Popular in the Philippines, Axie Infinity is an NFT-based video game based on Ethereum. (That's a lot of buzzwords—in short, it's a crypto video game). The game involves breeding and battling "Axies," short for the axolotl, a type of salamander.
You can watch people playing the unique game here.
Part of the game's infrastructure is a bridge, letting players convert their crypto from one blockchain to another. On March 23, someone hacked Axie Infinity's bridge, making off with $600 million worth of crypto.
The wild part of the story? Nobody knew about the theft for six days.
Turning this into a story, what if we follow the group of hackers right after they pull off the heist?
The story opens with a tense moment when two hackers in the Philippines see if the money transfers to their account. Then, the money shows up, and the hackers sit in stunned silence. Finally, they celebrate, then plan to return to the specialized office with their computer equipment again the next day.
One woman goes back to her isolated existence, similar to Jessica Jones's character—empty apartment, drinking problem. The other woman goes back to her husband, who is addicted to Axie Infinity. He has no clue that his account is empty.
We find out that the two are childhood friends who took wildly different paths in life. The wife recruited the expert hacker because she's tired of taking care of her kids alone.
Over the next six days, we see how the women handle moving the money around to other cryptocurrencies. The wife doesn't change her spending patterns, but the lonely hacker takes care of her work on the computer in the morning and then spends the rest of the day drinking.
The lonely hacker also has a relationship with local organized crime, stealing from banks and skimming off the top. Her theft from the crime bosses is discovered soon after her crypto heist, and she's forced into taking money out to pay off her other debts, which is how the theft is found after six days.
The lonely hacker takes care of the money she owes to the crime bosses while the model wife tries handling the fallout from her husband's empty account. He's furious, depressed, and lost. He ignores the children even more.
In an attempt to cheer him up, the wife offers to help him level up his video game character again. The husband leaves her alone and takes the kids to the park while his wife injects her funds into the game, creating a behemoth account in no time at all.
The husband realizes that he likes spending time with his kids more than playing the game, while the wife becomes addicted.
The lonely hacker takes off, moving to an island and living off the grid, always keeping one eye over her shoulder.
