Axie Infinity co-founder joins early-stage token fund 1kx as venture partner

Jeffrey Zirlin, also known as Jiho, the co-founder of the company that made the popular NFT-based play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, has joined the early-stage token fund 1kx as a venture partner. 

According to a tweet thread from 1kx, Jiho will guide the firm’s investment strategy for emerging play-to-earn media. 

“We regard Jiho to be the best community builder in all of crypto and an incredible force to have on the team,” 1kx wrote on Twitter. “We are incredibly lucky to work with him.”

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Jiho’s firm Sky Mavis obtained a $3 billion valuation after the wild success of its game Axie Infinity, which at its peak had over 900,000 users and a 30-day rolling volume of $8.4 million, The Block previously reported.

Axie Infinity still dominates weekly gaming NFT trading volume. The Block’s Data Dashboard shows that the game saw $184 million in volume during the final week of October. 

Following Axie Infinity’s success, half of the $3.4 billion in crypto venture funding in October went to NFT and blockchain gaming startups.

About Author

MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.