Axie Infinity players are about to be taxed by the Philippines for earning large profits, someone just 22 years old bought 2 houses at the same time

The profits that players make through games like Axie Infinity are likely to drop significantly in the Philippines in the near future. The reason is that the tax authority of this country has just declared that this is taxable income.

According to the Manila Bulletin, the Philippine Department of Finance (DOF) is looking to tax not only businesses that operate on blockchain, but also players on these platforms.

Philippine Deputy Finance Minister – Antonette C. Tionko, said that in the near future, players will have to declare the amount of money earned from the game to then pay personal income tax. She emphasized this is a flow of wealth and added that DOF and the Department of Treasury (BIR) are specifically targeting Axie Infinity – a game developed by Vietnam-based studio Sky Mavis. Up to now, this game has not been officially registered in the Philippines.

Axie Infinity requires participants to purchase NFT in order to play. During the game, they can earn digital currency and choose to keep or exchange for pesos. Built on top of Ethereum, Axie Infinity’s AXS token has grown rapidly in recent times, reaching 5,000% year-to-date. Earlier this month, Axie Infinity surpassed the $1 billion mark in token sales, becoming the most valuable NFT project in the world.

Although game income is considered taxable income, up to now, the mechanism for determining income as well as the method of taxing has not been decided in the Philippines. Tionko said the process would depend on whether the asset is a security or a currency, a matter still being debated between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the central bank of the Philippines. “Either way, this type of income is bound to be subject to income tax,” she added.

Sky Mavis, a studio backed by billionaire Mark Cuban, is an unregistered foreign company with the BIR. Therefore, the agency is looking for a way to impose taxes on the income of Axie Infinity players in the Philippines.

Currently, about 40% of Axie Infinity players are Filipino. Most of them see this as their main source of income after being heavily affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. If you spend the amount of money working for 1 hour, the player can get the amount of 2 working days.

A Filipino shared: “At first, I didn’t believe that this game could make me money, but I tried anyway. Due to the impact of the pandemic, we have almost no way to make money like before. is one of the reasons why Axie Infinity is so popular.”

An elderly couple in the city of Cabanatuan said they kept the grocery store while playing Axie Infinity in the hope of making extra income.

There are even cases of buying a house by playing Axie Infinity. That’s John Aaron Ramos 22 years old guy from Manila, Philippines. Last May, he announced that he had bought two houses at once thanks to the money he earned from playing Axie Infinity.

Ramos said he started playing the game every day at the end of last year. The young man said that thanks to hard work playing games with a little luck, he has saved a considerable amount of money to buy a house.

Axie Infinity became popular last summer after a Coindesk article published information about it in August. As of mid-May 2021, the game developed by Sky Mavis has nearly 60,000 players.