A Thai-language YouTube channel about Axie Infinity and the play-to-earn economy, run through the 2021–22 boom.
In 2021 a game called Axie Infinity briefly became a livelihood for a lot of people in Southeast Asia. You bought creatures with real money, played, and earned a token you could sell back out. In the Philippines and Thailand people were covering rent with it. Almost nobody explaining it in Thai was explaining the money part — the videos were about which team to play, not about what you were actually holding.
So that is the gap I aimed at. Madfish001 covered the mechanics of the economy in Thai, for people who had never touched a wallet or an exchange before.
The spine of the channel was a numbered run of 21 episodes taking someone from never having heard of the game to running it as an income. The most-watched ones were not about gameplay — they were about money.
The scholarship episodes are the ones I would point at now. A scholarship was a lending arrangement dressed as a game: an owner who had capital but no time lent their creatures to a player who had time but no capital, and they split the earnings. People were underwriting strangers on trust, with no collateral and no recourse, and asking me how to structure the split. Two of my six most-watched videos are effectively about running a small unsecured lending book.
Alongside that ran Axie101, a shorter four-part track for people who had not bought anything yet — turning baht into AXIE, using the marketplace, understanding the cards, and moving SLP back out. Two of those four are pure financial plumbing, which was the part newcomers were most likely to get burned on.
Alongside the series I ran ranked livestreams, patch breakdowns (the SS20 update, everything known about V3 Origin ahead of launch), and meta analysis when the balance changes moved which teams were worth building. Later episodes covered the harder subjects: what we knew about the account bans and the hacks, and what was actually happening to the token as the numbers stopped working.
The channel is quiet now, and that is the interesting part. I watched a token economy inflate and deflate from the inside, on a weekly upload schedule, while explaining it to newcomers as it happened. The rewards token had no sink worth the name and an uncapped faucet; the whole thing depended on new entrants buying in faster than existing holders cashed out. From inside it felt like a game with a payout. From outside it was a yield curve that only worked while the queue kept growing.
I got a fairly unglamorous education in tokenomics, incentive design and what happens to retail participants when a mechanism is designed without one. It is a large part of why I ended up doing an MSc in Financial Technology, and why my applied project is about governance mechanisms rather than returns.