Meet the Vietnamese developer behind blockchain game Axie Infinity

In 2012, at the age of 20, Trung Nguyen was the chief technical officer and a co-founder of aspiring startup Lozi. At the time, Lozi was a social network for food bloggers.

The startup was popular among Vietnam’s teens and young adults, with 8 million users at one point. It received a seven-figure investment led by Golden Gate Ventures in 2015.

But as the startup grew, Nguyen felt like his path was diverging from the other co-founders’ trajectories.

The Axie team / Photo credit: Sky Mavis

Nguyen left the company in 2015 and spent nearly three years in Ho Chi Minh City working as a software engineer for Anduin Transactions, a Silicon Valley-based company with a platform that makes investment deals faster, more efficient, and more transparent.

Nguyen was interested in the accountability facilitated by Anduin’s platform, so when people in Vietnam started talking about blockchain, it clicked immediately. But others were more interested in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies; some companies were running cons through initial coin offerings.

For Nguyen, the promise of blockchain wasn’t in quick, risky profits. As an avid gamer, he was more interested in CryptoKitties, one of the world’s first blockchain-based games, where players can buy, sell, and breed virtual cats that are unique and validated by the Ethereum network’s architecture.

Nguyen recognized how blockchain technology could potentially bring forth a new way of building games.

The Axie genesis

In 2017, a few months into playing CryptoKitties, Nguyen was hooked. “I ended up having 1,000 virtual cats,” he said during an interview with KrAsia in Ho Chi Minh City. “It triggered my interest and imagination.”

Fascinated by the economy that formed within the game, Nguyen invested about US$600 to play CryptoKitties. Then, he realized that he could make a blockchain-based game of his own, combining the elements of true ownership and the advanced genetic system found in CryptoKitties with the competitive gameplay of the Pokémon series or Neopets.

Over the course of several months, with help from a group of Nguyen’s friends, Axie Infinity began to take shape.

Players control Axies, which are fantasy creatures based on axolotls, the Mexican walking fish with amazing regeneration capabilities. The game’s title is a reference to this quality as well as a description of how players can create countless types of Axies on the platform.

The axies live in an environment called the Terrarium, where a player can feed their team of Axies, clean them, or put them to bed. Like in CryptoKitties, players breed Axies and direct them to engage in battles. They can also visit a marketplace to buy and sell Axies.

A sensational hit

The game’s beta version was released in mid-2018. It was an unexpected hit, to the point that revenue from pre-orders of Axies was enough to give the developers a full year’s cash runway.

Lowering the barriers