Introduction: A Warrior Philosopher
Jeffrey “Jihoz” Zirlin’s X bio cites his role as cofounder of Axie Infinity and the Ronin Network, but we were struck by the descriptor that follows, “// warrior philosopher.” It does not appear to be metaphor or marketing copy and is certainly not performative bravado common with crypto bros. Zirlin studied military history at Yale before building one of the most consequential companies in blockchain gaming. His worldview blends strategic thinking with a builder’s relentless pragmatism, qualities that helped him survive the Web3 Gaming Reckoning. He has been through all three eras of the web3 gaming industry cycle: the euphoria, the carnage, and rebuilding. His conviction survived. His illusions did not.
Zirlin is the Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Sky Mavis, the company behind Axie Infinity and the Ronin Network. He and his colleagues turned a niche blockchain pet game into a global economic phenomenon that generated $1.3 billion in annual revenue at its peak, supported entire communities in the Philippines, and then lost 99% of its speculative audience in the crash that followed.[1][2]
He has seen it all. And he has a lot to say about what comes next.
From Yale to Vietnam: An Unconventional Origin
Zirlin’s path to becoming one of the most influential figures in blockchain gaming is anything but linear. He was born and raised in New York City to a Korean mother and an American father with Italian and Belarusian roots, making Zirlin half Korean, a quarter Italian, and a quarter Belarusian. His mother is trilingual and worked as a senior banker at Nomura before leaving to focus on family. His father is a lawyer, lepidopterist, painter, and fossil collector who maintains a home insect museum.[3]
Zirlin grew up at the intersection of intellectual rigor and obsessive collecting: catching insects, studying military history, and playing video games with an intensity that would later define his career.
He attended Yale University, graduating with a BA in History. His academic interests ranged from military history to monetary policy, topics that would prove unexpectedly relevant to the development of a digital game economy. After graduation, he worked at a startup building a resume platform connecting Ivy League students with hedge funds like D.E. Shaw.[4]
Then he read Peter Thiel’s Zero to One.
“I became obsessed with creating new markets rather than incrementally improving existing ones,” Zirlin has said of the epiphany that changed his trajectory. Friends from Exeter introduced him to Ethereum and smart contracts. He purchased ETH to study the technology, but his professional interest crystallized upon discovering non-fungible tokens through CryptoKitties, the early blockchain game where players breed unique digital cats.[4]
The World of Warcraft Story
To understand why Zirlin became a true believer in decentralized digital asset ownership and Web3 gaming, consider his history as a player.
Zirlin grew up playing Neopets, Diablo II, and World of Warcraft (WoW). Zirlin’s progress in WoW is remarkable, earning $20,000 selling to Chinese gold-farming operations, who paid to join his guilds for access to high-level raid content. But when Blizzard Entertainment discovered the activity, they banned his account entirely. Hundreds of hours of gameplay, thousands of dollars in accumulated asset value, his characters, his reputation, his entire in-game identity: gone. One company made one decision, and everything he had built was erased.[4]
The experience left a permanent mark. Blizzard, as a centralized entity, had absolute control over his player identity and assets. There was no appeal, no recourse, and no recognition that the time and value he had invested belonged to him in any meaningful sense. It was the starkest possible demonstration that gamers do not own their digital lives.
With Neopets, Zirlin recalls an active secondary market: “However, you had to figure out if you were going to accept money through PayPal, eBay, or other platforms, and the problem was that these platforms would usually side with the buyer on chargeback disputes.” In contrast, with CryptoKitties built on the blockchain, he recognized immediately that digital asset ownership is a game-changer: “Each one of them is a unique token,” and owned by one wallet. If game assets lived on a decentralized ledger rather than a company’s servers, no single entity could confiscate them. The value players created would actually belong to the players, and secondary markets could emerge, offering frictionless commerce between players.[4]
This was not an abstract ideological position for Zirlin. It was a personal conviction born from personal loss. He had experienced firsthand that gaming assets carry real economic value, that players invest real time and skill to create that value, and centralized platforms can destroy it on a whim. Web3 gaming was not just a market opportunity. It was the solution to a problem he had lived through.
He became a CryptoKitties streamer, community analyst, and power user. And in early 2018, he found Axie Infinity, very early. By May 2018, he had broken up with his girlfriend, given his dog to his parents, and moved to Vietnam to join what would become Sky Mavis as the fifth team member and the first non-Vietnamese person in the company.[3][4]
The Axie Blueprint: 2.5 Years Before the Token
In our analysis of the industrial cycle in the Web3 Gaming Reckoning Report, Axie Infinity is identified as “the most consequential development” of the Play-to-Earn era.[5] But Zirlin himself offers a critical correction to the popular narrative that Axie was an overnight success:
“This is also what many teams don’t remember or realize about Axie. Axie was gaining traction for around two and a half years before releasing our token.”
This timeline matters enormously. While hundreds of projects rushed to launch tokens within months of their inception during the 2021-2022 frenzy, Axie had been quietly building product-market fit since 2018. By the time the AXS governance token launched in November 2020, the game already had a proven community, functional gameplay loops, and organic growth.
The lesson is one that Zirlin now frames in corporate finance terms:
“Having a token is like going public. In the real world, it’s very difficult and complex to go public. Crypto simplifies this, but it overshot a bit. We’ll see projects weighing their token launches much more carefully and work on finding PMF before token launch first.”
This insight cuts to the heart of why 93% of web3 games from the bull run are now dead.[5] They treated tokenization as a growth hack rather than what it actually is: a form of going public, with all the scrutiny, accountability, and economic pressure that implies.
The Philippines, the Scholars, and the Peak
No profile of Jihoz would be complete without the Philippines.
When the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the Philippine economy in 2020-2021, Axie Infinity became a lifeline. At its peak, the game had nearly three million daily active users, with at least 40% based in the Philippines. Filipino players were earning amounts exceeding local minimum wages, with reports suggesting monthly earnings of nearly $500 for consistent participants through the “scholarship” model. Gaming guilds like Yield Guild Games lent expensive NFT assets to players in exchange for a share of their earnings.[1][2]
Zirlin has described the Philippines and Axie as “inextricably linked.”[6] The Filipino community did not just play Axie; they stress-tested it, scaled it, and shaped its culture. Local streamers built audiences around the game. Community organizers ran scholarship programs that onboarded thousands of new players. The Philippines became both the largest market and the most authentic proof that blockchain gaming could create real economic opportunity in the real world. That community was essential to Axie’s growth, and Zirlin has acknowledged this publicly and repeatedly.
But he is also clear-eyed about what happened next. The scholar model, for all its genuine social impact, also created an industrial-scale extraction system. When the SLP token price collapsed, so did the economics that sustained millions of players. The “earn” in Play-to-Earn turned out to be dependent on an endless supply of new capital, a reflexive system where new players provided exit liquidity for existing ones. When growth stalled, the model collapsed.[5]
The 99% Attrition: Who Stayed and Why
Most founders, after watching their user base evaporate, retreat into euphemism. Zirlin does the opposite. In exclusive commentary provided for the Reckoning Report, he quantifies the carnage and then explains what it revealed:
“We’ve seen an attrition in crypto of 99% of the audience that was here looking for profit. The players that remain stay because of a combination of: belief in the long term potential of the technology, the friends they have in the community, the enjoyment they get out of playing and helping to drive forward the games they play.”
Then he delivers the counterintuitive insight that many studios learned too late, or never learned at all:
“The counterintuitive thing is that many games thought the users that cared about making money were the key audience since they made up the majority of the users, whereas the minority of emotional users that actually cared about a different subset of problems was the more important audience.”
This framing, that the majority was the wrong audience and the minority was the right one, is a direct challenge to the growth-at-all-costs mentality that dominated web3 gaming from 2021 to 2024. It explains why games with millions of “users” (many of them bots or mercenary farmers) could collapse overnight, while smaller communities with genuine emotional attachment survived.
Industry data supports this thesis: the games that survived the crash shared common traits including game-first design, sustainable revenue models, experienced teams, and realistic economic expectations.[5] What Zirlin adds is the human dimension. The players who stayed did so for reasons that cannot be replicated by financial incentives alone.
Creative Destruction: The Ronin Rebuild
Zirlin does not shy away from the pain of what Axie and Ronin have endured. He frames it as necessary:
“Axie and Ronin have shed the tourists and short term thinkers and retained the long term visionaries through a painful process of creative destruction.”
The scale of that creative destruction is staggering: the Ronin Bridge hack in March 2022, where North Korea’s Lazarus Group stole $624 million. The collapse of the SLP token. The departure of millions of players. Two of the four confirmed 2026 blockchain game closures, Pixiland and Forgotten Runiverse, were on the Ronin chain itself.[5]
But Ronin is now entering a reconstruction phase. The network’s migration to an Ethereum L2 via the OP Stack (testnet launched in February 2026, mainnet expected in late March) delivers 12x faster transaction speeds.[7] More fundamentally, the new Proof-of-Distribution (PoD) economic model replaces passive staking with activity-based rewards, directing value toward builders and active contributors rather than passive token holders.[5]
As Zirlin told Blockworks regarding the L2 transition: “This was a highly contested battle between L2 providers. This move opens up Ronin’s upgrade to Proof of Distribution, which will create more rewards for the builders.”[8]
The Ronin ecosystem’s numbers, despite the attrition, remain formidable: over 30 million wallet downloads, 1.5 million monthly active users, and more than $5 billion in lifetime NFT volume.[9] Zirlin has compared Ronin’s relationship with Axie to “Mario and Nintendo,” the flagship game anchoring an entire platform ecosystem where other titles like Pixels (which grew from 5,000 to 1.4 million DAU on Ronin) can flourish.[9]
The Speculative Premium Is Gone
Zirlin’s perspective on where token economics stand now is informed by seven years of direct experience, watching AXS climb to extraordinary heights and then decline 99% from its all-time high:
“The speculative premium has deflated from most tokens on the market. In the future, only tokens with real value backed by current and future cashflows will survive.”
The data bears this out: VC funding for web3 gaming collapsed from $5.4 billion in 2022 to just $293 million by 2025, a 94.6% decline.[5] The speculative tourists are gone from the investment side too. What remains, Zirlin argues, are the projects with genuine revenue-generating capabilities.
He sees the key question now as fundamentally economic: “Right now, if you look at which tokens are performing well, it’s tokens that are able to have buybacks, and buybacks are typically a function of are you able to generate revenue? So then the question becomes what revenue models are working for Web3 games?”[10]
This framing, tokens as equity-like instruments that must be backed by real cashflows, represents a maturation that industry analysts are calling “Era 3” of web3 gaming: the era where speculation gives way to fundamentals.[5]
The AI Question: Scholars, Chess, and Friendship
Perhaps Zirlin’s most forward-looking commentary concerns the intersection of AI and web3 gaming, a topic where his perspective carries unique weight. It was the Axie scholarship model that first demonstrated how large-scale labor delegation could operate within a game economy. Now AI agents are poised to replace the scholars entirely.
He sees three distinct futures emerging:
“You’ll see different approaches. Some games may optimize for being AI and bot friendly. Agents can replace the role of scholars in these games. As long as loops do not allow for risk-free value compounding there’s a chance they can work.”
“Other games may look more like chess, where complex mechanisms of detection will continue to allow for the role of humans.”
“Interestingly, games that require real communities and social interactions might be a bit more immune to being disrupted by AI as friendship and human connection will be harder to replace. I use Claude and Gemini for many things, but they cannot replace my friends and family, at least not for me and most emotional humans.”
This three-part framework (bot-optimized games, human-verified games, and community-immune games) offers a more nuanced taxonomy than the binary “bots good / bots bad” debate that has dominated the discourse. Consider the scale of the problem: an estimated 70% of historic unique active wallets in web3 gaming were bots.[5] Zirlin’s framework acknowledges that different game genres will require different relationships with AI, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
His admission that he personally uses Claude and Gemini “for many things” but that they “cannot replace my friends and family” is a refreshingly honest acknowledgment from someone building at the frontier of digital economies. The humans who stayed through the reckoning stayed for reasons that are fundamentally non-automatable.
The Macro View: Poker, Squid Game, and Eve Online
When asked about the broader trajectory of web3 gaming, Zirlin zooms out to the societal forces shaping the opportunity:
“I look at the world through a few accelerating trends: the world is becoming hyper-financialized. Humans are gaining more free time due to technological advancements. Creativity and self expression are in a bull market.”
This macro lens (financialization, leisure, and creative expression) frames web3 gaming not as a crypto niche but as a convergence point for three of the defining trends of the 2020s. If the world is simultaneously becoming more financialized, more leisure-rich, and more creative, then games that combine economic participation with entertainment and self-expression occupy a naturally expanding market.
His vision for what these games will actually look like is vivid:
“Web3 games will look a bit more like a combination of poker, squid game, and eve online.”
The metaphor is precise. Poker: high-stakes wagering where skill and risk create real economic outcomes. Squid Game: elimination tension, dramatic narrative, and the psychology of survival. Eve Online: player-driven economies of extraordinary complexity, where political alliances, economic warfare, and emergent narratives are created entirely by the community.
This vision maps directly onto a trend already emerging in the market: “Risk-to-Earn,” where infinite inflationary rewards give way to zero-sum skill-based redistribution. Your gain is someone else’s loss, and only the skilled survive.[5]
The Survival Imperative
For all the philosophical breadth of his worldview, Zirlin’s advice to builders is ruthlessly practical:
“In general, web3 game devs will need to think hard about their audiences and making difficult choices to survive. Stay lean, build something new, gather data, and keep shipping.”
This is the advice of someone who has watched 27 named blockchain games shut down in 2025 alone, with 300+ more going dark silently.[5] It is the advice of someone who has acknowledged that Axie was “too conservative” in 2025 and plans to “take much larger risks” in 2026.[11]
If there is a single line that captures the lesson of the past seven years, the lesson that our own Reckoning Report arrives at after analyzing thousands of projects, billions of dollars, and millions of lost players, it is this: teams matter more than tokens. Jihoz is the living proof.
About This Article
This article is part of the Architects of the Future series by Blockleaders, featuring exclusive perspectives from the builders and leaders shaping web3 gaming’s next chapter. The direct quotes attributed to Jihoz in this article were provided exclusively to Blockleaders in April 2026.
Read the full report: Web3 Gaming: The Great Reckoning, 2019 to 2026
Sources
- Blockleaders Reckoning Report, Section 3.2–3.3. Axie Infinity revenue data, Philippines adoption metrics, scholarship model analysis. Sources: Footprint Analytics, CoinGecko, DappRadar. ↑
- BitPinas (2023). “Axie Infinity Co-Founder: PH is the Beating Heart of Web3 Gaming as Pixels Goes Parabolic.” bitpinas.com/feature/ph-beating-heart-web3-gaming. ↑
- Asian Pioneers. “Q&A with Jeff Zirlin (Sky Mavis / Axie Infinity).” asianpioneers.com/interviews/qa-with-jeff-zirlin. ↑
- The Politic (Yale). “Jeffrey Zirlin, YC ’15: Growth Lead of Axie Infinity.” thepolitic.org/jeffrey-zirlin-yc-15-growth-lead-of-axie-infinity. ↑
- Sawyer, D. (2026). “Web3 Gaming: The Great Reckoning.” Blockleaders ↑
- BitPinas (2022). “Jihoz Acknowledges Axie PH Community as Axie Open Manila 2022 Concludes.” bitpinas.com/feature/axie-open-manila-recap. ↑
- CoinTelegraph (2026). “Ronin Network is Coming Back Home to Ethereum in 2026.” cointelegraph.com/news/axie-infinity-ronin-coming-back-ethereum. ↑
- Blockworks (2026). “Optimism scores $5M+ Ronin deal for L2 tech.” blockworks.co/news/optimism-5m-ronin-deal. ↑
- OpenSea Blog. “In Conversation With Jeffrey ‘Jihoz’ Zirlin.” opensea.io/blog/articles/in-conversation-with-jeffrey-jihoz-zirlin. ↑
- Addressable (2026). “The State of Crypto Gaming: A Playbook for 2026 and Beyond with Jiho from Axie Infinity.” addressable.io/blog/the-state-of-crypto-gaming. ↑
- CoinTelegraph Magazine (2026). “Web3 games shuttered, Axie Infinity founder warns more will ‘die’: Web3 Gamer.” tradingview.com/news/cointelegraph (Web3 Gamer). ↑
