I cannot believe I'm saying this, but Play-to-Earn is going to make a comeback. Before you stab me with your pitchforks, let me explain. I was one of P2E's biggest adversaries. I called it unsustainable and a Ponzi. Ohhh boy, did I get in trouble for that. And the economics that bothered me then still bother me now. But the economics of BUILDING these games are changing, and I think that unlocks something a lot of people are going to hate. First, go back to DeFi Summer. We were bootstrapping liquidity through programmable incentives, allocating capital across composable financial primitives, laying the foundations for an entirely new financial system. Then someone put 9,000% APY next to a vegetable and we all lost our fucking minds. There was real utility underneath it. Giving people an incentive to provide liquidity is insanely useful. But the intended purpose of a product and its eventual PMF can be very, very different things. Builders quickly realised they could crank up emissions, knowing the attractive yields might last days, hours, sometimes minutes. And people went ballistic. APY screenshots everywhere. Everyone was degen farming, and I mean fucking everyone. It wasn't completely about the money either. It became competitive. Who found the farm first? Who timed their exit? Who thought they could squeeze another hour out of it? Gambling with a drop of skill. We already had a game. Now put an actual game around it. Five years ago, building a P2E game that was even vaguely playable took serious time and money. Spending a year building something whose earning frenzy might last a week was a ridiculous bet, even if that week could attract hundreds of thousands of people and make the developer millions. So teams tried to stretch it out. Carefully plan emissions. Build demand for the token. Give the economy enough time to become sustainable. Axie is the obvious example. Eventually, SLP issuance massively outpaced the amount being burned, and the team cut rewards to try to bring it back into balance. But what happens when someone can build a simple game with AI in a week? They haven't spent years building the IP. They have little emotional attachment to it. And they're perfectly happy for it to last a week if that week brings enough attention, users and money. Suddenly, a game with a seven-day lifespan can be worth building. That's the part I think changes everything. Crank the emissions up to hyper mode, wrap the farm in a game, make it accessible on mobile or in a browser, and see what happens. The yield still dries up. People still leave. The developer can be halfway through building the next one by then. Go look at Roblox. The first version of Grow a Garden was built by a teenager in a few days. After studios came on board and expanded it, the game reportedly generated $12 million in revenue. Twelve million dollars. In a month. Growing fucking vegetables. And the tools keep getting better. Roblox has 1,000’s of creators already using AI tools to help plan, build or test their games, and they’re generating millions. Now take that speed of development and add the financial incentives crypto is famous for. You can see where I'm going with this. You have to remember how crazy Axie got at its peak. Some merchants in the Philippines were literally accepting SLP as payment for goods and services. An in-game reward token. If there's money to be made and someone can access it on a cheap phone with very little friction, people will come. And I think that can happen in days. You'll see those headlines again. "Players in the Philippines making more from games than their day jobs." Although “playing” will be doing a lot of heavy lifting. Plenty of people will commit money and time, watch the yield, and decide when to leave. There will be almost zero loyalty to most of these games. For the developer who built one in a week, that might be completely fine. They planned around it. And yes, I'm saying all of this as the founder of Illuvium. We've spent years building through this shit. I'm still here, still building, so I understand why people who've stuck around might have mixed feelings about what I'm describing. But I actually think this will be GOOD for Illuvium. Two months ago, everyone was calling the entire category dead. Now imagine a few of these games blow up, people start making money, and gaming is back on the timeline. Watch how quickly that narrative changes. The big, widely distributed, fully diluted dino gaming coins could benefit massively from that. People will start looking at the category again, capital will rotate, and games that have spent years building will get another wave of attention. We still have to turn that attention into people who stay. These are completely different categories of gaming, but people can move between them. Some of the people arriving through these degen games will discover games like Illuvium, and I think that spillover matters more than people realise. I'm hardly going to complain about gaming becoming relevant again because I don't love every game that helped bring people back. And I think a big reason we haven't seen this explode in crypto yet is pretty obvious. Hardly anyone wanted to touch crypto gaming again. After the last cycle, even saying you were building a crypto game was enough to get laughed out of the room. But that's already starting to change. There are enough green shoots for some devs to start doing the maths again. And when building an experiment takes a week, you don't need the same level of conviction you needed to commit a team for three years. You just need to think there's a chance. Once one of these games blows up and the earnings screenshots start spreading, watch how quickly everyone becomes interested again. The same people calling gaming dead will be asking what launches next. I think this gets stupidly hot again. And much faster than people expect. Again, I'm not saying everyone participating is going to make money. Plenty of people will lose. But crypto doesn't give a fuck whether you or I approve. It's permissionless; people can build anonymously, and if there's enough money on the table, someone will do it. Some people hate sports betting. Some hate prediction markets. If you don't like gambling, you're probably going to hate what I'm describing. But history shows us what happens when something can be built quickly, and the potential returns are ridiculous. Developers turn up chasing the opportunity. Users turn up chasing the money. And everyone convinces themselves they'll know when to leave. The market doesn't give a fuck whether the comeback matches the version we originally had in our heads. It'll do whatever it wants. I'm saying this is going to happen; AI makes it fucking inevitable.