On a recent Tuesday night, about 20 people crammed onto the second floor of Joniel Bong's newly opened Internet cafe in Quezon City, 16 miles from Manila. Sitting in front of a computer with a 34-inch curved monitor, they began playing video games like Heroes of Mavia and Nifty Island as music by Swift and Maroon 5 blared from the speakers.
Playing these games can become a full-time job, and some of Bong's customers spent their nights eating pizza slices for energy. The game rewards players with cryptocurrency tokens for completing small daily challenges. Players often exchange tokens for pesos, the country's currency, earning him about twice the minimum wage in the Philippines, which is $11 per day.
Mr. Bong, 40, dreamed of his business thriving after the cryptocurrency crash two years ago dashed hopes for the then-thriving gaming collective.
“There was a point where I had to say, 'I believe this.' I had to hope,” said Bonn, a former information technology employee. “We survived.”
Bong's new internet cafe is a sign that crypto is starting to boom again in the Philippines, which has long been a hub of crypto activity. Bitcoin reached an all-time high this month, capping a recovery from the 2022 market crash and causing other digital currencies such as Ether to rise along with it. On Sunday, Bitcoin was trading around $68,000.
New billboards for crypto companies have popped up across Manila. People are starting to harvest virtual crops from a crypto farming game called Pixels as a new source of income. Overseas Filipino workers known as OFWs are also returning home to earn cryptocurrencies as MFWs (Metaverse Filipino Workers).
According to data from research firm Chainalysis, the value of crypto transactions in the Philippines increased by 70% from September and October to $7.3 billion in November and December.
Pixels' Philippine player base jumped from 80,000 in November to more than 830,000 in March, according to the game's developer. According to them, about 30% of the world's video gamers who earn money in cryptocurrencies are based in the Philippines.
The new activity has given some Philippine officials pause. At a crypto conference in Manila in November, Kelvin Lee, then commissioner of the country's Securities and Exchange Commission, said the government was struggling with how to regulate the technology as it regained popularity. He said he was thinking about it.
Cryptocurrencies have historically been at the center of scams and scams. The tokens distributed by cryptocurrency earning games are more volatile than Bitcoin or Ether, meaning the boom could burst again.
Lee acknowledged that the Philippines, which relies heavily on outsourcing of customer service and information technology-related jobs, could be helped by a robust cryptocurrency industry, but added: “We need the security to operate well. I want a place where I can live.'' “How can you successfully operate if the industry itself, or the space itself, seems unruly, unruly, illegal?”
Lee, who resigned from the commission this month, declined a request for an interview. The Philippine central bank told local media last month that it plans to issue its own digital currency within the next two years.
Cryptocurrencies became particularly popular in the Philippines during the pandemic lockdown. More than 40% of the Philippines' population does not have a bank account, but the majority of Filipino households have access to the internet, allowing cryptocurrencies to spread to rural areas.
At the time of the lockdown, people started playing the video game Axie Infinity to earn virtual currency. Skymavis is a Vietnamese company. In the game, the player battles Pokemon-like characters and earns a cryptocurrency called Smooth His Love Potion.
When Axie's popularity peaked in 2021, Smooth Love Potion was accepted by Filipino landlords, gas stations, and some restaurants as a replacement for pesos.
However, when the cryptocurrency collapsed a year later, thousands of Filipinos lost their savings on Smooth Love Potion. game character.Some players even sold it for thousands of dollars. It was so valuable that some Filipinos took out loans to buy it, but it became worthless.
“The game worked well when everyone participated,” said Ian Dela Cruz, 30, a farmer and former Axie player in Pampanga province, north of Manila. “But just as everyone was about to go outside, it stopped.”
Some Filipinos who have succeeded in making money through Axii have gone on to become entrepreneurs, starting their own companies or creating gaming collectives called “guilds.” Some of these efforts are now getting off the ground.
Teresa Pia, 27, a former Axie player, quit her job as a kindergarten teacher in 2021 to run a virtual currency gaming guild called Real Deal, which has 54,000 members on the social media platform Discord. Pia views her Discord channel as a “new classroom,” she said, where she teaches her members, many of whom are Filipino women working abroad, how to trade and invest in cryptocurrencies. With the recovery of cryptocurrencies, many of these women are now making enough money to go home to their families, she said.
“The amount they receive may seem small, but when translated into pesos, it's a big amount for them,” Pia said.
Dela Cruz remained in the crypto industry as a video game streamer on Twitch, the Amazon-owned streaming platform. He is currently the captain of the largest esports team in the Philippines. In Pampanga, many farmers have started playing Pixel to harvest virtual crops and earn virtual currency as side income, he said.
The game's founder, American Luke Bawikowski, said he received advice from Filipino farmers on how to make the pixels more realistic.
“We have users who literally tell us their crop schedules and watering habits,” he said.
Even by crypto standards, the Philippine industry is full of opportunists. Phishing scams in the Philippines are prevalent in online crypto communities on platforms like Discord and X, as well as “pig butchering” where scammers target victims with deceptive texts and Facebook messages. Former players say that during Axii's heyday, some guild leaders exploited vulnerable players and took half of the profits as membership fees.
In addition to providing computers and resources to guild members, Bong said he considers his job to be that of a guardian. “It's family,” he said.
While cryptocurrencies have been a boon for many Filipinos, some say they are open to moving on to other opportunities if the industry fails again. Delacruz said he dreams of managing more farms with his brothers and not having to rely on cryptocurrencies for income.
“Fresh air, roosters crowing,” he said. “You don’t get that online.”
