Axie Infinity
- 27-year-old Sam Peurifoy left his job at Goldman Sachs to make money playing video games, Bloomberg reported.
- Peurifoy, who has a PhD in chemistry from Columbia University, goes by "captain" in Axie Infinity.
- The ethereum-based game has brought in about half a billion dollars this year as of August.
Twenty-seven-year-old Sam Peurifoy left his job at Goldman Sachs to seek wealth as a crypto capitalist in the video-game world.
He's a bit of a banker in his new role, too, according to the Oct. 30 story from Bloomberg News titled "Into the Metaverse: Where Crypto, Gaming and Capitalism Collide." In the video game known as Axie Infinity, which is based on the ethereum blockchain, players can earn tokens called Smooth Love Potions, as well as NFTs called Axies, both of which can be sold on a crypto exchange.
But to start playing the game, players need three Axies, which totals about $1,000, Bloomberg said. As the quasi-banker, Peurifoy lends his NFTs to new players, who earn more cryptocurrency and split the winnings with him.
Players from the developing world have flocked to this play-to-earn game, Insider wrote previously, noting that Vietnam-based Axie Infinity brought in $485 million in revenue from July to August.
In this gaming world, Peurifoy is known as the "captain" in charge of what he calls a gang of "kapitalist pirates." His online persona is "Das Kapitalist," a reference to Karl Marx's Das Kapital.
"Marx probably does not appreciate the joke," he wrote in messages to Insider.
Peurifoy, who earned his PhD in chemistry from Columbia University, told Insider that gaming is just an evening and weekend hobby right now while he works full-time as a director at crypto-custody-and-execution firm Floating Point Group.
Even so, he said if his "magic internet money" were converted to US dollars, his annual income from the gaming ecosystem exceeds his salary and bonus at the research division at Goldman Sachs.
"I left GS because of my conviction that 2020 would be a landmark year for institutional crypto, and we'd see a real structural shift in sentiment towards widespread adoption given better connectivity, use cases, and compliance tools," he told Insider.