No.301
Smooth Love Potion SLP
The breeding currency of Axie Infinity
🎭 a cheerful little potion that pours out of every battle and quest, asking only to be poured back to hatch one more pet
💬 “You win a battle, you finish a quest, and out I trickle. Save me up, pour me into two Axies, and a brand-new pet hatches. The more you all play, the more of me there is, so I learned the hard way what too much of a good thing does to a price.”
- SLP is the reward token of Axie Infinity, a play-to-earn NFT game by Sky Mavis.
- You earn it by playing and burn it to breed Axies (the game's pet creatures).
- It is an ERC-20 token that also lives on the Ronin chain. It started life as Small Love Potion.
- No fixed cap historically, so when everyone played at once in 2021, supply ballooned and the price fell.
📖 The Story
2018. A studio in Vietnam called Sky Mavis, led by Trung Nguyen and Aleksander Larsen, launched a game on Ethereum where you collect and battle little creatures called Axies. To breed a new Axie you needed a reward you could only get by playing, and that reward was Smooth Love Potion.
How you make it. SLP drips out of ordinary play, daily quests, the PvP Arena, the PvE Adventure. It is the soft currency, the points you grind for. To hatch a new Axie, two Axies are bred together and SLP is burned in the process. Earning mints it, breeding destroys it, so the amount in the world rises and falls with how much people are playing.
2021. The game went huge, especially in the Philippines and across Southeast Asia, where some people earned a real income from it. But that boom had a sting in the tail: so many players were minting SLP and not enough were breeding that supply far outran demand. The price collapsed under its own weight. It was a live lesson in what happens when a currency is printed faster than it is used.
Since then Sky Mavis has spent years trying to mend the balance, raising how much SLP gets burned and trimming how much is handed out. On January 7, 2026, they switched off SLP rewards entirely in the Origins game mode, partly to slow new supply and partly to discourage bot farms that played only to mint and sell.
📊 Stats
🧩 How it works
SLP is not a chain of its own. It is a token: an NFT-game currency built as an ERC-20 on Ethereum that also lives natively on Ronin, Sky Mavis's own faster sidechain. The loop is simple: play to mint it, breed to burn it. When more is burned than minted, the pool shrinks; when more is minted than burned, it grows.
🌗 Light & Shadow
- A clear, real job: it is the currency that lets Axie Infinity breed new pets, so it has a use beyond pure speculation
- Backed by an active studio. Sky Mavis keeps reworking the rules, burning more and minting less to defend the token
- It runs on Ronin, a fast, low-fee chain, so earning and spending small amounts stays cheap and quick
- No hard cap historically, so heavy play floods the market with new SLP (the 2021 oversupply crash is the cautionary tale)
- Its fate is chained to one game. If players leave Axie Infinity, demand for SLP fades with them
- Bot farms have minted it just to dump it, which is why Sky Mavis had to switch off rewards in some modes
🧬 Evolution lineage
SLP is not a fork of Bitcoin or Ethereum. It is an ERC-20 token bridged to the Ronin chain, and it has a sibling: AXS (Axie Infinity Shards). Both come from Sky Mavis. SLP is the breeding currency you spend; AXS is the governance token you hold.
🧭 Meet other friends
❓ FAQ
- What is Smooth Love Potion (SLP)?
- It is the reward token of Axie Infinity, a play-to-earn NFT game from Sky Mavis. You earn SLP by playing quests and battles, and you spend it to breed new Axies, the game's pet creatures.
- Why does SLP keep losing value?
- SLP has no fixed cap, so when lots of people play and earn it, supply grows fast. In 2021 so much was minted that the price fell hard. Sky Mavis has since burned more SLP and cut emissions to fight that inflation.
- Is SLP the same as AXS?
- No. Both come from Axie Infinity, but they do different jobs. SLP is the soft currency you earn and spend on breeding, while AXS (Axie Infinity Shards) is the governance and staking token. Think reward points versus shares.
- Where can I buy SLP?
- It trades on many crypto exchanges and on the Ronin network where Axie Infinity lives. Its price has swung wildly with the game's popularity, so only try a small amount. (Information only, not an exchange or investment recommendation.)
⚠️ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only