On a recent Tuesday night, about 20 people crowded into the second floor of Joniel Bon’s newly opened internet cafe in Quezon City, 10 miles from Manila. Sitting at computers with 34-inch curved screens, they began playing video games such as Heroes of Mavia and Nifty Island as music by Taylor Swift and Maroon 5 blared from the speakers.
Playing these games can be a full-time job, and some of Mr. Bon’s customers stayed up all night with slices of pizza to fuel them. The games reward players with cryptocurrency tokens for completing small, daily challenges. Often, players convert their tokens into pesos, the country’s currency, earning roughly twice the Philippine minimum wage of $11 a day.
Mr. Bohn, 40, had dreamed up the hustle and bustle of running his own business after the spectacular cryptocurrency crash two years ago dashed his hopes for a thriving gaming collective at the time.
“There was a point where I had to say, ‘I believe in this.’ I had to hope,” said Mr. Bohn, a former IT worker. “We survived.”
Mr. Bon’s new internet cafe is a sign of how crypto is starting to boom again in the Philippines, which has long been a hub of crypto activity. This month, Bitcoin hit a record high, capping the comeback from the 2022 market crash and bringing other cryptocurrencies like Ether with it. On Sunday, Bitcoin was trading around $68,000.
New billboards for crypto companies have now appeared in Manila. People have started collecting virtual crops from a crypto game called Pixels as a new source of income. Overseas Filipinos, known as OFWs, also return to the country to earn crypto as MFWs or repatriated Filipino workers.
In November and December, the value of crypto transactions in the Philippines rose 70% from September and October to $7.3 billion, according to data from research firm Chainalysis.
The Filipino player base for Pixels grew to over 830,000 in March from 80,000 players in November, according to the game’s developers. About 30 percent of crypto-earning video game players are based in the Philippines, they said.
The renewed activity gave some Filipino officials pause. At a crypto conference in Manila in November, Kelvin Lee, then a commissioner at the country’s Securities and Exchange Commission, said the government was grappling with how to regulate the technology as it regained popularity.
Cryptocurrencies have been at the center of scams and scams in the past. The tokens issued by crypto games are more volatile than Bitcoin and Ether, which means the boom could fall again.
“We want a safe space for it to work well,” Mr Lee said, while acknowledging that a strong crypto industry could help the Philippines, which relies heavily on outsourced customer service and information technology jobs . “How can you function well if the industry itself, if the space itself, seems unruly, immobile, lawless?”
Mr. Lee, who left the committee this month, declined an interview request. Last month, the Philippine central bank told local media that it plans to launch its own digital currency in the next two years.
Crypto became especially popular in the Philippines during the pandemic lockdown. While over 40 percent of the country’s population does not have a bank account, the majority of Filipino households have access to the internet, which has allowed crypto to spread to rural areas.
During the lockdown, people started playing the crypto-winning video game Axie Infinity, which was created by a Vietnamese company Sky Mavis. In the game, players battle Pokemon-like characters to win a cryptocurrency called Smooth Love Potion.
At the height of Axie’s popularity in 2021, Smooth Love Potion was accepted by owners, gas stations and some restaurants in the Philippines as an alternative to pesos.
But when the cryptocurrency crashed a year later, thousands of Filipinos lost their Smooth Love Potion savings. The characters in the game, which some players would trade to sell for thousands of dollars — so valuable that some Filipinos took out loans to buy them — became worthless.
“The game worked well when everyone got in,” said Ian Dela Cruz, 30, a farmer in Pampanga, a province north of Manila, and a former Axie player. “But when everyone tried to get out, that’s when it stopped.”
Some Filipinos who have successfully made money through Axie have become entrepreneurs, creating their own gaming companies and collectives called “guilds”. Now some of these efforts are taking off.
Teresa Pia, 27, a former Axie player, left her job as a preschool teacher in 2021 to run a crypto gaming guild called Real Deal, which has 54,000 members on the social media platform Discord. Ms. Pia said she saw her Discord channel “like a new classroom” where she taught members, many of them Filipinas working abroad, to trade and invest in crypto. As crypto recovers, many of these women are now earning enough money to return home to their families, she said.
“The amount of money they receive may seem small, but when you convert to pesos, it’s a lot for them,” Ms. Pia said.
Mr. Dela Cruz remained in the crypto industry as a video game streamer on Twitch, the Amazon-owned streaming platform. He is now the captain of one of the biggest eSports teams in the Philippines. In Pampanga, many farmers have started playing Pixels and harvesting virtual crops to earn crypto as extra income, he said.
Luke Barwikowski, the game’s American founder, said Filipino farmers gave him tips on how to make the Pixels more realistic.
“There are users who will literally give us their crop schedules or their watering routines,” he said.
Even by crypto standards, the industry in the Philippines is full of opportunists. Philippine phishing scams are rampant in online crypto communities on platforms like Discord and X, as is “pig butchering,” in which scammers target victims with deceptive text and Facebook messages. During Axie’s heyday, some guild leaders took advantage of vulnerable players, taking up to half of their earnings as subscriptions, former players said.
Mr. Bohn said that in addition to providing his guild members with computers and resources, he viewed his job as a patron. “This is family,” he said.
While crypto has been a boon for many Filipinos, some said they were okay with moving on to other opportunities if the industry fails again. Mr. Dela Cruz said he dreamed of managing more farms with his siblings and not having to rely on crypto for income.
“The fresh air, the sounds of the chickens,” he said. “You don’t get that on the internet.”
