Vietnamese cryptocurrency market cap tops $2.5 bln

Its price has increased 82 times this year to $41 at the time of publishing.

It is the 43rd largest cryptocurrency in the world, according to crypto data platform CoinMarketCap.

Axie Infinity (AXS) price. Photo courtesy of CoinMarketCap.

Axie Infinity (AXS) is a blockchain-based game in which players buy non-fungible tokens of monsters and then battle them against each other. AXS is a native token and it costs four of them to "breed" a monster.

The game is inspired by Nintendo’s Pokémon series in which you collect and pit monsters against each other in combat.

A player might have to spend $700 or more to build a starter team, and can sell the monsters later for profits, and the game’s play-to-earn approach rewards players with crypto tokens that can be exchanged for money.

The project was developed by Sky Mavis, founded in 2017 by Nguyen Thanh Trung, 29. He was also the founder of e-commerce startup Lozi.

As of June this year Axie Infinity has 60,000 players around the world.

In May Sky Mavis raised $7.5 million from several foreign investors.