Turns Out Love (and Other NFTs) Can Give Thrills, Pay Bills Too

Play-to-earn blockchain games like Axie Infinity may be bleeding users, but that doesn’t mean you can’t pay your electric bill in Smooth Love Potions.

A Smooth Love Potion, or SLP, is a cryptocurrency token given as a reward to players of the top crypto-based game. It can be used to breed non-fungible token (NFT) critters — axies — that gamers use to win battles royal. They are, by far, the biggest and richest NFT collectables, with sales topping $4 billion.

Now payment services provider XLD Finance has launched xSpend, a platform that lets players use various gaming tokens — cryptocurrencies with an in-game use — and stablecoins to pay utility bills, top up mobile phones and pay for goods at a 10,000-member merchant network in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh.

This is use of GameFi — a play on decentralized finance (DeFi) — tokens as a real-world currency has been talked up for several years in the crypto community.

It has been argued that the next revolution in gaming will be play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity that let players earn tokenized in-game items they can sell for real-world money to other gamers on cryptocurrency exchanges. While it’s not quite spending NFTs as a currency, it’s not that far off, either. SLPs have only one use: breeding new and more formidable axies.

In many cases, people in developing countries — the Philippines high among them — have become either full-time or part-time play-to-earn workers, often doing boring and repetitive tasks to earn saleable NFTs or in-game items like SLPs that can be used to create them.

Play at Work

Axie Infinity’s SLPs have proven to be the most popular token on xSpend, XLD co-founder Ian Estrada told Decrypt.

That is hardly surprising, considering that it is far and away the largest play-to-earn game, with 1.7 million players having bought 16.8 million axie NFTs, easily topping the all-time NFT sales list.

The news came after XLD announced on July 19 that it raised $13 million in a pre-Series A venture funding round. It is planning a payments platform that includes a crypto off-ramp, merchant payments application programming interface (API), a disbursements tool and a digital wallet.

Like most pay-with-crypto platforms like crypto spend debit cards and payments processors like Stripe, Strike, BitPay and PayPal, the xSpend users pay with crypto but the merchants receive cash.

Read more: Bringing Bitcoin Firmly into Payments, Strike Partners with NCR, Shopify, Blackhawk

Into the Metaverse

In the broader gaming community, in-game items ranging from magic swords, decorative clothing and accessories and in-game currencies are highly valued. Bootleg sales of these items are something the developers of games like Bungie’s World of Warcraft have been trying to stamp out for years.

One of the biggest complaints about GameFi NFT sales is that they encourage development of what serious gamers call unfair “pay-to-win” games.

So while GameFi’s future isn’t clear — the number of Axie Infinity users collapsed from 2.7 million in November to 700,000 in June and many games in the space are of poor quality — there is a bigger potential use here: the metaverse.

See also: Is Play-to-Earn Killing Blockchain Gaming?

Both blockchain-based metaverses, like Decentraland and The Sandbox, and others, like Roblox and Fortnite, are all largely considered games that have proprietary but purchasable currencies.

And while they’re still in their infancy, it’s inevitable that people will be able to do things that may be boring — say, attending marketing demonstrations or showing up at off-hour events — where NFTs that are potentially valuable or required for access are given away.

While in-game currencies, whether for Axie Infinity or for metaverses, can already be sold on crypto exchanges, that comes with a transaction fee, and generally two, as many exchanges do not trade those tokens directly for dollars but for stablecoins — much as in play-to-earn games. Particularly for smaller sums used in developing countries as real income, that can be a hard hit.

If GameFi tokens can be successful as a real-world currency, it seems likely that dynamic would apply in the metaverse as well.

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