GameFi Tokens Axie Infinity, The Sandbox Defy Crypto’s Bearish Trend

In brief

Axie Infinity surged 89% this week following a major tokenomics overhaul aimed at reviving its game economy.
One analyst attributes the rally to project-specific news, rather than a broader capital rotation into gaming tokens.
Experts agree that a true GameFi revival requires a fundamental increase in token utility and user demand.

Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, and other gaming tokens have notched significant gains as Bitcoin trades lower amid escalating global liquidity threats.

Over the past 24 hours, Axie Infinity is up 16.7%, bringing its weekly gains to 88.5%, according to CoinGecko data. Over the past week, The Sandbox has recorded a rally of 15.3%, while gaming tokens including Decentraland and Smooth Love Potion have also posted weekly gains of 4.4% and 0.7% respectively.

The moves signal a potential rotation in trader focus.

“Realistically, this momentary defiance in gaming tokens is purely capital rotation and high-risk speculation,” Bertie Wrench, founder of Web3 gaming NFT project Bad Bikers, told Decrypt, noting that attention has shifted after meme coins’ sustained run.

With the broader macroeconomic outlook pressured by factors such as Japan’s bond market crisis, Wrench said this type of trend rotation across multiple sectors is likely unless market conditions improve.

Users on prediction market Myriad, owned by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, reflect negative sentiment following Bitcoin’s recent crash, assigning a 71% chance that Bitcoin will rally to $100,000—down from 84% less than a week ago.

Illia Otychenko, lead analyst at CEX.IO, disagreed about the capital rotation thesis, noting that Axie and The Sandbox’s moves look pronounced since they start from a much lower baseline due to a sustained downtrend.

The recent outperformance in gaming tokens has more to do with local, project-specific catalysts,” he told Decrypt. Last week, Axie Infinity announced a major restructuring of its tokenomics to revitalize its in-game economy and address issues like bot farming.

“These localized developments likely helped lift sentiment across the broader GameFi sector, even without a clear narrative rotation from privacy-focused tokens,” Otychenko explained.

A sustained revival of the sector, both experts agree, would require a fundamental increase in demand for tokens within their games. “The current move looks more like a local rally than a structural shift,” Otychenko told Decrypt.

He tempered investor expectations, noting that “GameFi as a sector is still under pressure, with roughly a 75% decline in 2025 and around 55% less funding last year,” and that only a small number of games consistently “exceed 100,000 weekly active wallets,” research data from Delphi showed.