QUEZON CITY, Philippines — On a recent night, About 20 people filled the second floor of the Internet cafe recently opened by Joniel Bon in Quezon City, 16 kilometers from Manila. Sitting in front of computers with 32-inch curved monitors, they began playing video games like Heroes of Mavia and Nifty Island, while music by Taylor Swift and Maroon 5 blasted from the speakers.
Playing these games can be a full-time job, and some of Bon's customers had settled in for the night with slices of pizza to fuel them. The games reward players with cryptocurrency tokens for completing small daily challenges. Players often convert their tokens to pesos, the Country's currency, earning around double the Philippine minimum wage of $11 a day.
Bon, 40, had dreamed of the bustle of activity in his own business after cryptocurrencies collapsed spectacularly two years ago, dashing his hopes for a thriving gaming collective back then.
“There was a point where I had to say, 'I believe in this.' I had to hope,” said Bon, a former IT worker. “We survived.”
Bon's new internet cafe is a sign of how cryptocurrencies have begun to flourish again in the Philippines, which has long been a hub of crypto activity. Bitcoin hit an all-time high in early March of around $73,000, capping a recovery from the 2022 market crisis and dragging other digital currencies like Ether with it. (At the end of the month, Bitcoin was trading at about $64,000.)
Now new snapshots of cryptocurrency companies in Manila have emerged. People have started harvesting virtual crops from a cryptocurrency farming game called Pixels as a new source of income.
In November and December, the value of cryptocurrency transactions in the Philippines rose 70 percent against September and October, to $7.3 billion, data from research firm Chainalysis shows.
Cryptocurrencies became particularly popular in the Philippines during the pandemic lockdowns. People started playing the video game Axie Infinity, created by Sky Mavis, a Vietnamese company. In the game, players battle Pokémon-type characters to earn a cryptocurrency called Smooth Love Potion.
At the peak of Axie's popularity in 2021, renters, gas stations, and some restaurants in the Philippines accepted Smooth Love Potion as an alternative to pesos.
But when cryptocurrencies crashed a year later, thousands of Filipinos lost the savings they had in Smooth Love Potion.
“The game worked well when everyone was coming in,” said Ian Dela Cruz, 30, a farmer from Pampanga, a province north of Manila, and a former Axie player. “But when everyone tried to leave, that's when everything stopped.”
Some Filipinos who successfully made money through Axie became entrepreneurs, creating their own companies and gaming collectives called “guilds.” Now some of those efforts are taking off.
Teresa Pia, 27, a former Axie player, left her job as a preschool teacher in 2021 to operate a crypto gaming guild called Real Deal, which has 54,000 members on the social media platform Discord.
Pia said she sees her Discord channel “as a new classroom” where she teaches her members, many of them Filipino women working abroad, how to trade and invest in cryptocurrencies.
As cryptocurrencies recover, many of those women are now making enough money to return home to their families, she said. “The amount of money they receive may seem small, but when you convert it to pesos, it is big for them”Pia said.
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