Virtual Pets, Real Precarity: Crypto Gaming as Speculative Labor in Inflation‐Ridden Cuba

Steffen Köhn and Nestor Siré

Economic Anthropology, 2026, vol. 13, issue 1

Abstract: This article examines how Axie Infinity, a play‐to‐earn crypto game, became a precarious source of income for young Cubans amid an ongoing economic crisis. Against the backdrop of the COVID‐19 pandemic, intensified US sanctions, and a destabilizing currency reform, Cuba has faced severe shortages, runaway inflation, and growing social unrest. In this context, Axie Infinity offered an unexpected digital lifeline: Players could earn income by battling and trading blockchain‐based assets, gaining rare access to the global crypto economy. Yet participation required significant upfront investment and often depended on exploitative scholarship arrangements that reproduced existing racial, class, and gendered inequalities. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork in Havana and Matanzas, this study traces how Cuban players navigated complex onboarding processes, technical barriers, and informal exchange networks to transform in‐game earnings into usable currency. It argues that play‐to‐earn games embed financial speculation into everyday life, blurring distinctions between work and play and between formal and informal economies. By combining insights from the anthropology of play and digital labor, the article theorizes serious play as a moralized and monetized practice—one that conceals precarity behind gamified interfaces and reward systems. In doing so, it complicates celebratory narratives about blockchain as a vehicle for financial inclusion and instead reveals how these platforms extend speculative capitalism into new and deeply unequal terrain.

Date: 2026
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