Axie Infinity creator Sky Mavis lays off 50 employees as part of broader efforts to adapt post-hack and market shifts.

Sky Mavis, the developer of the blockchain-based game Axie Infinity, said it will lay off 21% of its staff — or roughly 50 employees — as part of efforts to streamline operations and focus on core products, TechInAsia has learned.

The firm’s co-founder Nguyen Thanh Trung emphasized in an X post that the decision was not driven by financial pressures, reassuring that the decision is a “strategic move that allows for a sharper focus and positioning Sky Mavis for hypergrowth in 2025 and beyond.”

“The decision to part ways with talented team members was not made lightly and does not reflect their contributions to Sky Mavis. […] In order to better focus on these products and have the agility needed to open Ronin in Q1, we have made the tough decision to let go of 21% of our workforce.

Nguyen Thanh Trung

Trung also shared that Sky Mavis would not pursue new directions, stating, “rather than trying to build products for all users, we are doubling down on what makes Sky Mavis truly exceptional.” As a result, the game developer will focus on the Ronin wallet and expanding the Ronin Network “for more builders.” Following the news, the price of the Axie Infinity (AXS) token plunged 3.78%.

Founded in 2018, Sky Mavis operates a play-to-earn model where players purchase monsters as well as earn non-fungible tokens and in-game currency. In 2022, North Korea-affiliated hackers launched a multi-level social engineering attack on the company, leading to a $600 million loss. In response, Sky Mavis shifted to a free-to-play model.

HashCats, a tap-to-earn miner game, is concluding its first season and shifting focus to its upcoming Token Generation Event. 

With nearly five million players engaged in the game’s first six months, HashCats has announced a $500,000 giveaway in collaboration with its partner Choise.ai to reward players ahead of this next phase, according to a release shared with crypto.news.

T2E games, which allow users to earn cryptocurrency by playing, have gained attention but faced challenges in maintaining long-term engagement. Games like Hamster Kombat and Catizen (CATI) initially sparked hype but have struggled to sustain user interest.

HashCats is trying to buck this trend by expanding its ecosystem and enhancing player incentives.

HashCats background

Tap-to-earn games let users generate cryptocurrency by playing simple games. In HashCats, players mine $HASH tokens by tapping their screens and upgrading virtual mining equipment. These tokens can then be converted into cryptocurrency or used within the game’s ecosystem. 

Unlike traditional games that charge for upgrades, T2E games aim to provide a potential income stream for players.

Season 1 of HashCats introduced basic mining mechanics, enabling players to use a single virtual ASIC miner designed for mining specific digital currencies based on their hashing algorithms. 

According to the release, Season 2 will expand this concept, enabling players to manage a full mining farm and introducing Secret Points, which boost TGE rewards. Players from Season 1 who accumulated SP through contests and giveaways will gain an advantage in the new phase.

HashCats and Choise.ai Collaboration

The partnership with Choise.ai, a platform that merges traditional finance with blockchain, adds an extra layer of incentives. 

The launch of arcade-style beat-’em-up game Super Doginals came at an opportune time this month, being inscribed on the Dogecoin blockchain right as the original meme coin saw a resurgence in demand and attention, with DOGE hitting a three-year price peak.

But there’s little indication that the rollout was specifically timed like that. As pseudonymous creator Pimax told Decrypt, the game was created in honor of the fun vibes that have defined Dogecoin and its community for over a decade.

“I created Super Doginals as a tribute to the Doge spirit and playful culture,” they said, “adding my own touch to it.”

Super Doginals is particularly polished and robust for a web game, let alone a crypto game inscribed directly onto a blockchain. It’s simple in design, taking its cues from classic button-mashing brawlers like Fatal Fury and Streets of Rage, but has charming artwork and music, and really does capture the spirit of the meme coin’s fandom.

Pimax said that the game was developed using OpenBOR, an open-source game engine, which was ported to the WebAssembly language to run well in web browsers and remain compatible with the Doginals protocol standard.

It’s also a “lightweight” engine, they said, which was key for a game that would be fully inscribed onto a blockchain. Meanwhile, the old-school pixel art vibe both paired well with the retro gameplay and didn’t take up too much space, though the original music posed a bigger challenge.

“Pixel art was an ideal choice because it’s lightweight and scales nicely on higher resolutions without needing extra data,” said Pimax. “The heaviest component was the music—35 minutes in total—so we compressed it into the web-friendly OGG format to keep it Dogecoin-compatible.”

Pimax wanted to put everything on-chain, right on Dogecoin’s blockchain itself via Doginals—a protocol that, like the earlier Ordinals for Bitcoin, lets users inscribe artwork, code, and other data onto the chain. That can yield assets akin to NFT collectibles, but it can also enable interactive games and apps that fully live on-chain.

The builder first experimented with on-chain games on Dogecoin earlier this year, porting over the original shareware version of first-person shooter Doom, as well as launching a Doge-themed riff on Tetris.

But Super Doginals is a much more ambitious project—not just because it’s an original creation, but also because the size of the game requires the use of multiple inscriptions that work together as one in a process called recursion. Doginals then pulls all of the pieces together into a single, playable game, plus that approach unlocks potential add-on features as well.

“We inscribed the game engine, assets, and utility functions separately, then tied them all together in a final Doginal,” said Pimax. “This approach enables others to build on Super Doginals by adding their own levels, characters, or even creating entire games on top of existing on-chain content.”

Players will also be able to create a “delegate” inscription to have a version of the game in their own Dogecoin wallet, and playable through compatible wallet apps. Pimax said that details on this process will be shared in the near future.

Super Doginals was clearly born from Pimax’s own passion for Dogecoin and the community, but they shared that AI tools were used to make this a manageable solo project. In their view, the AI tools only helped them execute on that vision, rather than strip away their human touch.

“As a solo developer, I used AI tools to accelerate development—whether drafting art, composing music, coding, or gaining insight,” they said. “Today’s AI tools give developers superpowers. While they don’t replace human talent or creativity, they provide a massive productivity boost, making it possible to create a game like this.”

“It still required many months of work with a lot of hands-on effort,” Pimax concluded, “but AI, combined with ingenuity and determination, made it possible to tackle this project on my own.”