Two Hundred People Playing a Video Game as Their Full-Time Job.

In 2021, Axie Infinity created an economic model where people could earn real income playing a video game. The catch: you needed NFTs to play, and those NFTs cost hundreds of dollars. Most of the people who wanted to play could not afford the entry fee.

I founded MegaKraken as a gaming guild: I bought the NFTs, lent them to players, and split the earnings. At peak, 200 people in the Philippines were playing Axie Infinity full-time through our guild. For many of them, it was their primary income source, earning more than local employment alternatives.

Running a 200-person operation across time zones required Discord-based community management, wallet management for cryptocurrency earnings distribution, player onboarding and training, performance tracking, and the financial modeling to keep the economics working for everyone. It was a 24/7 operation.

The guild ran successfully for about a year and a half before the broader crypto market crash collapsed the Axie Infinity economy. The earning model became unsustainable, and I wound down the operation. A truly life-changing experience, both for the players who earned a living through it and for me in understanding what it takes to run a distributed operation at scale.