Smooth Love Potion Soars 70% in 24 Hours Behind Axie Infinity Update

Smooth Love Potion, a token earned by playing Axie Infinity, has been a white knuckle ride in recent months.

In its latest turn, the token has soared almost 70%, to $0.034 in mid-morning trading U.K. time. The momentum pushed Smooth Love Potion’s (SLP) market cap to $1.1B.

SLP’s 14-day chart. Source: CoinGecko

The token is the highest gainer of the top 300 coins in the past 24-hours as of Feb. 9.

The apparent catalyst is a change to Axie’s game mechanics as a part Season 20 update, which was posted to the project’s Substack on Feb. 3. Season 20 makes two major cuts to SLP emissions, which together will reduce daily increases in token supply by 165M, according to the project’s estimations.

It’s a big moment for Axie. The project is the flagship of the play-to-earn economy and was celebrated for supplementing or replacing people’s income, but even at the $0.03 mark, SLP is down over 92% from the token’s all-time high of $0.40 which came on July 13.

SLP has been down for awhile, putting a damper on a project which was beating even Ethereum in fees last August. “While we’ve all experienced the euphoria that comes with incredible growth and prosperity, we’ve also more recently entered into a period of economic uncertainty,” read Axie’s Season 20 post.

Indeed the 180-day chart for SLP looks grim compared with the 14-day one.

SLP’s 180-day chart. Source: CoinGecko

Still, the past 24 hours have proved that Axie and its SLP token are still fighting. The project has over a million people in its four Discord servers, making Axie one of crypto’s largest communities. The Season 20 update concedes that if the project does nothing it risks economic collapse. So far, the changes appear to be working, or at least helping SLP’s price.

The first major change of Season 20 is the removal of the 50 SLP which players earn from what’s called “adventure mode,” according to the update. Adventure mode is a version of the game which can be played alone, as opposed to against other players. Axie says that roughly 40% of the SLP is created through adventure mode and that the change means 120M less tokens will be created daily.

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“Adventure mode was originally conceived as a way for the community to learn how to use their Axies,” read the update. “It has outlived its purpose as a way for people to earn tokens from the game.”

Season 20’s second major change to SLP mechanics also involves cutting emissions entirely from “daily quests,” which is a set of tasks such as completing a certain amount of one-on-one matches as well as adventure mode levels. According to Axie this will reduce SLP emissions by 45M per day.

The update also touches on upcoming burn mechanics, whereby users will be able to spend their SLP on digital objects like skins, in-game emojis, and to use the token as buy-in for tournaments among other uses.