Axie Infinity Whale Holds Over Half SLP Tokens, Players Worried

Paigambar Mohan Raj
Source: Science News

A mysterious Axie Infinity whale wallet has amassed more than half of the game’s SLP (Smooth Love Potion) tokens. SLP is the in-game cryptocurrency that powers the popular play-to-earn (P2E) title. As per reports, the whale currently holds nearly 22 billion SLP tokens.

The development was reported by Techno Blender. Their report further found that the tokens had come from Binance. Billions of SLP tokens were sent from the Ronin Binance wallet, into the whale’s anonymous wallet.

While speaking with CoinTelegraph, Axie Infinity player Michael Benko expressed his concern, given the short amount of time taken for the whale to gather the large amount of SLP.

Benko stated,

“The significance of a wallet holding so much SLP, if it’s an individual person, gives that person a huge amount of control over an economy, especially in an economy where it’s so hard to mint a token.”

An average player can produce between 10 and 70 SLP every day, depending on how proficient they are at the game. Benko highlighted that a wallet with 22 billion SLP could keep prices down when they should be rising.

Who owns the mystery Axie Infinity wallet?

According to Techno Blender, the wallet does not belong to Sky Mavis, the company behind the Axie Infinity game. Moreover, it was noted that the wallet is not part of Axie Infinity to distribute SLP tokens to players.

This was further confirmed by Aleksander Larson, co-founder, and chief operating officer of Sky Mavis. He spoke to CoinTelegraph and revealed that neither Sky Mavis nor Axie Infinity owns any of the game’s cryptocurrencies. He said that all tokens in circulation have been created by the players.

One of the main DAOs for Axie Infinity gamers, Yield Guild Games’ co-founder Gabby Dizon, claimed that YGG did not own the wallet. Dizon speculated that it might be a wallet that the exchange uses to store liquidity. Benko, however, does not believe Binance is the owner of the wallet. He stated,

“Binance seems to have an official wallet and this doesn’t seem to be that wallet.”

As of now, nobody knows to whom the wallet belongs, or what the whale’s intentions are.