When Bryce Johnson first discovered Axie InfinityIn the spring of 2021, he had graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University for four years and had just started his fourth job as a software engineer, deep in the bureaucratic quagmire of the government-oriented IT companies around Washington, D.C. Johnson, known as his childhood friends for being “extremely sincere,” with a contagious smile, was driving home from work in his Honda Civic one day, when he happened to overhear a guest on a podcast advocating investing in the metaverse. specifically, Axie Infinitya Pokemon-style digital card game that was gaining traction in Southeast Asia that people believed could unlock widespread crypto adoption.
At that time hardly anyone was streaming axie on platforms like YouTube and Twitch, despite tens of thousands of people playing every day. “I was just taken aback by the whole idea and decided to dive in,” Johnson says.
On April 27, 2021 he placed his first axie video on YouTube entitled, “How to Win: Axie Infinity Arena! (Beginner’s guide)‘, and almost overnight, Johnson says, he became ‘the face of’ axie† His timing couldn’t have been better: the game became hugely popular. At its peak, last August, it was generating $17.5 million a day.
in Johnson, axie found a rags-to-riches nice guy to match his family-friendly brand. He is not a mercenary crypto shill. But the economy underpinning crypto relies on promoters bringing in new players and new money. Without them, as we’ve seen time and time again, projects fall apart. Johnson’s charisma has built his brand, enabled him to create a start up crypto world of his ownsign for Gary Vaynerchuk .’s Export Office† evangelize for NFTs—and to run away from axie‘s collapse without real consequences. To find out how this all happened in just over a year, Read the businesstraverse.com Premium Exclusive Story: “Meet a crypto maker who plays to win.”
