What meltdown? Crypto is coming roaring back to the Philippines.

On a recent Tuesday evening, about 20 people gathered on the second floor of Joniel Bon’s newly opened internet cafe in Quezon City, 16 kilometers from Manila. Sitting in front of computers with 34-inch curved monitors, they started playing video games like Heroes of Mavia and Nifty Island, while music from Taylor Swift and Maroon 5 blasted from the speakers.

Playing these games can be a full-time job, and some of Mr. Bon’s customers had kept themselves entertained all night with slices of pizza for fuel. The games reward players with cryptocurrency tokens for completing small, daily challenges. Often, players convert their tokens into pesos, the country’s currency, earning about twice the Philippine minimum wage of $11 per day.

Mr. Bon, 40, had dreamed of the hustle and bustle of his own business afterward cryptocurrencies crashed spectacularly two years ago, which dashed his hopes for a thriving gaming collective at the time.

“At some point I had to say, ‘I believe in this.’ I had to hope,” said Mr. Bon, a former information technology worker. “We survived.”

Mr. Bon’s new internet cafe is a sign of how crypto is booming again in the Philippines, which has long been a hub of crypto activity. This month Bitcoin reached a record high, which caps a comeback from the market crisis in 2022 and brings with it other digital currencies such as Ether. On Sunday, Bitcoin was trading around $68,000.

New billboards for crypto companies have now popped up in Manila. People have started harvesting virtual crops from a crypto farming game called Pixels as a new source of income. Overseas Filipino workers, known as OFWs, also return to the country to earn crypto as MFWs, or metaverse Filipino workers.

In November and December, the value of crypto transactions in the Philippines rose 70 percent from September and October to $7.3 billion, according to data from research firm Chainalysis.

According to the game’s developers, the Filipino player base for Pixels rose to over 830,000 in March from 80,000 players in November. About 30 percent of the world’s crypto-earning video gamers are based in the Philippines, they said.

The renewed activity has given some Philippine officials pause. At a crypto conference in Manila in November, Kelvin Lee, then a commissioner at the country’s Securities and Exchange Commission, said the government was struggling with how to regulate the technology as it regained popularity.

Cryptocurrencies have been the center of fraud and fraud in the past. The crypto-earning tokens are more volatile than Bitcoin and Ether, meaning the boom could fail again.

“We want a safe space to function properly,” Mr Lee said, while acknowledging that a robust crypto industry could help the Philippines, which relies heavily on outsourced jobs in customer service and information technology. “How can you operate well when the industry itself, like the space itself, looks unruly, cumbersome and illegal?”

Mr Lee, who left the committee this month, declined an interview request. Last month, the central bank of the Philippines told local media that it planned to release its own digital currency in the next two years.

Crypto became especially popular in the Philippines during the pandemic lockdowns. While more than 40 percent of the country’s population does not have a bank accountthe majority of Philippine households have internet access, which has allowed crypto to spread to rural areas.

At the time of the lockdowns, people started playing the crypto-earning video game Axie Infinitymade by A Vietnamese company Sky Mavis. In the game, players battle Pokemon-like characters to earn a cryptocurrency called Smooth Love Potion.

At the height of Axie’s popularity in 2021, Smooth Love Potion was accepted by landlords, gas stations and some restaurants in the Philippines as an alternative to pesos.

But when crypto collapsed a year later, thousands of Filipinos lost the savings they had in Smooth Love Potion. The game’s characters, which some players would trade to sell for thousands of dollars – so valuable that some Filipinos took out loans to buy them – became worthless.

“The game worked well once everyone got on board,” said Ian Dela Cruz, 30, a farmer in Pampanga, a province north of Manila, and a former Axie player. “But when everyone tried to get away, it stopped.”

Some Filipinos who successfully made money through Axie became entrepreneurs and founded their own companies and gaming collectives called “guilds.” Now some of those efforts are starting to pay off.

Teresa Pia, 27, a former Axie player, left her job as a kindergarten teacher in 2021 to lead a crypto 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,” teaching members, including many Filipino women working abroad, to trade and invest in crypto. As crypto recovers, many of these women are now making enough money to return home to their families, she said.

“The amount of money they receive may seem small, but if you convert it to pesos, it is big for them,” Ms. Pia said.

Mr. Dela Cruz stayed in the crypto industry as a video game streamer on Twitch, Amazon’s streaming platform. He is now the captain of one of the largest esports teams in the Philippines. In Pampanga, many farmers have started playing Pixels and harvesting virtual crops to earn crypto as additional income, he said.

Luke Barwikowski, the game’s American founder, said Filipino farmers gave him advice on how to make Pixels more realistic.

“There are users who literally want to give us their growing schedules or their watering routines,” he said.

Even by crypto standards, the industry in the Philippines is filled with opportunists. Philippine phishing scams are common in online crypto communities on platforms like Discord and During Axie’s heyday, some guild leaders exploited vulnerable players, taking as much as half of their earnings as membership fees, former players said.

Mr. Bon said that in addition to providing his guild members with computers and tools, he viewed his job as that of a protector. “That’s family,” he said.

While crypto has been a boon for many Filipinos, some said they were fine with pursuing other opportunities if the sector failed again. Mr. Dela Cruz said he dreamed of managing more farms with his brothers and not having to rely on crypto for his income.

“The fresh air, the sounds of the chickens,” he said. “You can’t get that online.”