Axie Infinity Under Attack? - TokenSmart NFT Humpday Report #27
Welcome to the 27th issue of the NFT Humpday Report, a weekly column covering and providing embedded analysis on the NFT economy’s biggest topics du jour. Brought to you by WIP meetup collaborators and nft42 community hub TokenSmart.
The Twitter accounts of popular NFT game Axie Infinity and Axie co-founder The Jiho were inexplicably suspended this week. In the wake of the consequential and apparently baseless suspensions, the Axie Infinity community and the wider NFT ecosystem have been demanding answers.
The context: Axie Infinity is one of Ethereum’s most popular dapps, period. It has more users and on-chain activity than many more widely known DeFi protocols. The franchise is arguably the most important and promising trailblazer in the NFT ecosystem’s blossoming play-to-earn arena yet and is pioneering how to steadily put a game in the hands of its community rather than just its builders via the AXS governance token.
As for Jeffrey Zirlin, a.k.a. The Jiho, he’s a co-founder and growth lead at Sky Mavis, the game studio behind Axie Infinity. He’s became a leading champion of, and a major leader in, the Axie community.
Taken together, the Twitter accounts of Axie Infinity and The Jiho are two of the best ways to stay up to date on all things Axie related. The seemingly gamed suspensions of these accounts are thus getting in the way of Axie Infinity readily keeping its community informed and safe, which has real consequences.
Potential mass reporting: So what’s going on here? It’s not exactly clear for now, though we can certainly speculate. For their part, the Sky Mavis team asserts malicious actors “mass reported” the accounts in question in order to spam their suspensions into reality.
Zooming out, this frankly does seem to be the likeliest explanation. There’s no indication whatsoever that the accounts actually trespassed Twitter’s rules in any way, and both were suspended at the same time, which suggests coordination of some kind.
The big question, then, is who’s responsible? Again, we can only speculate right now. But the low-hanging fruits are pretty easy to nail down, i.e. the likeliest candidates are 1) an Axie Infinity competitor, or 2) an enemy of NFTs attacking a high-profile NFT project, e.g. diehard Bitcoiners who oppose anything related to Ethereum. .
What they’re saying:
In the wake of the suspensions, the Axie Infinity team announced on the project’s Discord: “Our twitter account is currently suspended for unknown reasons. We have applied to get the suspension removed and hope it will be resolved as soon as possible. #FreeAxieInfinity.”
Suspensions coincide with AXS ATH: In the hours after the aforementioned Twitter accounts were suspended, AXS, the Axie Infinity governance token, acutely hit a new all-time price high of $7.33 USD (the token is currently trading at $5.98, down a bit from there).
Was this run the result of the Axie Infinity community rallying against the suspensions? Maybe in part, but the likelier scenario is that AXS was just listed on two major exchanges, Huobi and Gate.io. It may have just been a temporary influx of new buyers then.
For a deeper dive on AXS, its potential, and how it fits into the Axie Infinity ecosystem, be sure to check out the 5th TokenSmart NFT Humpday Report on the AXS token release.
What’s next: The ball’s in Twitter’s court now. It’s up to them to un-suspend these accounts in timely fashion. If they don’t, it’s a non-trivial injustice to a project that’s done nothing wrong!
Thanks for reading the 27th NFT Humpday Report! Check back this time next week for more excellent NFT ecosystem coverage! Cheers🌠