Crypto Unicorns has announced a “play-to-airdrop” campaign to start next month, amid the game’s migration across the Ethereum scaling ecosystem—from sidechain Polygon to Arbitrum’s layer-3 Xai gaming network.

Founded in 2021, the expanding Crypto Unicorns ecosystem includes the core land-based building and battling experience, spinoff jousting, and party games. The project’s NFTs have generated about $35 million worth of trading volume to date.

While Crypto Unicorns migrates to Xai, the game will be paused and unplayable, set to return “in a month” when the play-to-airdrop campaign will begin.

Players will earn points by achieving in-game goals such as hatching a Shadowcorn egg, breeding a unicorn, or evolving a baby. These points will place you into tiers which will determine the token rewards you receive once the campaign ends.

A snapshot of player history was taken on Tuesday, and the most active Crypto Unicorns players will be rewarded with a “small headstart” in the play-to-airdrop competition. It’s worth noting that until the migration is complete sometime in June, there will be no way to earn additional “preseason points.”

During the migration, you will not be able to transfer, buy, or sell any Crypto Unicorns assets, as the contracts are frozen. However, while players wait, you are able to play mobile game Unicorn Bingo to earn Crypto Unicorns (CU) and XAI network tokens.

Laguna Games co-founder and CEO Aron Beierschmitt previously told Decrypt that the team had run into “challenges” operating a game on Polygon, particularly with network gas spikes that made it more expensive to operate the game and created friction for players. 

As a result, Laguna Games said they had to subsidize players’ network fees to the tune of $5,000 to $10,000 a month, but that was unsustainable for a small indie studio. Xai, described as a layer-3 gaming network built on top of Arbitrum (itself an Ethereum layer-2 scaling network), lets players avoid such fees entirely thanks to a gas subsidy.

Edited by Andrew Hayward