Axie Buzz had been more than just a platform for a lot of users. This young and promising project seeks to give light to how Axie Infinity can pave a path for users to be free from financial binds. Yes, Axie Buzz isn’t just a scholarship program to take in scholars that we deem worthy to take in. Axie Buzz itself is the Create-To-Earn program that values the spirit of collaboration as it aims to prove that we are Stronger Together.
Today, exactly 50 days after releasing Axie Buzz, it's time to shed some light on the project and let the wider crypto community know what Axie Buzz's goals and principles are, what core values it was built upon, and what plans we have for the future.
My name is Stella, also known as @stellariche, a content creator and a scholar for Axie Buzz. There is more than the surface-level knowledge of what people know about our campaign and our platform. So, our team collaborated together and interviewed our founder or how the community likes to call him Papa Buzz.
Table Of Contents:
- What is Axie Buzz?
- How were you able to come up with the idea of having Axie Buzz?
- What are your goals with Axie Buzz?
- What are the guiding principles behind the initiative?
- What motivates you to keep running Axie Buzz?
- What drew you to Axie Infinity?
- What are the short-term and long-term goals of Axie Buzz?
- What are the challenges that you’re facing?
- What do you think is the impact/legacy of Axie Buzz and its community to the Axie Infinity community or game as a whole?
- How has Axie Infinity changed you?
What is Axie Buzz?
Axie Buzz is an extraordinary place where upvotes payout cryptocurrency ($HIVE) 7 days after posting content and receiving upvotes. Rewards were made possible because of the Hive blockchain. The more staked Hive tokens (Hive Power) users have in their wallets, the more their upvotes are worth. The best thing about upvotes is that it costs nothing to give value to others. Upvotes are entirely free so giving a monetary value to content creators on Hive costs nothing. The only requirement is to stake Hive tokens which can later be unstaked at any time.
I managed to partner up with the largest curation guild on Hive (@ocdb). Axie Buzz has the right to distribute a portion of its daily upvotes, resulting in a 1000-200$ weekly reward pool for Buzz creators. This amount is only set to grow as we grow as a community and when Hive price increases since it also increases our upvotes' value.
By sharing their work with Axie Buzz, content creators are empowered to monetize their creative efforts. Readers also get to enjoy a constant stream of fun, attractive, and unique, Axie-related content. That's the gist of Axie Buzz and what makes it special.
How were you able to come up with the idea of having Axie Buzz?
It's an interesting story actually. Axie Buzz was founded upon a humanitarian drive to help an awesome Hive content creator get recognition for his work.
It happened about a month after I started playing the game. As I was searching for Axie-related content on Hive, I found a user by the name of @bittrio that I've already known about for many years but didn't follow him closely. It turns out he's creating killer Axie videos and posting them to Hive. They were so impressive to me that I instantly concluded he is Hive's top video content creator. The disappointing thing about it was that curators didn't appreciate his content. The amount of money he was earning for sharing his work was severely low. He barely made a dollar per post!
Knowing that some Hivers could help change his situation by upvoting his content, I quickly contacted a few people with substantial enough HP and willingness to curate great content. Acidyo (owner of ocdb curation guild) was one of the first people to respond. He said something in the lines of: "Why don't you two create an Axie community on Hive? You'll have the ability to upvote with ocdb curation trail, and you can reward Bittrios content whenever you want."
Instantly, I took this opportunity and started working on it. I created the Axie Buzz Hive account, community, and discord server, and hired a designer to make a logo. In about a couple of days, Axie Buzz was released.
The rest is history.
What are your goals with Axie Buzz?
Axie Buzz's mission statement is constantly evolving and taking on new forms. Still, generally, I'm keen on reaching a couple of main goals.
- I want Axie Buzz to become a potent positive driving force in the lives of hundreds of thousands of Lunacians across the globe.
- Supercharge their journey to financial freedom through content creation by introducing them to the opportunities presented by the Hive blockchain and the Axie Buzz community. I want to show creators how to further financially empower themselves by sharing content about the game we all love and adore.
- Establish a vibrant community of like-minded individuals helping each other reach their goals no matter how big or small they might be. I want to create a collaborative environment where individuals are incentivized to achieve both shared and individual goals. This way, each individual in the community has a much higher chance of achieving their personal goals. This is how we win both on a collective and individual level. Stronger Together is not a tagline or a corny statement. It's true, and it's one of the core principles of Axie Buzz.
- Become the go-to source of Axie-related information and, as Chaya once said, turn Axie Buzz into the NYT of Axie Infinity.
- Grow Axie Buzz both on Twitter and Hive to use its influence to catapult our members closer to achieving anything they want to achieve. Once Axie Buzz becomes big, I want to promote artists/creators within our community to get them a step closer to finding clients. AxieBuzz will help achieve their dream of making their creative aspirations into a stable source of income, enough to support their daily needs, and enough for them to dedicate their full time and attention to it.
- Create AxieBuzz custom Hive-based social media website where creators can earn both Hive and our unique custom token. By creating our platform, we will have more flexibility in implementing new features currently missing on Hive/PeakD. We can gain more flexibility with the content we push up to the top of the site where it gets more views and greater flexibility to curate content and reward creators for their work, but these are only a few ideas among many other things I want to achieve with having our own custom platform.
- Create a DAO for the AxieBuzz platform and use it to reward contributions that aid our community in achieving our goals and further incentivize valuable contributions.
- Be a positive example and leader in the Axie community, showing new members how they should think/act if they want to succeed in Axie Infinity and generally in life as a whole. Like thinking long-term, helping and collaborating with others, and building solid foundations you can use later in building a successful career/business.
- Motivate creators to produce more of the right kind of content necessary for Axie Infinity. AxieBuzz's goal is to reach a broader audience and establish a reliable source of Axie-related content for people to enjoy consuming.
- Organize many fun events for the community to participate in, like contests/giveaways/tournaments.
- Do anything else that comes to mind that will help Axie Infinity and our community members grow and achieve deserved success.
What are the guiding principles behind the initiative?
Help, connect, uplift, inspire, collaborate, and motivate.
Community is layer 0 of any project. The most crucial aspect and the main driving force to the success of any undertaking. Knowing this and knowing how our potential is supercharged by collaboration, I put this idea at the forefront of what we're doing as a collective with Axie Buzz.
I believe everyone deserves a chance. Something that's not often seen in this cruel world.
The game of life is wildly unfair and skewed in favor of the elite that controls it (especially the monetary aspect) at the expense of everyone else. I feel like Axie Infinity has the chance to change this grim reality for a lot of people, while Axie Buzz can greatly help further increase this financially liberating movement.
This world is designed so that most people are inclined to act against each other as if they are in constant competition with everyone else. In their opinion, thereis no way of reaching their goals by working together with others who have the similaraspirations since they see them as competition. So they act cunningly to bring down the people around them to have a higher chance of making it themselves. Mostly because money itself is a zero-sum game, so by default, someone must lose if you want to gain it.
I'm here to prove that this is a complete and utter nonsense idea, purposely designed to create more low and middle-class, wage/government-dependent, mind-slaves. I'm going to provide factual and verifiable evidence that, by doing the exact opposite of the mentioned negative behavioral pattern, is how every single person on this planet has a much higher chance of achieving their goals.
Axie Buzz will show the world how powerful of a fuel collaboration is, and I'm going to use the full scope of my influence to prove this.
Additionally, through Axie Buzz, I want to help, motivate, and inspire our community members to change their lives for the better. Once they achieve this with my help and the help of the rest of the Buzz fam, out of gratitude, they will naturally come back to do the same for someone else in the community. This should create a perpetual positive feedback loop where each individual gets helped and, in return, does the same for someone else in the community. Think of it as personal growth and development but on steroids.
What motivates you to keep running Axie Buzz?
My primary motivation in doing all of these is seeing others win and seeing our community members achieve goals that they would've never been able to accomplish independently.
Axie Buzz is not about enriching myself or becoming "famous" for myself but rather about acquiring influence and capital to help others win for themselves. Whatever this may mean for them- I find happiness and joy. One of the main motivations that constantly keeps a fire burning under my ass is to keep me motivated about investing so much of my time and capital into making this happen.
I genuinely feel more happiness from seeing others win than winning myself.
I wish there were someone like this to help me out when I was down bad at the beginning of my journey as I'd be able to reach my goals much faster and wouldn't waste years of my life stuck at ground zero. Now that I've managed to slightly uplift myself financially, I'm going to fully use this newfound capital to help others in a way that I wish I had assisted on my journey.
Also, collecting good Karma points is a nice benefit :D
What drew you to Axie Infinity?
I knew about Axie way back when it was first released after reading about it in a post by Acidyo. I liked the idea but didn't understand the bigger picture, and back then, I couldn't even spare enough to get into the game even though Axies were like 5-50$ bucks per pop. Funnily enough, I joined in 2021 at an entry-barrier of 2k per team.
Why did I join now, though?
After seeing the YGG video about how people from the Philippines can uplift themselves from poverty by playing the game, I finally said yes, I'm ready to jump headfirst! After doing some research, I FOMOed after a couple of days. Having a distant relative in Venezuela and knowing the hardships Venezuelans are going through due to the hyperinflation of their national currency, my first main goal was to create this massive scholarship program that will save the lives of unfairly struggling Venezuelans.
After getting into the game and realizing how difficult this will be to pull off due to the language barrier, lack of experience, and capital to provide enough teams, I put this idea to the back-burner for now until I get it all figured out. I may not pivot to only hiring Venezuelans through Axie Buzz because that would be unfair to others. Still, I do plan to organize a second, dedicated scholarship solely for this purpose.
My aspirations for what I want to achieve with Axie Buzz evolved substantially from then, and now even though I still have this in mind and want to do it at one point, the vision has grown into something much more significant than the original goal.
What are the short-term and long-term goals of Axie Buzz?
Short-term, the goal is to bootstrap a vibrant community of individuals collaborating to achieve both shared and personal goals, create the Axie Buzz interface, DAO, establish the Venezuelan-exclusive scholarship, and become the NYT of Axie.
I want Axie Buzz to produce more interesting, valuable, unique, and educational content for the Axie community to enjoy reading. Some short-term goals in this department include interviewing influential individuals in the Axie community. Organizing tournaments which will be recorded and narrated by Bittrio and posted to Twitter/Hive. Creating a newsletter covering the most notable events that recently occurred in Lunacia and a few other things I'm not ready to share yet.
Additionally, I want Axie Buzz to achieve a substantial following on Twitter and use it to promote the undertakings of our community members. For example, Kaizen intends to be an artist, and his dream is to have his own clothing line. When I first heard this, I told him I will do whatever I can to help him make this happen, and I mean it. Having a big following will make this possible not only for Kaizen but also for many other Axie Buzz fam members.
Long-term, the plan is to develop the Axie Buzz interface further to provide all the right tools needed to help players start and enjoy their Lunacian journey. I've got some pretty wild ideas for the interface, which I won't spoil for you now, but I'll say that if I'm able to transition them from my imagination to our reality, the Axie Buzz interface is going to blow your mind. Another idea floating around is to develop an RPG-type, Play 2 Earn game. Considering Hive has fast and free transactions, and it's the lifeblood and sanctuary of Axie Buzz, building it on top of the Hive blockchain is a no-brainer.
Why do I mention this if it has nothing to do with Axie Infinity? Well, it does.
The plan is to implement Axies into the game so that owners could scan their Axie collection to claim them in the game and use them as companions or pets that will assist in battle. I believe that building additional use-cases for Axies is a must if we want Axie as a whole to succeed moving forward. I also think it would be so cool to be able to use our Axies across many other games and on many different blockchains.
What are the challenges for Axie Buzz?
Exposure, onboarding, and lack of capital are a huge hindrance in achieving more for.
Exposure
Reaching people on Twitter is not an easy task. Considering that I want to show Lunacians how they can further financially empower themselves through posting to Hive, I must be very successful in reaching many people on Twitter if I wish Axie Buzz to succeed.
A major debilitating factor here is that Twitter is notorious for suppressing the reach of Tweets containing links, so it's hard to promote Hive content to attract new users. The worst thing about this is that Twitter stops links leading to Web 3 platforms even more heavily, and it doesn't end by crippling the reach of the Tweet containing the link but also expands to doing the same for the next couple of Tweets, whether they have a Web 3 link or not.
Considering Web 2 lives off censorship and information control, while Web 3 platforms such as Hive have freedom of speech embedded in its code, it's no wonder Jack is allergic to our links.
Solving this problem is only possible through collaboration with large accounts that will help spread our message by retweeting Axie Buzz's content. This kind of support I have yet managed to acquire, but I'm working on this.
Onboarding
Onboarding new users to Hive is challenging due to the inherent complexity of using a blockchain-based social media site. It’s so complex and hard to understand for new users that it’s greatly hindering the number of people we can introduce to Hive and is crippling the success of my main goal, which is to help creators financially empower themselves through sharing content about the game.
Proper education about how to use Hive can slightly alleviate this problem.. Still, this solution is nowhere near ideal as it requires a great deal of effort by new users to learn Hive through the tutorials I posted.
The only viable solution to this problem that comes to mind requires Axie Buzz's custom platform and the answer will come in the form of a more easy-to-understand and user interface with the addition of login through a Twitter account.
Lack of capital
It is the most formidable challenge I've faced so far and the most difficult one to overcome.
Most of what I'm doing and want to do in the future with Axie Buzz requires a great deal of capital to be able to shine the brightest. With enough funds, I could buy more Axies to hire more scholars. Pay people to work on Axie Buzz directly, engage influencers to share the word about Axie Buzz to onboard more new users, develop the Axie Buzz platform. An RPG game is just some of the things more capital would allow me to do. With enough resources, AxieBuzz is going to be significantly improved and its reach and potential is going to be greatly magnified.
I've already given it my all by funneling most of my net worth to this project. There is not much more I can provide unless I can make another couple of X's on the rest of my portfolio. Figuring out a long-term solution to this challenge would push Axie Buzz to the next level and increase its potential in all of the scopes of activities it does.
What do you think is the impact/legacy of Axie Buzz and its community on the Axie Infinity community or game as a whole?
I hope that Axie Buzz has a long-lasting positive impact on everyone directly involved and the wider Axie Infinity community as a whole.
I hope the content produced in AxieBuzz contributes to the longevity of Axie Infinity- by adding vital, missing pieces in the grand scheme of things. Provide Lunacians a place where they can chat, connect, collaborate, learn from others, and enjoy Axie-related content while earning an additional income for their efforts.
As a legacy, I'd love to instill this sense of collaboration over the competition because only through collaborative efforts does each individual of the community have a much higher chance of succeeding in whatever they're trying to accomplish. Competition and tribalism are for the barbarous ages. We're in a 21st-century fam. It's time to open our minds to other possibilities and adopt a more healthy and positive mindset.
By doing so, we're all going to make it, and that's what I'm here for.
How has Axie Infinity changed you?
Axie changed me in many ways. Most notably, it reignited my drive to help others. It has given me something to look forward to every day and something to keep continually working on. I've never found myself so motivated and dedicated to anything in my entire life. Even when I was trying to acquire financial freedom for myself, I wasn’t so entirely devoted to something, which is odd because I thought I was giving it my all. Now that I see how much thought and effort I'm putting into Axie Buzz, it's blatantly apparent that I could've been doing more for myself back then.
It has given me a tool through which I can help change people's lives for the better, and I love every second I spend working towards achieving this goal.
For some reason, my general happiness and well-being have recently improved quite dramatically. I can't tell if that's due to seeing all of the efforts I put in Axie Buzz paying off (not monetarily as I reinvest everything but community growth-wise) or the good vibes the Buzz fam is sending out through the ether reaching my being. Whatever it may be, I can say that this is solely because of Axie Infinity without a shadow of a doubt.
Last but not least, ever since I've started working on this project, I was never more optimistic about what the future has in store. Now, I'm more confident than ever before that I'm on the right path. I'll be able to do something extraordinarily significant both for the Axie and Hive communities. It excites me as I've always wanted to do something meaningful for Hive because I've been a long-term believer in the project ever since first joining more than 4 years ago. Hive has already given me so much throughout the years, and now it's my turn to give back.
Needless to say that none of this would be possible if it weren't for Axie Infinity, and for this, I'm incredibly grateful.
Ending notes
This concludes our interview with Papa Buzz. We hope your questions about Axie Buzz have been answered and that you’ve been inspired to create content on our platform. Come visit us on Hive and unleash the buzz by creating Axie-related content. We're looking forward to seeing more Lunacians join our creative side of the metaverse and start monetizing their Axie-related content. If you have any other questions, feel free to drop them in the comment section. I'm sure that Papa will find the time to answer them.
