Ten kilometers outside Manila, on Tuesday evening, about twenty individuals crammed onto the second floor of Joniel Bon’s recently opened internet cafe in Quezon City. They sat at desks sporting 34-inch curved monitors and played video games like Nifty Island and Heroes of Mavia while Maroon 5 and Taylor Swift’s songs buzzed over the speakers.
With pizza slices to keep them going through the night, several of Mr. Bon’s patrons had made their way to the end of a long day of gaming. The games give users tokens worth cryptocurrency in exchange for solving quick, everyday tasks. Players frequently exchange their tokens for pesos, the national currency of the Philippines, making around twice the minimum income of $11 per day.
Mr. Bon, forty, had dreamed of the flurry of activity at his own company following the stunning collapse of cryptocurrencies two years prior, which dashed his ambitions of having a successful gaming collective at the time.
“I had to declare at one point that I believed in this. Mr. Bon, a former employee in information technology, said, “I had to hope.” “We made it through.”
The resurgence of cryptocurrency in the Philippines, a hub for years, is demonstrated by Mr. Bon’s new internet cafe. This month saw a record high for Bitcoin, which completed a recovery from the 2022 market crash and brought other cryptocurrencies like Ether with it. Bitcoin was trading at over $67,000 on Monday.
Recently, new cryptocurrency company advertisements have appeared all around Manila. As a new source of revenue, people have begun to gather virtual crops from a cryptocurrency farming game called Pixels. In addition, O.F.W.s—overseas Filipino workers—are coming home to work as M.F.W.s, or metaverse Filipino workers, to earn cryptocurrency.
According to data from research firm Chainalysis, the value of cryptocurrency transactions in the Philippines surged by 70% from September and October to $7.3 billion in November and December.
According to the game’s producers, the number of Filipino players increased from 80,000 in November to over 830,000 in March. According to their report, the Philippines is home to over 30% of the world’s cryptocurrency-earning video gamers.
Some Philippine officials are taking note of the increased activities. During a November cryptocurrency conference in Manila, Kelvin Lee, who was a commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission of the nation, stated that the government was having difficulty figuring out how to regulate the technology as it became more and more popular.
In the past, scams and frauds centered around cryptocurrencies. Because the tokens distributed by cryptocurrency-earning games are more erratic than Bitcoin and Ether, the surge may collapse once more.
“We want a safe space to operate well,” Mr. Lee stated, conceding that the Philippines, which mainly depends on outsourcing information technology and customer service employment, may benefit from a thriving cryptocurrency sector. “How can you function effectively if the sector, or the area, appears disorderly, cumbersome, or unlawful?”
Mr. Lee, who departed the commission this month, turned down a request for an interview. The Central Bank of the Philippines announced to the local media last month that it intended to introduce its virtual currency over the next 24 months.
In the Philippines, cryptocurrency gained significant traction amid the pandemic lockdowns. Even though more than 40% of Filipinos lack a bank account, the majority of homes have internet connections, which has allowed cryptocurrency to proliferate in rural areas.
People started playing the cryptocurrency-earning video game Axie Infinity, developed by Sky Mavis, a Vietnamese firm, during the lockdowns. Players must fight Pokemon-like characters in the game to gain Smooth Love Potion, a cryptocurrency.
Smooth Love Potion was accepted as a replacement for pesos by landlords, gas stations, and several eateries in the Philippines in 2021, the year of Axie’s peak popularity.
However, millions more Filipinos lost the money they had invested in Smooth Love Potion when the cryptocurrency market crashed a year later. Characters in the game that some players would trade for thousands of dollars, so expensive that some Filipinos had to take out loans to purchase them, suddenly lost all of their value.
According to Ian Dela Cruz, 30, a farmer from Pampanga, a province north of Manila, and a former Axie participant, “the game worked well when everyone was getting in.” However, it ceased when everyone attempted to flee.
Axie enabled several Filipinos to become successful business owners, creating their gaming collectives known as “guilds” in addition to their firms. Some of those initiatives are now beginning to pay dividends.
In 2021, Teresa Pia, a 27-year-old Axie player, quit her work as a preschool teacher to become the leader of the Real Deal cryptocurrency gaming guild, which has 54,000 members on the Discord social networking platform.
“Although it might appear insignificant, the amount of money they receive adds up when converted to pesos,” Ms. Pia stated.
Mr. Dela Cruz continued to work in the cryptocurrency space, streaming video games on Twitch, a streaming service owned by Amazon. One of the biggest e-sports teams in the Philippines currently has him as its captain. According to him, a lot of farmers in Pampanga have taken up Pixels and are harvesting virtual crops to earn cryptocurrency as additional revenue.
The game’s American creator, Luke Barwikowski, claimed to have received guidance from Filipino farmers on how to improve the realism of Pixels.
He remarked, “There are users that will give us their watering schedules or crop schedules.”
The Philippines’ crypto market is rife with opportunists, even by crypto standards. Filipino phishing scams, also known as “pig butchering,” are very common in online crypto communities on Discord and X. In this scam, victims are tricked by fraudulent texts and Facebook messages. Former players claimed that during the height of Axie’s popularity, certain guild leaders took advantage of weaker players, keeping up to half of their earnings as a membership fee.
Mr. Bon stated that he saw his role as a guardian in addition to giving his guild members access to computers and other tools. It’s family, he remarked.
Although many Filipinos have benefited greatly from cryptocurrency, several stated they were content to move on to other chances should the business fail once more. Mr. Dela Cruz stated that he has aspirations of running more farms alongside his brothers and becoming independent of cryptocurrency.
“The sounds of the chickens and the fresh air,” he remarked. “That’s not available online.”
