Love (and other NFTs) bring excitement, pay bills

Play to earn blockchain games like Axie Infinity may be bleeding users, but that doesn’t mean you can’t pay your electricity bill in Smooth Love Potions.

A Smooth Love Potion, or SLP, is a cryptocurrency token given as a reward to players of the best crypto-based game. It can be used to spawn non-fungible token (NFT) critters – axes – that players use to win battle royales. They are by far the largest and richest NFT collectibles, with a turnover of 4 billion dollars.

Now, payment services provider XLD Finance has launched xSpend, a platform that allows players to use various game tokens – in-game cryptocurrencies – and stablecoins to pay utility bills, top up mobile phones and pay for goods in a 10,000-member merchant network. in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh.

This use of GameFi – a game about decentralized finance (DeFi) – tokens as a real currency has been talked about for several years in the crypto community.

It has been argued that the next revolution in gaming will be monetization games like Axie Infinity that allow players to earn tokenized in-game items that they can sell for real money to other players on cryptocurrency exchanges. While it doesn’t quite use NFTs as currency, it’s not too far off either. SLPs have only one use: breeding new and more formidable Axes.

In many cases, people in developing countries—the Philippines high among them—have become either full-time or part-time workers who play for money, often doing tedious and repetitive tasks to earn salable NFTs or in-game items such as SLPs that can used to make them.

Play at work

Axie Infinity’s SLPs have proven to be the most popular token on xSpend, XLD co-founder Ian Estrada told Decrypt.

That’s hardly surprising, considering it’s by far the biggest play-to-earn game, with 1.7 million players buying 16.8 million axie NFTs, easily topping the all-time NFT sales list.

The news came after XLD announced on July 19 that it raised $13 million in a pre-Series A funding round. It plans a payments platform that includes a crypto off-ramp, merchant payments application programming interface (API), a payout tool and a digital wallet.

Like most pay-with-crypto platforms like crypto-enabled debit cards and payment processors like Stripe, Strike, BitPay and PayPal, xSpend users pay with crypto, but merchants receive cash.

Read more: Take Bitcoin well into payments, Strike Partners with NCR, Shopify, Blackhawk

Into the Metaverse

In the wider gaming community, in-game items ranging from magical swords, decorative clothing and accessories, and in-game currencies are highly valued. Bootleg sales of these items are something the developers of games like Bungie’s World of Warcraft have been trying to stamp out for years.

One of the biggest complaints about GameFi NFT sales is that they encourage the development of what serious players call unfair “pay-to-win” games.

So while GameFi’s future isn’t clear — the number of Axie Infinity users collapsed from 2.7 million in November to 700,000 in June and many games in the space are of poor quality — there’s a bigger potential use here: the metaverse.

See also: Is Play-to-Earn Killing Blockchain Gaming?

Both blockchain-based metaverses, such as Decentraland and The Sandbox, and others, such as Roblox and Fortnite, are all largely considered games that have proprietary but purchasable currencies.

And while they’re still in their infancy, it’s inevitable that people will be able to do things that might be boring—like attending marketing demonstrations or showing up at after-hours events—where NFTs are potentially valuable or required for access, given away.

While in-game currencies, whether for Axie Infinity or for metaverse, can already be sold on crypto exchanges, it comes with a transaction fee, and usually two, as many exchanges do not exchange these tokens directly for dollars, but for stablecoins – much like in games to earn money. Especially for smaller sums that are used in developing countries as real income, it can be hit hard.

If GameFi tokens can be successful as a real-world currency, it seems likely that the dynamic will apply in the metaverse as well.

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