This week I saw a rare Axie for sale that I really wanted. In order to fund the purchase (0.501 ETH) for this rare Axie I’ve been converting some crypto assets earned through Axie Infinity, Hive and cctip into ETH.
I cashed out 2972 SLP I’d earned since September 26. This included 250 SLP I won through a cagyjan giveaway. Not bad for one month’s work. Unfortunately SLP-ETH prices are quite low at the moment so this got me 0.17 ETH minus gas fees. Still that’s money earned through play. So anything is a bonus.
I’ve been active on steem/hive since January 2019. I haven’t really invested any of my money into the platform so 99.9% of my HP is earned. After swapping a good chunk of powered-down STEEM for HIVE and powering up to boost my HP post the hard-fork that gave life to hive, I switched to 50/50 rewards with a view to swapping earned liquid HIVE for other higher-conviction assets. In the two months since I earned 117 liquid HIVE. This week I swapped this HIVE into ETH via WHIVE. For my 117 HIVE I received a whopping 0.0576 ETH (plus approximately 3 HIVE refund).
I’ve been using cctip since January this year. WHALE was introduced to cctip a couple of months ago. Not long after listing on cctip, WHALE surged in price, thanks to aggressive marketing, attractive yield farming options and a rise in popularity of NFTs and crypto art. Thus for a short period after listing folks were tipping in WHALE quite liberally.
The funny thing with cctip is that they also have their own internal DEx - so my plan was always to convert this WHALE into ETH and then withdraw the ETH to my wallet. However, when I went to exchange the WHALE I noticed that there was a weird discrepancy in ETH-WHALE prices on the cctip DEx versus - say - Uniswap. It made more sense to swap my ETH into WHALE, then withdraw all the WHALE, then swap on Uniswap. It was a small arbitrage opportunity. The user experience of withdrawing from cctip was a nightmare but I was absolutely stoked when this morning I saw the 19.5 WHALE in my wallet. I swapped this for 0.316 ETH minus gas fees.
The net result of this consolidation was that I managed to scrounge the ETH together to buy this rare Axie.
Since the crazy Mystic Madness surge, I’ve become increasingly interested in rare Axies. On my journey down the Axie rabbit hole, understanding rarity has come relatively late in the learning continuum. I’ve gone from learning the basics of battle-play and PVE, to learning what Axies to buy to increase my winning percentages, to the basics of breeding, to learning about land play, to buying a Mystic Axie. Now that Mystics are super-expensive I’m looking at what other properties make Axies rare.
Axie OG Zee recently made an excellent guide for identifying rare Axies. I felt quite pleased with myself that my own research into identifying rare Axies led me to pretty much the same understandings.
I looked at this Axie many times this week hoping no one would buy it whilst I was in the process of consolidating these other assets into ETH. I had the FOMO real bad!
Virgin Mech Big Yak. Woop!!
My newest Axie has the Big Yak body type (they are so cute!) and its class is Mech (one of the rarest classes). It is also a virgin Axie. I was quite chuffed that I bought it from Coco__Bear - an absolute legend in the Axie space. Personally I don’t find it the most attractive Axie but it is only one of eight Big Yak Mech virgin Axies in existence. My n00b self thinks that this was a good value buy for 0.501 ETH. Thanks for reading.
