On a recent Tuesday night, about 20 people crowded the second floor of Jonel Poon's newly opened Internet café in Quezon City, 10 miles from Manila. They sat in front of computers with 34-inch curved screens and began playing video games like Heroes of Mafia and Nifty Island, while music from Taylor Swift and Maroon 5 blared from the speakers.
Playing these games can be a full-time job, and some of Mr. Boone's clients have settled in at night with slices of pizza to fuel them. The games reward players with cryptocurrency tokens for completing small daily challenges. Often, players convert their tokens into pesos, the country's currency, and earn about twice the Philippines' minimum wage of $11 a day.
Mr. Boone, 40, had been dreaming of a buzz at his own company after the spectacular collapse of cryptocurrencies two years ago dashed his hopes for the then-thriving pool game.
“There was a point where I had to say: I believe in this. “I had to hope,” said Mr. Boone, a former IT worker. “We are alive.”
Mr. Poon's new internet café is a sign of how cryptocurrencies are beginning to boom again in the Philippines, which has long been a hub of cryptocurrency activity. This month, Bitcoin reached a record high, capping a comeback from the 2022 market crash and bringing with it other cryptocurrencies like Ether. On Sunday, Bitcoin was trading at around $68,000.
New billboards for cryptocurrency companies have now popped up all over Manila. People have started harvesting virtual crops from a cryptocurrency farming game called Pixels as a new source of income. Overseas Filipino workers, known as OFWs, also return to the country to earn cryptocurrencies as MFWs, or OFWs.
In November and December, the value of cryptocurrency transactions in the Philippines increased by 70 percent from September and October, reaching $7.3 billion, according to data from research firm Chainalysis.
The Filipino player base for Pixels rose to more than 830,000 players in March from 80,000 players in November, according to the game's developers. About 30 percent of video game players who win cryptocurrencies in the world reside in the Philippines, they said.
The renewed activity has given some Filipino officials pause. At a cryptocurrency conference in Manila in November, Kelvin Lee, then a commissioner on the country's Securities and Exchange Commission, said the government was grappling with how to regulate the technology as it regained popularity.
Cryptocurrencies have been at the center of scams and scams in the past. Cryptocurrencies are considered more volatile than Bitcoin and Ethereum, which means the boom could collapse again.
“We want a safe space to do well,” Mr. Lee said, while acknowledging that a strong cryptocurrency industry could help the Philippines, which relies heavily on outsourced customer service and IT jobs. “How can you do well if the industry itself, the space itself, seems unruly, impractical and illegal?”
Mr. Lee, who left the committee this month, declined an interview request. Last month, the Philippine central bank told local media that it plans to issue its own digital currency in the next two years.
Cryptocurrencies have become especially popular in the Philippines during the pandemic lockdowns. While more than 40% of the country's population does not have a bank account, the majority of Filipino households have access to the internet, which has allowed cryptocurrencies to spread to rural areas.
At the time of lockdowns, people started playing the video game Axie Infinity to earn cryptocurrencies, which was made by a company Vietnamese company Sky Mavis. In the game, players battle Pokemon-like characters for a cryptocurrency called Smooth Love Potion.
At the height of Axie's popularity in 2021, the Smooth Love Potion was accepted by landlords, gas stations and some restaurants in the Philippines as an alternative to the peso.
But when the cryptocurrency collapsed a year later, thousands of Filipinos lost the savings they had held in Smooth Love Potion. Game characters that some players trade to sell for thousands of dollars – so valuable that some Filipinos took out loans to buy it – it has become worthless.
“The game went well when everyone participated,” said Ian Dela Cruz, 30, a farmer in Pampanga, a province north of Manila, and a former Axi player. “But when everyone tried to get out, it stopped.”
Some Filipinos who have successfully made money through Axie have become entrepreneurs, building their own companies and gaming groups called “syndicates.” Now some of these efforts are starting to take off.
Teresa Pia, 27, a former Axie player, left her job as a preschool teacher in 2021 to run a cryptocurrency gaming guild called Real Deal, which has 54,000 members on the social media platform Discord. Ms. Pia said she saw her Discord channel as a “new classroom” where she taught members, many of whom are Filipino women working abroad, to trade and invest in cryptocurrencies. She said that with the recovery of cryptocurrencies, many of these women are now earning enough money to return home to their families.
“The amount of money they receive may seem small, but when you convert to pesos, it is huge for them,” Ms. Pia said.
Mr. Dela Cruz has remained in the cryptocurrency industry as a video game streamer on Twitch, the Amazon-owned streaming platform. He is now the captain of one of the biggest eSports teams in the Philippines. He said many farmers in Pampanga have started playing the pixel game and are harvesting virtual crops to earn cryptocurrencies as additional income.
Luke Parvikowski, the game's American founder, said Filipino farmers gave him advice on how to make the pixels more realistic.
“There are users who will literally give us their crop schedules or irrigation routines,” he said.
Even by cryptocurrency standards, the industry in the Philippines is full of opportunists. Philippine phishing scams are rampant in online cryptocurrency communities on platforms like Discord and During the height of Axie's activity, some guild leaders exploited vulnerable players, taking up to half of their profits as membership fees, former players said.
Mr. Boone said that in addition to providing his union members with computers and resources, he views his job as a protector. “This family,” he said.
While cryptocurrencies have been a boon to many Filipinos, some said they are okay with moving on to other opportunities if the industry fails again. Mr. Dela Cruz said he dreams of running more farms with his brothers and not having to rely on cryptocurrencies for income.
“The fresh air, the sounds of the chickens,” he said. “You don't get that online.”
