1. How can you not love the Pinoy Axie community? In case you missed it, I first wrote about the Axie Archipelago concept on Aug 27th, and got some supportive feedback about it in my comments. So together with Bitpinas editor Mike Mislos, I decided to give it a shot and distribute the manager survey form the following week on Sept 1st. The form collects very basic information such as guild names, general locations, and member numbers. By Sept 3rd, the AxieArchipelago.org website was live with 160 guilds listed. We got a lot of positive responses, but also a few naysayers which I’ll address later. Here’s the part that blew me away though. When I woke up on Sept 4th, I discovered that we had received another 250 submissions from guild managers across the country! Mike and I were obviously thrilled at the reception from the community, but were not sure how to handle the workload. A lot of time needs to go into cleaning, sorting, and standardizing the data, and both of us were juggling other responsibilities at the same time. Importantly, you can’t derive the correct latitude and longitude from the locations that people were entering since it was all messy informal text, so we had to manually find each set of coordinates.

2. So I reached out to YGG and they immediately agreed to sponsor a small bounty of 1,000 SLP. Just to emphasize the speed at which this was all happening: I woke up at 730am on Saturday, saw the new submissions, and messaged Gabby Dizon at 830am. By 9am, I had announced the bounty on Twitter and Facebook, asking for volunteers who could contribute their time to the project. By 930am, I had found two, and by 10am they had already started working on the data. And it was just in time too! Over the course of the weekend, we received ANOTHER 300 submissions, and our two volunteers — John from BitsharesLabs and Miles R — somehow sorted over 700 guilds in a single weekend. I am so grateful for their hard work, and you all should be too!

3. AxieScholar.co.uk and FH.team also kindly offered to donate to the SLP bounty, and I’m hoping that other guilds will help out also, because it’s looking like we’re gonna need all the help we can get. The updated AxieArchipelago website now lists 637 guilds, and as of this morning there’s already a fresh set of 200 submissions for us to work through. There’s also a lot of web development that I’d love to do also, like add a search function, or create infographics that summarize the numbers across each region. As a massive stretch goal, it’d be great to introduce the idea of “verification” also, so we can highlight the guilds that have chosen to provide more information about themselves. If there are developers out there with a strong grasp of Javascript, Google App Script, and are willing to work for SLP on Ronin, please let me know in the comments!

4. Of course, not everyone was enthused by the AxieArchipelago project, and quite a few people made jokes about how this was a trap set by the BIR. I think it’s a valid concern, so I thought I’d address it here. First, I should remind everyone that if you are earning income in the Philippines, you should probably just accept the fact that you owe some taxes to the BIR. However, the AxieArchipelago project is not a tax map, and it is most definitely not a secret project of the BIR. I’m honestly a little amazed that I even have to type that sentence, but I just wanted it to be crystal clear. Our directory contains no trackable information other than the name of a guild and its city. The BIR could get the exact same information simply by searching for “axie guild” on Facebook and combing through the results. We just cleaned it up and restructured it. Ultimately, we believe that the positive impact of having an easy-to-use directory far outweigh these concerns, because we now have a single place that people can use to find other players in their area, or other guilds offering scholarships. Never forget that we’re the biggest country in the Axie metaverse. We need to be leading the way, not hiding in the shadows.

5. I’ve also received some security concerns from guild managers who don’t want to advertise themselves because they don’t want to make themselves targets in their districts. To anyone who is worried about their personal safety as a result of their success in Axie Infinity, my first response would be “don’t register on AxieArchipelago.” (My second response would be “it might be time to move out of your area,” but that’s just me.)

   

6. You probably already saw the $AXS broke its ATH again on Saturday, hitting $91 at its peak before losing momentum and coming back down to $82. At this point I feel like breaking through the $100 barrier is an inevitability. The rest of the crypto industry is doing pretty well also, with $BTC finally breaking through past $51,000, and $ETH just inches away from $4,000. $FIL was one of the biggest gainers over the weekend, owing to the launch of their free NFT.storage service, which decentralizes the storage of NFTs. The service has some nice developer tools already, and I may dig into this once I have time to digest the documentation.

   

See you all on Wednesday, cryptofam! May the grind be forever profitable.