Sky Mavis, the creator of the popular play-to-earn (P2E) blockchain game Axie Infinity, just announced a partnership with CyberKongz — a blue chip Ethereum-based NFT collection.
The partnership comes with the release of a new non-fungible token (NFT) collection called the ‘CyberKongz Genkai Collection,’ the first release from CyberKongz in almost two years and the first PFP collection and third party mint from Sky Mavis. The NFTs come with other moves to create a more comprehensive gaming ecosystem for Sky Mavis’ native blockchain Ronin.
Here’s what we know about the NFT mint:
- On July 27th, 2023, at 9 a.m. (PT), 4,000 Genkai NFTs will be available on the Ronin platform via the Mavis Market.
- On the same date, 16,000 additional NFTs will be made available on Ethereum Mainnet.
- The Genkai NFT collection is inspired by anime and manga art.
- Holders of Mystic Axie NFTs will be rewarded with one CyberKongz Genkai NFT per Mystic Axie owned.
- The mint price is 0.25 ETH.
Furthermore, CyberKongz’ ERC-721x smart contract will be used for the Genkai mint, allowing users to “lock” their digital assets utilizing the token standard’s lock registry. It also prevents NFTs from being moved without authorization, and allows for seamless transactions for blockchain gaming protocols.
Sky Mavis also teased a new interoperable game featuring Genkai that will integrate with already existing Axie Infinity experiences. Also, CyberKongz‘ ‘Play & Kollect’ game, a game that integrates soulbound tokens and lets players collect NFTs, will be moving from Polygon to Ronin, allowing CyberKongz to access Ronin’s core gaming community and make use of Ronin’s negligible gas fees.
The announcement comes as Sky Mavis aims to make Ronin the industry standard for Web3 gaming. By teaming up with a successful NFT collection like CyberKongz, Sky Mavis hopes to build a gaming ecosystem with a big user base that shares community-owned protocols, applications, and deep asset liquidity. For CyberKongz, the partnership presents a huge opportunity to expand its IP into Asian markets.
Axie Infinity Continues to Be Major Force in Web3 Gaming
Founded in 2019, Sky Mavis began as small Vietnam-based company with less than 50 employees. Since then, the company has exploded in popularity and value, mainly due to the fact it created the most popular NFT game ever — Axie Infinity.
Axie Infinity is a game that lets players trade, breed, and battle each other with NFT creatures called “Axies.” At the height of its popularity in 2021, the game attracted over 2.8 million active monthly players. Countries like the Philippines even saw people quitting their regular jobs because they earned more playing the play-to-earn game.
In February 2022, DappRadar showed Axie Infinity had sold $4.14 billion in NFTs to nearly two million traders. Then in March 2022, we reported that Axie Infinity was the most searched NFT collection on Google in the world, bringing in over 3.85 million monthly global searches.
Although things have calmed down a bit since, Sky Mavis continues to be a leader in Web3 gaming. At Rarity Sniper, we suspect its latest partnership and NFT collection with CyberKongz could be the first sign of more things to come from the blockchain gaming giant. We’ll keep our eyes and ears open for any updates to the story.
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