Gabby from the Philippines has been a true leader when it comes evangelizing Axie in Southeast Asia. We sat down this Gabby to learn more about his Axie adventure, the Axie community in the Philippines, and his predictions for the future!

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background in gaming.

I’ve been in the game industry for a very long time. Started in 2003 when we made the first ever game to come out in the Philippines. Put Altitude Games in 2014 to make mobile games. Started researching on Ethereum in 2017 when we heard about the concept of smart contracts, and pretty much decided that this was the future of tech and decided to dive in deeper into NFTs and blockchain games.

How did you find out about Axie?

I invited Jiho to do a talk about Axie in Manila in late 2018. We were conference friends at that point, and he gave me 3 Axies to get started in the game. It literally changed my life! I started playing the game, got involved in the community and made a decent amount of ETH along the way. It’s made me some really good friends that I may have never met in person but I consider some of the best influences in my life.

The Philippines is proving to be a hotspot for Axie activity. Why do you think this is the case?

The Philippines has a lot of challenges right now — high unemployment due to Covid and an economy in free fall. Once players discovered that you can make a living playing Axie and farming Small Love Potion tokens, word spread around and we’re seeing new Filipino community members every day. I am hoping that this trend is sustainable and that we can create a valuable economy inside of Axie Infinity for people around the world (but especially in poorer countries) to participate in.

What get’s you most excited about Axie’s future?

It’s definitely land gameplay. I had initial concerns about Axie’s future when all you could do was battle and breed, but the land gameplay turns it into a possible huge meta economy where people can cooperate and build lasting assets that can generate value for its players and greater community for a long time to come.

What community-driven efforts do you think help Axie the most? What do you want to see more of?

One thing I see that is most helpful is when someone who has a hard time getting into the game (initial on boarding is pretty difficult) get into the Discord server and get welcomed to the community. They usually end up staying and becoming a valuable part of the economy themselves.

What I want to see more of: community driven content that helps smooth the new user’s on-boarding experience. There’s actually already tons of material here from Medium articles to YouTube videos etc., but you can never have enough quality content to turn a new player into a retained community member.

You made a big splash, fractionalizing/sharding Almace. Tell us a bit about that and how you see sharding fitting into the broader NFT picture.

I was playing (too much) Axie Arena, using the earned SLP to breed more Axies when /biz caught the attention of Axie and SLP, bringing the price of SLP from $0.003 to $0.2 (briefly) before things died down. I thought it was a good time for people to learn more about one of the most famous and unique Axies in the game. I asked Jiho to hook me up with the Niftex guys and we (Almace co-owner Sillytuna and I) decided to go ahead with sharding Almace.

We weren’t expecting much, but I was hoping that the residual attention from the recent SLP pump would help give focus to Almace. And did it ever! We offered up ALMX for sale at an original valuation of 40 ETH which got sold out in 6 hours. When secondary trading opened, the valuation went up to over 300 ETH with a trading volume of over 1000 ETH. It was nuts!

The initial hype has died down a bit, but now ALMX is in the hands of over 300 people and the ALMX shard community is working together to make him the most famous game character in all of the Metaverse.

I expect more high value NFTs to become fractionalized in the future — this gives a good way for the owners of these NFTs to achieve liquidity without having to sell the item.

7. Can you make 3 predictions for the NFT space and Axie for the next 12 months and 12 years?

Next 12 months -

• Axie land gameplay will launch and I’ll be farming the hell out of it.
• Guild DAOs will become prevalent as people need to coordinate the resources of players, asset owners and have a seat at the table in determining the future outcome of blockchain based games.
• NFTs will merge with DeFi and create a 100x liquidity explosion in the NFT space.

Next 12 years -

• My kids won’t need a college degree, they just need to know how to create value in virtual worlds to earn a living for themselves.
• Blockchain-based games will just be “games”.
• Axie will beat the GDP of the smallest country.

Thanks for reading our first player spotlight! If you’d like to meet Gabby and ask him about his adventure, make sure to join Axie Discord!

The Axie Infinity Team

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