme play-to-earn platform. The game’s drop down DappRadar’s dapp rankings testifies to Axie Infinity’s troubled start to the year.
The big news for Sky Mavis this year was the Ronin bridge exploit where hackers stole over $600 million from users. In the 24 hours that followed, the game saw an 11% decrease in active players and the native marketplace lost 17% of its users.
DappRadar also reported back in February that inflationary problems and stalled growth were having a negative impact on the game’s popularity among users.
Both of these problems have come against a backdrop of a bearish DeFi market in which most cryptocurrencies and native tokens have dropped in value. External events, like the war in Ukraine, rising commodity prices and China’s ongoing Covid issues, are all causing people to trim their risks and save their money where they can.
It will be interesting to see whether or not Sky Mavis’s new land ventures do have a positive effect on Axie Infinity’s performance. You can keep up to date with its position in our rankings pages and see how its land NFTs perform.
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