Axie Infinity's native token axs soars more than 40% after the game cuts back on supply of play-to-earn tokens and increases prize pool to $6 million

• Axie Infinity's axs token has surged 44% since it revealed plans to cut the supply of Smooth Love Potion tokens.
• The 'drastic' changes will halve the creation of SLPs by making it more challenging to earn the tokens.

Axie Infinity's governance token, axs, surged more than 40% after the leading NFT game said it's bringing in updates to eliminate two ways people can create play-to-earn tokens.

The upcoming Season 20 release will include several changes aimed at rebalancing the economics of the game, the Axie Infinity team said.

These changes mainly affect the games play-to-earn token Smooth Love Potion, or SLP. Players will no longer be able to earn these by taking part in daily quests and playing adventure mode, Axie said.

"The daily quest, in principle, was great to encourage people to play everyday, but it's now become a mass emission mechanism for SLP. By removing the daily quest, we are able to reduce issuance by around 45 million SLP per day," it said in the latest edition of its newsletter, The Lunacian.

People playing the game can collect creatures called Axies, represented by NFTs, that they can put into battle. The NFTs can be bought and sold on the Axie Infinity Marketplace, at a wide range of value.

With the upcoming changes, the supply of SLP will drop by up to 56%, making them more scarce. As SLP tokens are needed to breed new Axies from old ones, that should make the NFTs in shorter supply, too — which has helped lift the price of the axs token they are traded in.

The price of an axs token has risen 44% to $69.28 at last check Monday, from $47.80 around the time of the Axie news Thursday, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Meanwhile, SLP went up from $0.009 on Thursday to $0.016 on Monday, up 27% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.

Axie Infinity took off in 2021 as play-to-earn games grew exponentially, in tandem with the crypto market, and axs rose by 18,000% throughout the year.

The Axie team said the game's economy requires change to ensure its long-term viability.

"We know that this is painful medicine. The Axie economy requires drastic and decisive action now or we risk total and permanent economic collapse. That would be far more painful," it said.

The updates also include the creation of a $6 million prize fund, and changes to the games rewards structure. In season 19, Axie gave out 3,000 axs tokens to users in the top 1,000 gamers on the leaderboard. In the upcoming season, this amount has increased to 117,676 for the top 300,000 leaderboard slots.

"Put simply, we've prioritized growth and on-boarding millions. Without this approach, it's likely that Axie would have remained a small, niche game with a few thousand players," Axie said.