Jeff ‘Jiho’ Zirlin: From 300 Users to $4B+ in Trading Volume, The Story Behind Axie Infinity’s Meteoric Growth
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Key Quotes
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🎯 Summary
Podcast Episode Summary: Jeff ‘Jiho’ Zirlin: From 300 Users to $4B+ in Trading Volume, The Story Behind Axie Infinity’s Meteoric Growth
This episode features Jeff ‘Jiho’ Zirlin, Co-founder of Sky Mavis (creators of Axie Infinity and the Ronin blockchain), detailing the journey of building Axie from a small community to a global phenomenon with over $4 billion in NFT trading volume. The discussion centers on early-stage growth hacking in Web3, the evolution of the crypto market cycle, and the strategic necessity of building proprietary infrastructure.
1. Focus Area
The primary focus is Web3 Gaming and Hyper-Growth Strategy, specifically covering:
- Manual User Onboarding at Scale: Techniques used to acquire the first few hundred users.
- Tokenized Game Economies: Pioneering the Play-to-Earn (P2E) model by tokenizing in-game assets and experience points.
- Infrastructure Development: The decision and execution behind building the custom Ronin sidechain.
- Market Cycles: Contrasting the retail-driven 2021 cycle with the current institutional-focused cycle.
2. Key Technical Insights
- On-Chain Genetics Inspiration: CryptoKitties provided the initial blueprint, featuring on-chain genes adhering to Mendelian genetics, which inspired Axie’s biological/ecosystem approach (incorporating the “cycle of life and destruction” via battles).
- Tokenizing XP for Economy: Axie tokenized off-chain experience points (XP) into tradeable “potions,” creating a secondary market and turning user incentives into the primary user acquisition budget.
- Building Ronin: Sky Mavis built the Ronin blockchain from scratch, scaling it to support 2 million users within six months, demonstrating the necessity of custom infrastructure for high-throughput gaming applications.
3. Market/Investment Angle
- Institutional vs. Retail Cycles: The current cycle is defined by institutional adoption (ETFs, corporate treasuries) rather than the retail mania seen in 2021, shifting focus toward Wall Street relevance.
- Incentives Evolution: The shift from “helicopter money” (giving out tokens to attract users) to creating supercharged, targeted loyalty and reputation systems using token incentives.
- Gaming as Onboarding Funnel: Gaming (like Axie) has a massive advantage over pure DeFi/trading apps because gamers represent a much larger potential user base for onboarding into broader crypto primitives (payments, DeFi).
4. Notable Companies/People
- Jeff ‘Jiho’ Zirlin: Co-founder of Sky Mavis, specializing in community building and early growth experimentation.
- CryptoKitties Community: The origin point where Zirlin met his co-founders and other key early NFT builders (like the founder of OpenSea).
- Axie Infinity: The flagship game, recognized by Guinness World Records as the #1 NFT project by trading volume ($4B+).
- Ronin Network: The proprietary sidechain built by Sky Mavis to support Axie’s scaling needs.
- Uniswap: Mentioned as a key catalyst; early Axie players benefited significantly from the Uniswap airdrop, creating a wealth effect that fueled further engagement.
5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion
No direct, deep dive into specific regulatory frameworks was covered, but the discussion noted the current cycle is “very political,” implying that institutional adoption is heavily intertwined with navigating regulatory landscapes.
6. Future Implications
- The industry needs to figure out how gaming can appeal to Wall Street metrics, which is currently a major focus for infrastructure builders.
- There is significant untapped potential for Web3 games to onboard users into DeFi and financial primitives, acting as a seamless portal beyond just collecting/trading NFTs.
- The experimentation mindset—ingraining constant iteration—must remain central to growth, especially in emerging markets.
7. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for Web3 Founders, Game Developers, Growth Marketers in Crypto, and Venture Capitalists focused on the consumer application layer of blockchain technology.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
Binance Angels
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Exchange/Community
Fondo
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institution
MicroStrategy
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institution
Killer Queen
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Like Japanese
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Moku Grand Arena
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Angry Dynamite
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And Fableborn
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Brawl Stars
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Fishing Friends
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Stardew Valley
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Loom Network
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But I
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Fishing Frenzy
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Binance Angels Axies
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💬 Key Insights
"we basically realized, yo, you can't build your startup on another startup, and you're like, okay, nobody knows our needs better than us."
"one of the big inflection points as well that I should point out is the Ronin network. So, what is Ronin? Well, while we were building Axie from the beginning, we knew that scaling was going to be a boss that we had to contend with and slay. Why? Because we came from CryptoKitties. CryptoKitties famously or infamously clogged the entire Ethereum network."
"I still think that that's like the potential for gaming to onboard people into the payments aspect of crypto, the DeFi aspect of crypto. This is something that only Axie so far mainly has shown, but there are also some games like Pixels and Fishing Frenzy and Cambria that are showing this so far this cycle. But I still think that that's untapped, and I still think that that's going to be a huge onboarding funnel for like these more like financial primitives within crypto."
"The guild mechanism was also another huge kind of onboarding point. So people would basically get, require a ton of Axies and then go out there and search for people or pro gamers or people who are really good at games to kind of pilot or use these Axies and battle."
"a lot of game companies were wasting or using their money for basically to buy installs, whereas there might be a more interesting way of basically, can you just like deposit those funds directly into like a liquidity pool? And you're basically the token incentives are acting as basically your user acquisition budget."
"We invented the idea of being able to use a digital collectible or an NFT to earn a fungible token, so like a normal token. And I think the way that I think about this is that a lot of people were interested in mining crypto, but mining crypto is something that only a certain percentage of the population is going to be able to do. And we basically democratized the act of mining and earning your first crypto."
📊 Topics
#artificialintelligence
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#startup
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#investment
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