On May 2, the game Crypto Unicorns was launched. It runs on Polygon. As the name suggests, the main characters in this farm simulator are unicorns. They farm the land and breed little unicorns. With the game, developer Laguna Games appears to have a good contender in the rapidly growing play-to-earn market.

There are multiple ways you can benefit from the game. Like with Axie Infinity, the first successful play-to-earn game, you can earn local tokens by winning battles with your Axies. A passive way to be involved in the game is to simply trade the currency AXS on, say, LiteBit. Crypto Unicorns' governance token is Rainbow (RBW), of which there are now about 10 million in circulation, at a price of about $1.65. Rainbow can currently only be traded on a few decentralized exchanges (dexes).

In addition, you can trade the game's NFTs. In Axie Infinity, the Axies are the NFTs. In Crypto Unicorns theNFTs are - you guessed it - the unicorns. To play the game, you have to buy a Unicorn and a piece of land in the game. This is generally how it works in play-to-earn games: you need initial capital. Another example is the move-to-earn fitness app Stepn, where you first have to buy a pair of virtual sneakers. The price of a Unicorn is hefty, by the way: it hovers around 1 ETH.

New options in the coming months

Crypto Unicorns players will be able to engage in more and more activities in the coming months. This is also nice for the unicorns: in addition to working on the land, they will be able to do fun things. Among other things, participating in races and battles. On this animal farm, not every unicorn is equal. They all have a different combination of genetic traits. Therefore, some will perform better on land and some better in battles.

The flywheel of play-to-earn

The best-known blockchain games of the last year are Axie Infinity and DeFi Kingdoms. The local "economies" are set up so that the value of the NFTs and the play-to-earn coin goes up as the number of players grows. In the case of Crypto Unicorns, the play-to-earn token is Unicorn Milk (UNIM). The unicorns need it to breed babyunicorns. Nursing is therefore an investment in future capital: the babies will grow up, become productive, and obtain a value. In a similar way, every play-to-earn game has a sort of flywheel built in, which allows good players to earn more and more. In the Philippines, some players earned a local monthly income from Axie Infinity.