One of the biggest problems of play-to-earn (P2E) games like Axie Infinity is the initial capital needed to start playing the game. Not all players can afford to buy three Axies up front, which is why mechanisms like scholarships exist, giving players the chance to essentially rent NFT assets needed in P2E games for a split of their earnings.
Unfortunately, scholarships have created another problem for asset owners. Manually recruiting and managing scholars sometimes prove to be too much of a hassle, not to mention that the mechanism relies mainly on trust — trust that the scholar will not do anything that will lead to the assets being banned, while the asset owner agrees to pay the agreed percentage sharing from the earnings.
Enter Playdex, a new rental marketplace for P2E games. It aims to automate most of the processes in asset renting in P2E games. For asset owners, they can connect their assets to Playdex’s self-managed marketplace, set the daily rent amount, and start earning passive income. No need to manually recruit and manage scholars on their own.
For players, they can choose from thousands of NFT assets and start playing instantly, with rates as low as 15 SLP (Axie’s in-game currency) per day. What’s more, players can also change assets anytime. No commitment to a particular guild is necessary, as Playdex is only acting as an intermediary that streamlines the process.
While this may sound like a disadvantage to P2E game guilds, Playdex thinks that it doesn’t seem to be the case. Playdex’s co-founder, Ron Hose, said to BitPinas: “Guilds can now focus on training and scaling their communities no longer burdened by the hefty financial cost of gaming assets. While NFT owners can simply earn from their assets passively.” In practice, Playdex is actually looking to help guilds grow their community even more.
Playdex’s founding team is composed of founders of Filipino fintech firms Coins.ph and PayMongo, along with crypto veterans from Yield Guild Games and Xendit. Playdex has recently raised $2 million in seed funding led by crypto exchange PDAX, OrangeDAO, and iSeed Ventures. The company is based in the Philippines, and it’s a pretty obvious choice as the Philippines can be considered the P2E capital of the world, with one out of four internet users in the country playing P2E games like Axie Infinity.
Playdex will use the fresh funds to expand its community, accelerate product development, and introduce more games to the platform. It already has plans to integrate another popular P2E game Cyball soon, and more titles in the next three months.
Via: e27.
