Understanding Ronin: A Comprehensive Overview

Key Insights

• Ronin is an EVM-compatible Layer-1 blockchain optimized for NFTs and gaming. The network aims to establish an ecosystem of Play-to-Earn (P2E) games entirely owned and supported by the community.
• Ronin has strong traction among both Web2 and Web3 gamers. As of writing, the highest daily active addresses (DAA) count in 2024 is 1.6 million. Notable titles fueling this include Pixels, Apeiron, and the Axie Infinity Universe — the most popular NFT game by all-time trading volume.
• Following the March 2022 bridge hack, Ronin migrated to a Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism. Sky Mavis, the gaming studio behind Ronin, also expanded the number of validators from 9 to 24 and onboarded independent enterprise operators.
• Sky Mavis partnered with the popular Ragnarok gaming IP and 0x& to introduce Ragnarok: Monster World to its ecosystem in Q3 2024.
• Sky Mavis plans to integrate zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (zkEVMs) to allow games to permissionlessly launch and operate their own Layer-2 chains on the Ronin network using the Polygon CDK.

Introduction

Gaming on the Ethereum network faces several limitations. As the number of users on the network has steadily increased, so has the volume of transactions and gas payments. The increased competition for blockspace has led to network congestion. High gas prices and scalability issues made onchain gaming transactions economically unviable, which undermined player acquisition and retention.

The Ronin blockchain was specifically designed to address these scalability issues and facilitate the onboarding of the next hundreds of millions of gamers to blockchain-based platforms. It was initially developed by the gaming studio Sky Mavis in 2021 for the highly popular P2E game Axie Infinity. Now, Ronin is an EVM-compatible Layer-1 (L1) blockchain optimized for gaming and NFTs.

Currently, Ronin’s most popular game by daily active wallets (DAW) is Pixels, a free-to-play farming simulator. The game migrated from Polygon to Ronin in October 2023. To date, Ronin has processed over $11.4 billion in decentralized exchange (DEX) volume on Katana and over $4.3 billion in NFT trading volume.

Background

The story of Ronin begins as the story of Axie Infinity, the popular P2E Web3 game. Trung Nguyen, Aleksander Leonard Larsen, and Jeffrey Zirlin — the founders of Axie Infinity — first met while playing Cryptokitties, one of the earliest games to utilize blockchain technology. The three saw an opportunity to apply this innovation to address a fundamental issue in traditional gaming: the economic value generated by players was mainly retained by the platform owners rather than the players themselves.

To address this, they founded the gaming studio Sky Mavis in 2018 and built Axie Infinity, a game where players could own and benefit from their in-game assets. Their first major step was the pre-sale of Axie NFTs in April 2018, where players could adopt Axies and receive custom rewards when Axie Infinity launched. This set the stage for the Ronin ecosystem, where player ownership was central.

As Axie Infinity gained traction, the team launched Axie Infinity’s native token, AXS, on Binance in November 2020. Initially released as an ERC-20 on Ethereum, the token offered governance, staking, in-game functionalities, and a share in the game’s economy. However, as the game’s popularity grew on the Ethereum network, users began to experience poor performance due to high gas fees and network congestion. The Axie Infinity founders created Ronin to address the issues of time, scalability, and players’ experience with the Ethereum network.

Sky Mavis launched the network’s testnet on December 23, 2020, and followed up with the mainnet on February 1, 2021. In April 2021, Axie Infinity officially migrated from Ethereum to the Ronin Layer-1 blockchain. After the transition, the AXS staking program began in September 2021, allowing Axie Infinity players to earn rewards and participate in the game's governance. This enabled players to own and control the direction of the game, creating a gaming platform that shifted value from the platform owners to the players. At the height of Axie Infinity’s popularity, the game boasted over 1 million onchain and 2 million offchain daily active players.

Despite a smooth start, on March 29, 2022, the Ronin Bridge was hacked, leading to the theft of 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC, amounting to over $600 million at the time of the hack. The hack was uncovered a week later when a user attempted to withdraw 5,000 ETH and found they could not.

The hacker exploited a vulnerability in the network by gaining control of the private keys for four Sky Mavis Validator nodes and the Axie DAO node. This access was possible due to a backdoor error in the gas-free RPC node, allowing the hacker to obtain the signature for the Axie DAO validator. This backdoor existed because the Axie DAO validator had been previously whitelisted to facilitate free transactions during high network activity. Although this whitelisting was halted in December 2021, the IP address for the Axie DAO validator remained on the allowlist, enabling the hacker's entry. Because only nine validator nodes were operating during the attack, the hackers, rumored to be the North Korean Lazarus Group, controlled a majority of the nodes and could pass the fake withdrawals.

Binance recovered $5.8 million in funds connected to the hack, and Chainanalysis recovered $30 million. In June 2024, it was announced that Norway’s government agency for combating financial crimes, Økokrim, had returned an additional $5.7 million in funds and froze $40 million in the hacked amount.

Since the bridge hack, Ronin enhanced the network's decentralization through the migration to DPoS, formed strategic partnerships with independent enterprises to operate validators, and introduced rotating validators. Ronin also welcomed new Web2 and Web3 games and studios, expanding the ecosystem beyond the core Axie Infinity series. As a result, the network made a dramatic comeback in 2024, with Ronin featuring a more extensive collection of game titles than ever before.

Technology

Ronin initially utilized a Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism, where Sky Mavis appointed a limited number of validators. This limited number of validators enabled transactions to be validated faster, resulting in higher throughput. However, it also introduced a significant drawback: the system placed high trust in the validator set, creating a single point of failure if validators collude to act maliciously.

For that reason, Ronin adopted Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) of BFT in 2023. This consensus mechanism allowed anyone to register as a Validator Candidate, given a minimum staking requirement of 250,0000 RON (plus an additional 100 RON for bridge operators) worth around $390,000 at the time of writing. Under DPoS, Validator Candidates compete to receive delegated RON from tokenholders. The 10 candidates with the highest combined amount of staked and delegated RON tokens are elected daily at 00:00 UTC to serve as Standard Validators and contribute to consensus.

Standard Validators verify transactions, produce new blocks, and earn the operator rewards. These rewards are paid in RON tokens drawn from the “Rewards” allocation (25% of the total token supply) and the transaction fees included in each block. Delegators receive a share of these rewards minus a commission rate of 5% to 20%, which is paid to the Standard Validator.

In addition to the 10 Standard Validators, Ronin has 12 Governing Validators contributing to consensus. These validators are selected through onchain governance and are operated by trusted independent enterprises, with notable Governing Validators including Google Cloud, Nansen, Dapp Radar, and Stablenode. Tokenholders can still delegate their RON to Governing Validators to earn rewards, but this will not affect validator selection.

In July 2024, Ronin launched the Goda Upgrade to enable all active validators to contribute to the consensus mechanism and earn rewards. Under the previous DPoS version, only the top 10 Validator Candidates contributed to the consensus mechanism and earned rewards, incentivizing tokenholders to delegate RON to these top candidates to continue receiving rewards. Consequently, delegation to other validators would decrease, and new Validator Candidates were discouraged from participating due to the high staking requirements. As a result, the previous version of DPoS centralized the network by concentrating delegated RON among the top 10 Validator Candidates.

The Goda Upgrade resolves this issue by separating the tasks of finality voting and block production. All validators participate in finality voting to earn 85% of the rewards, with voting power directly proportional to the amount of staked RON. For block production, Ronin introduces Rotating Validators to receive the remaining 15% of rewards. Every epoch (approximately 10 minutes), 10 Validator Candidates are randomly selected to produce blocks. This selection utilizes a verifiable random function (VRF) that considers the total RON of each Validator Candidate. The 12 Governing Validators also produce blocks but do not rotate.

Validators and bridge operators who act maliciously are subject to a slashing penalty, which varies according to the degree of the infraction. If a validator acts maliciously and is slashed, delegators do not receive rewards for that day, but the delegated tokens are unaffected. This promotes responsible network participation.

For a double-sign validator, the validator is jailed for 2^63 -1 blocks and cannot be a validator in the future. While in jail, the validator does not earn commission and the staking reward. Furthermore, the validator is slashed for their minimum staking amount of self-delegated RON.

For an unavailable validator, slashing penalties are separated into tiers:

• For a tier 1 validator slashing penalty, they do not earn a commission or the staking reward if the validator misses more than 100 blocks in a day.
• For a tier 2 validator slashing penalty, if the validator misses more than 500 blocks in a day, the validator does not earn commission and the staking reward for the day. In addition to being slashed for 1,000 self-delegated RON and jailed for 57,600 blocks (approximately 2 days), the validator is banned from the validator set while in jail.
• For a tier 3 validator slashing penalty, if the validator misses 100 more blocks on the same day, the validator is slashed 1,000 self-delegated RON. Additionally, the validator is jailed for 57,600 blocks (approximately 2 days), the reward after a bailout from jail is removed, and the validator cannot bail out.

Similarly, for an unavailable bridge operator, slashing penalties are separated into tiers due to the severity of the infraction:

• For a tier 1 operator slashing penalty, the operator earns no bridge rewards if a bridge operator misses more than 10% of the votes in a day.
• For a tier 2 operator slashing penalty, if a bridge operator misses more than 30% of the votes in a day, the operator does not earn any rewards on the day.

Each validator is also required to run a bridge operator. Standard Validators use the Ronin Bridge to acknowledge deposits and withdrawals for token transfers between Ronin and other EVM-compatible networks. The Ronin network also includes non-validator nodes and archive nodes. Non-validator nodes are full nodes that do not participate in the consensus mechanism but synchronize with the ledger's state and monitor the network. Applications use these nodes to query the blockchain, send transactions, and execute smart contracts. Archive nodes store more information than full nodes and retain all historical data from the blockchain. The respective data is much denser than the data stored by the validators and non-validator nodes and is primarily used for services such as block explorers, wallet vendors, and blockchain analytics.

TokenomicsRON Overview

Ronin’s native token, RON, is used for security and Sybil-resistance (validator and delegator staking), as well as resource consumption (transaction fees and executions of smart contracts). The fixed total supply is 1 billion RON.

Initial Distribution

The initial token supply is divided into four main allocations: 30% to the community, 30% to the team, 25% to staking rewards, and 15% to the ecosystem fund. RON tokens are unlocked continuously rather than a block unlock. The unlock began on January 27, 2022, and the max supply can be unlocked after 108 months or 9 years if every token unlocked is then issued.

RON has several different utilities within the Ronin ecosystem:

• Medium of Exchange: RON is used as a payment currency across games, dApps, and NFT marketplaces on Ronin and is paired with every token on the native DEX Katana.
• Gas Fees: RON is utilized to pay for transactions on Ronin.
• Staking: Users can stake or delegate RON to validators to participate in the DPoS consensus mechanism and earn rewards. These tokens are paid from the “Rewards” allocation (25% of the token supply) and transaction fees. Since the Goda Upgrade, 85% of these rewards go to all validators participating in finality voting, and 15% to the validators selected every epoch for block production. Delegators receive all rewards minus a commission ranging from 5%-20%, which goes to the validator. This yield, paid in RON, ranges between an advertised 10%-13% APR as of June 20, 2024.
• Gaming Revenue and Payment: Game studios on Ronin frequently integrate RON within games for key revenue sources, including in-game purchases, actions, and NFT mints.
• Special Incentives: RON tokenholders and stakers have been granted airdrops, whitelist opportunities, and launchpad allocations for token launches by projects building on the Ronin network.

In the future, RON tokenholders will be able to directly participate in governance to determine how Ronin’s Treasury is spent. However, this feature is not yet live. The treasury, which accumulates a 0.5% fee from swaps on Katana and NFT sales on Mavis Market, aims to support the growth of the broader ecosystem. Currently, only Governing and Standard Validators vote on proposals on behalf of RON delegators.

Network ActivityUsage

When Axie Infinity announced the migration of its NFTs to Ronin on April 28, 2021, network activity increased rapidly. At the time, Ronin had only 361 DAA and 10,600 daily transactions. Two months later, on June 28, 2021, these metrics had surged to 32,800 DAA and 256,900 daily transactions, marking respective increases of 8,986% and 2,324%. From there, Ronin continued to grow, reaching a peak of 1.1 million DAA and 7.3 million daily transactions in November 2021.

The massive influx of new players began to strain the network, prompting Sky Mavis to whitelist Axie DAO to verify transactions — a decision that ultimately enabled the March 2022 hack. The Axie Infinity frenzy declined in 2022 due to over-farming and the rebalancing of in-game items, making the game less profitable. The March 2022 Ronin bridge hack further solidified this downward trend. Consequently, activity on Ronin fell significantly throughout 2022, from 311,200 DAA and 972,000 daily transactions on January 1, 2022, to 10,300 DAA and 57,200 daily transactions by January 1, 2023.

However, Network activity began to rebound in late 2023 and early 2024, led by crucial partnerships by Sky Mavis to onboard new games, such as Apeiron and Pixels. Daily transactions on Ronin spiked from 370,000 on December 17, 2023, to 7.5 million on December 18, 2023, due to the migration and launch of the game Apeiron from Polygon. Apeiron is a unique game that blends simulation, real-time strategy, and action role-playing elements. Players assume the role of a god, managing a planet, nurturing its inhabitants (called Doods) and engaging in battles — all while owning and trading in-game assets as NFTs. Apieron welcomed players to Ronin with an official launch campaign featuring daily sign-in bonuses, NFT mints, and game demos.

Pixels is another game that migrated from Polygon to Ronin in October 2023. Pixels is a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game that integrates farming, exploration, and community building into an open-world game. The game supports NFT Farm Land and Pixel Pet NFTs on Mavis Market and OpenSea marketplaces. Pixels launched season 2 of its Play-to-Airdrop Campaign for its in-game token, PIXEL, in January 2024. Players completed quests to earn badges to get added to the leaderboard. The top players were rewarded with 250 million PIXEL at the token generation event.

The resurgence of Ronin in 2024 can best be seen in the significant increase in NFT volume on the Mavis Market, Sky Mavis’s official NFT marketplace. NFT volume on the Mavis Market has increased from $215,000 in December 2023 to $6,775,000 in May 2024, an average increase of 90.75% MoM. This represents a 3,058% cumulative increase over the same period.

Security and Decentralization

Prior to the Goda Upgrade, the Ronin network featured 22 active validators, which has since increased to 24 with the implementation of Rotating Validators. The Nakamoto coefficient is a metric used to gauge the decentralization of a Proof-of-Stake network. It indicates the minimum number of independent entities controlling over one-third of the network's staked native assets. Ronin’s Nakamoto coefficient is 7, signaling that the network is more decentralized than other Proof-of-Stake networks, notably MultiverseX (6), Polygon (4), and Ethereum (1).

There are 209 million RON staked ($490 million as of June 20, 2024), representing 62.3% of the circulating supply. Locked tokens cannot be staked and earn rewards.

EcosystemGaming & NFTs

Ronin’s gaming ecosystem emphasizes player ownership. Thus, NFTs represent a significant component of this mission. Mavis Market is Sky Mavis’s official market for trading NFT collections outside the Axie IP. The most popular collections on Mavis Market include CyberKongz Genkai and Apeiron Planets, with cumulative volumes of 1.1 million and 865,000 RON, respectively.

Axie Infinity remains the most traded NFT collection on Ronin, with $4.3 billion in cumulative trading volume. However, it is traded on the Axie Marketplace and not on Mavis Market. Apeiron and Spark Suits Edition 01 (from the game Kaidro) round out the top three collections of all time on Ronin but trail significantly with $3.2 million and $2.7 million in cumulative trading volume.

The Ronin ecosystem currently consists of 12 games on the Mavis Hub platform, the official application providing access to all Sky Mavis games. It features early-stage and community-created games that have received support from Sky Mavis. In August 2023, Axie Infinity launched Mavis Hub Greenlight, a new home for game developers to directly share early versions of their Axie games with players on the Mavis Hub desktop app. Players can vote for their favorite early-stage games and provide feedback to builders looking to launch their products officially. This represents an expansion of the original Axie Builder’s Program introduced in April 2022, where community developers could apply to receive funding and support for games relating to the Axie Infinity Series. The latest game to launch on Mavis Hub Greenlight is Axie Forge, released in June 2024. Axie Forge is a casual idle sports game inspired by the Axie IP where players train their Axies to level them up through minigames.

Ronin is home to a suite of additional games outside Sky Mavis’s platform. Notable games include Pixels and Ragnarok: Monster World, slated to be released in Q3 2024.

For game developers to launch on Ronin, they must first undergo a stringent curation process from Sky Mavis before deploying. This ensures the project is closely aligned with the ecosystem and prevents spam. By choosing to build on Ronin, developers can access the full suite of Solidity development tooling brought by EVM compatibility, such as Remix, Truffle, and Hardhat. Additionally, developers can access Sky Mavis’ SDKs and APIs, enabling smooth integration with Ronin’s current products and services — including Ronin Wallet, Ronin Name Service, App Tracking, and Ronin JSON-RPC nodes. The Ronin Developer Console is the central hub for accessing Ronin’s documentation and APIs.

Several of Ronin's most crucial developer primitives are designed to support growth and help projects raise capital to build their gaming ecosystems. The Ronin Launchpad, powered by Impossible Finance, enables studios to conduct public sales of various assets. In March 2024, the popular Ronin game Apeiron successfully launched its token APRS through this application, raising over $3 million from over 11,500 participants. Mavis Store is Sky Mavis’s official marketplace for purchasing in-game currencies and assets. Game developers can integrate with the application to instantly gain access to the application’s large user base and streamline the complex listing of assets. Several games currently utilize the platform to support in-game purchases, including Axie Quest, Wild Forest, and Ragnorak: Monster World. A notable collection that recently launched on the platform is Moki Genesis. Participants could mint an egg to hatch a Moki character. All 8,888 NFTs sold out in about 2 hours.

DeFi

Decentralized finance on Ronin largely consists of key infrastructure to support the chain’s gaming and NFT applications. One of the most important protocols is Katana, Ronin’s native DEX. The platform offers three services: providing liquidity, monitoring analytics, and swapping.

• Providing Liquidity: Users can deposit into liquidity pools to provide trading liquidity. Depositors receive LP tokens and earn rewards derived from trading fees. As of June 20, 2024, the USDC-RON and AXS-RON liquidity pools have the highest APRs, with 33.68% and 43.49%, respectively. The WETH-RON and USDC-RON liquidity pools have generated the most LP Fees.
• Monitoring Analytics: Users can monitor analytics on the Katana dashboard.
• Swapping: Users can swap supported ERC-20 tokens, such as Ronin (RON), Aprerios (APRS), Pixel (PIXEL), Axie Infinity Shard (AXS), Smooth Love Potion (SLP), and Yield Guild Games Token (YGG).

Katana’s TVL peaked at an all-time high of $1.49 billion on December 4, 2021, and DEX volume peaked at $175.77 million on February 10, 2022. This coincided with the height of Axie Infinity when AXS and SLP were highly traded assets. Following the bridge hack, TVL on Katana declined substantially. On May 12, 2022, TVL fell below $100 million and stayed there until April 14, 2023, when it briefly rose above $100 million. On December 4, 2023, TVL on Katana surpassed $100 million again and has since remained above that level. The recent increase in TVL and DEX volume was largely driven by the introduction of new tokens on Katana. So far in 2024, Ronin has doubled the number of supported assets on Katana to 12 with the introduction of PIXEL, BANANA, YGG, APRS, ANIMA, and PHPC.

A major new addition to Katana is the Philippine Peso stablecoin (PHPC). PHPC is supported by the centralized cryptocurrency exchange (CEX) Coins.ph and is fully backed by cash and cash equivalents held in Philippine bank accounts. The new stablecoin received approval from the Philippine Central Bank, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), to undergo a pilot program exclusively on Ronin. In addition, PHPC is supported by the BSP’s Regulatory Sandbox Framework. This is a significant milestone for Ronin, making onchain gaming more accessible to its player base in the Philippines and APAC regions.

Another key DeFi protocol on Ronin is MetaLend. MetaLend enables borrowers to take out overcollateralized loans on yield-generating assets without giving up custody. This is accomplished through MetaLend’s appraisal engine, which continuously re-calculates the value of assets to ensure that they comply with the protocol’s risk parameters. Borrowers provide Metalend with collateral (staked AXS, staked RON, and Axie Land NFTs). Lenders stake WETH, RON, or USDC in the protocol's lending pools and receive a receipt token to track their deposits and interest earned. As of June 20, 2024, lenders receive an APR ranging from 1.4% to 12.1%.

The yield earned by borrowers on staked AXS and staked RON is subject to a 1% fee and auto-compounds daily. Borrowers can withdraw a maximum of 30% and 50% of the current value of supported NFTs and tokens, respectively. Loans on MetaLend have no defined payback period. However, if the collateral value drops or interest accrues beyond the maximum LTV, the protocol will liquidate assets to repay the loan.

Additionally, if a borrower exceeds their borrowing limit, MetaLend will list their collateral for sale with a 10% liquidation discount, allowing liquidators to repay up to 10% of the loan at a time. Any excess from the sale of larger assets, minus gas fees, is returned to the borrower. This liquidation strategy helps MetaLend mitigate risk during market crashes. As of June 20, 2024, MetaLend has $1.37 million in TVL.

RoadmapTechnical Improvements

Ronin has undergone significant technical improvements over the past several months. In May 2024, Ronin partnered with zkMe to integrate their identity oracles into the chain, enabling the possibility of novel privacy and security solutions. zkMe utilizes zero-knowledge proofs to verify user credentials without processing personal information. This partnership will provide the option for games building on Ronin to incorporate identity verification and KYC elements to help prevent fraud and prioritize the protection of user data.

In June 2024, Ronin announced plans to enable zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (zkEVM) on the chain by Q1 2025. This step would allow builders and game developers to permissionlessly deploy their Layer-2 chains on top of the Ronin network utilizing the Polygon CDK. This step increases transaction volume and improves incentive alignment for RON tokenholders and the broader Ronin ecosystem. In the same way, the original Ronin chain was created to scale Axie Infinity. This upgrade would enable the creation of game-specific chains on top of Ronin.

For L2s that look to launch on Ronin, meeting the 250,000 RON staking requirement to operate a validator node will increase competition for delegators. This will also increase the staking rewards as L2 sequencer fees accrue to the validator. Thus, greater competition results in greater decentralization for the network as a whole.

On June 25, 2024, Ronin announced plans on its blog to implement the Goda Upgrade, which it completed in July 2024. This upgrade included the Trippp and Aaron hard forks, aiming to increase Ronin’s decentralization further.

The Trippp hard fork implements Rotating Validators (REP-0010), which allows all validators to earn rewards by separating the tasks of block production and finality voting. Starting July 3, 10 validators will be randomly selected to produce blocks every epoch (10 minutes). This strengthens Ronin’s security by significantly increasing the number of active validators contributing to consensus.

The Aaron hard fork addresses a significant issue in current Axie and Land smart contracts: the inability to upgrade them without time-consuming migrations or creating new assets. With REP-0016, the Ronin validator community has decided to hard fork the chain, update the contract bytecode, and implement the ERC-1967 Transparent Proxy Standard. This change will upgrade Axie and Land smart contracts without needing resource-heavy migrations or mints. Additionally, these contracts will adopt the Ownership Delegation standard from REP-0015, extending the ERC-721 token standard on the Ronin blockchain. This will add more flexibility to NFTs, allowing users to stake, mortgage, rent, and delegate their assets.

Growth Strategy

Since onboarding the first five games in 2023, more independent games have migrated to Ronin to experience what the team has dubbed “The Ronin Effect”: significant growth enabled by Ronin’s scalability and strong community.

Because Ronin caters to Web2 and Web3 gamers alike, the ecosystem can tap into multiple audiences to spur massive growth. Some notable cases include Pixels’s migration to Ronin from Polygon, where DAA dramatically increased 7-fold. When Kaidro migrated to Ronin, the game’s inaugural NFT mint saw over 100,000 new Ronin wallets installed, 230,000 new wallet addresses, and over 346,000 NFTs minted. Since migrating to Ronin, both Apeiron (APRS) and Wild Forest (WF) have conducted successful token launches. Aperion raised $18 million for APRS in just 3 minutes and 30 seconds in the Primeral Community Round for the APRS token launch. Over 17.2 million WRON ($74.5 million) was staked in the Ronin Launchpad for the official APRS sale.

Ronin has numerous programs dedicated to helping new gaming studios build and succeed. Ronin Forge is an early access program helping experimental Web3 game studios get started on Ronin. The accelerator equips founders with technical materials, support from Sky Mavis’s team, and a grant of up to $50,000 in RON. Other initiatives include the Axie Builder’s Program and Mavis Hub Greenlight, which help new game developers and studios build around the Axie Infinity IP. There is also the Axie Creator Program for content creators, which highlights and rewards them through perks and features across its social media channels. Axie Infinity boasts an ecosystem fund currently managed by the Sky Mavis core team as it transitions into a DAO. The fund has been allocated 8% of the total amount of AXS. Stakers of AXS can vote on who receives funding, with the mission of adding value to the Axie Infinity community and promoting the community's long-term growth. The Axie Governance Portal completed its first vote in May 2024 on AIP-001, signaling future decentralization of the fund.

Ronin has continued transforming the ecosystem into an open, creator-led gaming economy well beyond the boundaries of its own titles. In recent months, the number of games launching on Ronin increased significantly. In the span of a few months, Ronin has welcomed to the ecosystem Fight League, Puffverse, Kaidro, Ragnarok: Monster World, Lumiterra, and — most recently — Forgotten Runiverse.

Ronin announced a strategic partnership with Ragnarok: Monster World in April 2024 to bring the game to the network. Ragnarok is one of the most significant transmedia gaming IPs, with over 68 million players across all its titles. This partnership signifies Ronin’s efforts to bridge the gap between traditional Web2 and Web3 gamers and capture a larger audience of gamers outside of the crypto space.

Lumiterra, a free-to-play, cross-platform MMORPG game, is another game making a significant transition onto the Ronin blockchain. The game, which combines survival, crafting, and exploration, allows players to battle NPC monsters, farm, craft items, and trade with other players. Utilizing RON as an in-game currency, Lumiterra aims to provide a multifaceted experience for Web3 gamers, mainly as it integrates DeFi protocols through Lumi Finance — an investment platform focused on sustainable yields. This migration marks a pivotal moment for Ronin, expanding its reach and deepening its presence in the Asian gaming market. The game is in its early development stage, with a Closed Beta Test (CBT) to launch in July. The CBT will feature $1 million worth of prizes, including RON, in-game items, and allowlist spots for future Lumiterra NFT mints.

In July 2024, Ronin welcomed Forgotten Runiverse to the network, a Web3 fantasy MMORPG cast in a magical open world. In Forgotten Runiverse, players are Wizards who revive forgotten ideas called Runes through stories, animations, and artwork. Players can form guilds, go on PvE expeditions, join monthly PvP leagues, and craft items by gathering resources, which they can mint and trade on the Ronin blockchain. A Closed Beta Test on July 31 will be followed by a public gameplay event where players can earn special rewards and craft unique NFT items. Forgotten Runiverse also plans to support mobile play over time.

Closing Summary

Ronin is an EVM Layer-1 blockchain optimized for gaming and NFTs. It was created by Sky Mavis in 2021 to improve the user experience of the Axie Infinity Series after the game became congested on the Ethereum mainnet. Ronin utilizes a DPoS consensus mechanism to secure the network, where all validators participate in finality voting, and 10 Validator Candidates are randomly selected and rotated every epoch to produce blocks.

Since Ronin’s launch, the chain has processed over $4.3 billion in cumulative NFT Volume and has over $166 million in TVL across its protocols and DEX. Ronin’s long-term goal is to become the primary hub for onchain gaming. It aims to attract traditional Web2 gamers to its ecosystem by introducing innovative P2E gaming mechanics and promoting content created and owned by the community. The announcement of its partnership with Ragnarok: Monster World, a traditional Web2 gaming IP with over 68 million players across all of its titles, demonstrates Ronin’s continued commitment to onboarding Web2 gamers into the Web3 space. With the announcement of zkEVM L2s, Ronin is positioning itself as a settlement layer for individual games operating on their L2, enabling high scalability for continuous growth.