Two years have passed, Axie Infinity is still alive, and so is Ronin.

Author: Joyce, BlockBeats

Editor: Jack, BlockBeats

The long-awaited "bull market" signal in the crypto community has been going on for more than two months, and the narrative of the gaming track has once again attracted the attention of investors. The token IMX of Immutable X, a gaming public chain with over a hundred games, has surged by nearly 300% in two months. Meanwhile, Ronin, with a market value of less than 1/5 of Immutable, has also achieved a 340% increase in two months.

When it comes to Ronin, most people's memories still linger on the leading blockchain game Axie Infinity, which created the GameFi craze in the last bull market. Two years have passed, Axie Infinity is still alive, and so is Ronin.

Ronin's Revival

From 2020 to 2021, Axie Infinity was a force to be reckoned with. With a monthly revenue of $3 billion, daily transactions surpassing those of Honor of Kings, and the emergence of large game guilds like YGG, Axie Infinity's success attracted a large number of game enthusiasts and developers to enter the Web3 gaming field, shaping today's GameFi track.

However, like most projects that have become popular in the crypto industry, Axie Infinity has not escaped the curse of the volatile crypto market. After reaching 2.8 billion daily active users in November 2021, the significantly inflated game assets raised the barrier for new users to a level that was unsustainable. With no new players entering, the game's internal economy also became unsustainable due to demand mechanisms and inflation models. By the end of the year, as the crypto market gradually turned bearish, Axie Infinity fell into a "death spiral," with its market value plummeting from $10 billion to $3 billion, evaporating nearly 70% in two months.

According to data released by Nansen, in November, the number of active addresses on Ronin exceeded 460,000, a 368% increase compared to the previous month, the largest increase among all Ethereum sidechains. After experiencing a bull and bear market, the Ronin wanderer is still here.

Stolen 600 million

For the development team behind Axie Infinity, Sky Mavis, the impact of the "big crash" was particularly painful, as just a few months ago, they had embarked on their ambitious "Great Voyage Plan" - the Ronin network.

Ronin is an Ethereum sidechain originally created for the Axie Infinity community. From 2020 to 2021, due to the influx of players into Axie Infinity, Ethereum's slow settlement and high gas costs became the team's most troublesome issues. Sky Mavis urgently needed a reliable, fast, and cost-effective network to provide security for the continued development of Axie. After the partner Loom decided to no longer customize L2 networks for To C applications, the Ronin network developed solely by Sky Mavis came into being.

With its own application chain, Sky Mavis was able to design the functionality and features of this chain according to its own ideas and the needs of the game and its community. Axie no longer needed to compete for on-chain space and gas with other DeFi projects. In addition to faster and lower costs, Axie players on the Ronin network also have their own game DEX and wallet, eliminating the need for players to leave the ecosystem to complete transaction activities. In February 2021, the Ronin network was officially launched, and by November, the number of daily active addresses on the chain had exceeded 1 million.

One of the most attractive new features for players is the staking economy that came with the Ronin network. Ronin has a separate AXS staking pool for users to stake AXS and earn rewards. After half a year of the network's launch, the total staked amount of AXS exceeded 20 million, nearly 30% of the circulating supply.

However, despite Ronin's achievements proving Sky Mavis's idea of "games needing an independent network," at the end of 2021, this ambitious "wanderer network" still could not reverse the decline of Axie Infinity in the face of the overall bearish trend in the crypto market. What made matters worse was the theft incident that occurred early the following year.

In March 2022, the Ronin network's cross-chain bridge was hacked, and 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC were stolen. In the days following the incident, the entire community could only watch helplessly as the hacker transferred and cashed out assets worth approximately $600 million, leaving the team almost powerless.

Two weeks after the incident, Sky Mavis announced that it had accepted a $150 million investment led by Binance, with participation from Animoca Brands and a16z, to compensate all users affected by the attack. However, in reality, Sky Mavis only raised $11 million in this round of financing. Shortly after leading the investment, Binance withdrew from the financing, with its spokesperson stating that Sky Mavis had been able to steadily recover funds since April and could cover the funds of the affected users without the need for Binance's investment.

"Stolen $600 million" seems to have become the final memory left by Sky Mavis and the Ronin network before fading from people's sight.

Mend the fold after the sheep are lost

Binance's withdrawal of investment was seen as a signal that Sky Mavis was no longer favored, causing Sky Mavis's valuation to drop from $30 billion to $19 billion. Under the shadow of "serious security vulnerabilities," the RON token price further declined, and the network's TVL shrank by half in a month. In pursuit of speed and cost, Sky Mavis ultimately fell victim to the "impossible triangle" of the crypto industry.

However, Ronin did not die. In order to regain the community's trust, Sky Mavis has been strengthening the network's security since the theft incident.

In April 2022, Ronin announced the addition of five new validator nodes, namely Nansen, Delphi Digital, Stable Node, Animoca Brands, and Dialectic. Animoca Brands had been optimistic about Axie Infinity in its early days and had invested in it, and has been steadfast in supporting Ronin ever since.

Just two days after Ronin announced the theft, news emerged that Animoca and the Sky Mavis team were discussing compensation plans. Animoca also participated in the $150 million financing led by Binance and issued a special announcement in support of Sky Mavis, stating, "We firmly believe that the kingdom of Axie Infinity will not only continue to exist, but will also thrive."

In July 2022, Ronin added four more validator nodes, all of which were early supporters of Axie Infinity. This includes the Web3 gaming guild YGG, whose DAO owns over 26,000 Axies and 235 pieces of Axie Land. YGG founder Gabby was an early player of Axie Infinity and met Sky Mavis founder Jihoz in 2018. Gabby founded YGG in 2020, and as of March 2022, out of 27,000 scholars in Southeast Asia, India, and Latin America, 20,000 were Axie Infinity players.

Left two: Sky Mavis co-founder Jihoz, left three: YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon

Six months after the theft, at the end of September 2022, Ronin announced that Google Cloud became its 18th validator node. Google Cloud has deep technical expertise in blockchain infrastructure and validator operations and has been Sky Mavis's strategic cloud provider since 2020. Its executive Ruma Balasubramanian sees Sky Mavis as "a powerful example of how cloud technology enables blockchain to bring innovation and value creation to individuals."

The DPos mechanism upgraded in March 2023 marked a small milestone in Ronin's security solution. After transitioning from the PoA mechanism to the DPoS mechanism, RON holders can delegate their stakes to selected validators, who will verify transactions, generate blocks, and earn rewards. Representatives voted for them will also share the rewards. According to Ronin, anyone holding 250,000 RON can become a validator and produce blocks. Currently, Ronin has 22 validator nodes.

Most people took notice of Ronin again, perhaps because its founder Jihoz announced in November this year that the daily active addresses of the game Pixels on Ronin had exceeded 100,000. Meanwhile, Ronin's trading volume has quadrupled in the past three months, and the daily active addresses on Ronin's chain have grown from less than 20,000 in early October to nearly 150,000 now.

More than just enthusiasts

In March this year, Ronin stationed a group of game studios such as Directive Games and Tribes Studio. Why choose to join the Ronin ecosystem? For Web3 game developers, the answer is actually quite simple. Developing games is not an easy task; it requires a lot of time and financial investment, continuous trial and error, and growth. In the Web3 gaming field, Sky Mavis has become a role model and spiritual leader for many game development teams. Their passion, perseverance, professionalism, and deep understanding of Web3 games have become key factors in attracting high-quality Web3 game development teams to Ronin.

From Axie to Ronin

Sky Mavis co-founders Aleksander Larsen and Nguyễn Thành Trung met in the community of the OG blockchain game CryptoKitties, where Larsen was a community moderator. Trung appreciated Larsen's contributions to the CryptoKitties community and invited him to create Axies, which was just an NFT series at the time.

Axies NFT was presold in 2018 and attracted a group of fans, including Jihoz Zirlin. Jihoz Zirlin had already known Larsen from the CryptoKitties community. Larsen suggested that Trung hire Jihoz, saying, "This guy is really excited; he will chat with everyone and is very suitable for community operations." Two months later, Jihoz joined the Sky Mavis team.

In October 2018, Sky Mavis released the first version of Axie Infinity. The rapidly growing number of users and the wealth effect already implied a huge risk. Larsen recalled in an interview, "We didn't anticipate that it would become so big, grow so fast, and we realized that we could easily lose control of the game narrative."

After the glory faded, Sky Marvis left behind hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and an unfinished story. The future of Ronin was placed in front of them, and the initial attempt for Axie Infinity turned into "since we are making our own chain, we can also consider using it to serve the entire Web3 gaming ecosystem."

In the second half of 2021, Sky Mavis began brewing a new version of Axie Infinity called Origins. In the new version, players will receive a starter pack containing three free non-NFT Axies, and the game's focus shifted from "Play to Earn" to "Play and Own." With the community support accumulated during the Classic period, Origins has maintained the heat of Axie for nearly a year, replacing Classic.

On September 6, 2023, Yield Guild Games concluded the first Axie Infinity Superquests event on the Ronin network, which initially aimed to have 2,000 participants but ultimately attracted 4,322 participants. In addition, 1,023 participants on the Ronin network received in-game rewards and soul-bound achievements. All aspects of the data show that the Axie Infinity player community is still active. Axie Infinity's trading volume has grown by 144% in the past month, approaching $90 million, and UAW has grown by 92.3%.

In September 2022, when TVL and coin prices showed no signs of improvement, Ronin carefully planned a three-day AxieCon in Barcelona, with over 2,000 participants, attempting to send positive signals to the outside world. During this time, the community heard various speeches covering various topics, given by members of the Sky Mavis team and some community members.

From the founders of Ronin to the Axie Infinity development team, to game guilds like YGG and Sura Gaming, and investors like a16z, stakeholders of Sky Marvis gathered to discuss the mission, vision, and product roadmap of Sky Marvis and Ronin. AxieCon was seen by Sky Marvis as "an opportunity to meet with allies from the past, present, and future in the community."

In Jihoz's introduction, Ronin is actively building scalable solutions that have been tested in practice and exploring different zero-knowledge solutions to increase transaction bandwidth, minimizing the interaction costs for developers and game players. In addition to technical efforts, Sky Mavis co-founder Aleksander shared the standards for an ideal game studio, including an experienced founding team, product coverage on mobile, and games with unreleased tokens, emphasizing the growth mindset of the studio.

A two-way ecological journey

In March this year, at the Los Angeles GDC (Game Developers Conference), Sky Mavis "introduced" Ronin to the outside world, launching the "signature" of Axie Infinity's Ronin, "hoping that our game studios can utilize everything we have created for Axie Infinity." The deep understanding of games and the deep cultivation of operations are the advantages that Ronin believes it has compared to other Web3 games.

2023 Los Angeles GDC venue

The game studios are also willing to foot the bill. During 2022, Ronin chatted with over 200 game studios. Kathleen Osgood once said in an interview, "Our strategy is not to get more people to join Ronin, but to find the right people to build a new paradigm for Web3 games." In the end, Ronin selected 6.

Tribes Studio, positioned to create immersive social MMO products, has been connected with Ronin since July 2022. Its CEO Glenn Mcguire had the first contact with Kathleen Osgood, the business director of Sky Mavis, at that time.

Tribes Studio, founded by a former executive of King and Scopely, plans to launch a community engagement platform before launching the MMO, using the power of the community to drive game development. This aligns with Ronin's preference for community operations. In the following months, Tribes Studio contacted other partners and, after considering the technical stack, community culture, and collaboration model, chose Ronin at the GDC venue. After the collaboration, Tribes Studio immediately received comprehensive help from Ronin, from technical guidance to marketing strategies.

Bali Games, launched by the Korean game studio Anipang, has developed and operated well-known IPs such as Disney Pop and Snoopy Puzzle, with revenue exceeding $1.8 billion and over 130 million downloads. In the collaboration with Ronin, Bali Games values the IP value of Axie Infinity and hopes to bring the Axie series into the Korean market, which is suitable for Ronin, already established in Southeast Asia and needing to expand its territory. Ronin also customized a market strategy for Bali Games so "they won't encounter the mistakes we made."

Directive Games was also one of the first five game studios to join Ronin. Directive Games is launching a shooting game called The Machines Arena, and its Chief Product Officer Kent Byers mentioned in an interview that he has great respect for the Sky Mavis team.

In the eyes of other game development teams, the rapid development of Axie Infinity has surprised everyone, bringing many new users to Web3 and putting Sky Mavis in the spotlight. When setbacks suddenly occurred, doubts followed. Under pressure, Sky Mavis did not give up but continued to build the ecosystem. This passion and perseverance for Web3 games also influenced other game development teams.

In addition to its sincere attitude, Ronin also has enough professionalism. The entire process of a game from concept to release often takes years, and for Web3 game developers, working with Ronin, which focuses on games, is more straightforward and direct compared to traditional public chains with broad use cases. Kent Byers said that Directive Games had early communication with Ronin before establishing a partnership, and initially, Ronin had many questions for the game team. "After more communication, we found a lot of consensus between each other, and we started to gain their approval."

"Ronin is a great home for us, and we want to be a part of it." In March 2023, at the GDC in Los Angeles, Directive Games and Ronin completed their collaboration.

Ronin Effect

With the entry of the first batch of game studios, Ronin has entered a more mature new stage from the initial "Axie Infinity chain": infrastructure for a wider range of blockchain games. In this role, Ronin began to reap the fruits of its victories. Footprint data shows that Ronin's daily active addresses are close to 150,000, nearly ten times the number in the past two months, and the number of on-chain transactions has exceeded 300,000, reaching a new high for this year.

Pixel Fruits

At the end of October, the metaverse blockchain game Pixels, which was previously on Polygon, officially launched on Ronin. Before this, Pixels had over 1.5 million monthly transactions and over 5,000 daily active players, making it the most popular Web3 game on Polygon.

Pixels founder Luke Barwikowski stated on Twitter, "Migrating to the Ronin Network is not just about acquiring users. Sky Mavis is the only team in Web3 that truly handles and resolves many of the pitfalls that all Web3 games encounter in terms of economics and scalability. This guidance is invaluable."

The most direct data comparison is that after migrating to Ronin for a month, the number of daily active players in Pixels fluctuated around 100,000, which is 20 times the number during the Polygon period. According to OpenSea data, the floor price of Pixels Farm Land NFTs grew by 600% in two months.

Left image: New player count for Pixels; Right image: Daily active player count for Pixels

Purple represents Polygon, green represents Ronin

From wallet payments to token transactions, the effects of Ronin's infrastructure updates can be felt in the player experience of Pixels.

First, the wallet. Players can use the Ronin wallet as a plugin in the Chrome browser to directly purchase in-game tokens with fiat currency. The mobile version of the Ronin wallet was launched as early as 2021. After integrating Binance Pay on December 2 this year, users can deposit directly through Binance in the Ronin wallet mobile app without scanning or copying wallet addresses.

Ronin also considered the liquidity needs of game players and launched the DEX platform Katana on Ronin in 2021, with a lock-up amount exceeding $1 billion during the peak of Axie Infinity. Since the start of the new staking incentive program in January, Katana has seen a 300% increase in RON in a month, and Ronin's TVL has increased from $40 million to $77 million. The in-game tokens SLP and AXS of Axie Inifinity have also nearly doubled.

In addition, in May of this year, Ronin launched its first NFT marketplace, Mavis Market. The Genkai series of NFT products from cyberkongz, developed by YGG founder OWL, became the first minting factory on Mavis Market. The 3,000 Cyber Kongz Genkai NFTs, priced at 0.25 ETH, sold out in less than an hour. During the minting period, Ronin processed 1,500 successful transactions in three minutes, and the daily active addresses almost doubled within three days.

Ronin shared this achievement in its newsletter, stating, "Ronin is the best place to launch various game-centered NFT collectibles." The successful minting of Genkai represents Ronin's opening its boundaries to the Web3 native community beyond Axie Infinity.

After officially launching on Ronin, Pixels opened the Pixels Pets NFT minting, and Mavis Market simultaneously launched this batch of NFTs. Currently, the RON/BERRY trading pair has also appeared on Katana. As of December 12, the number of BERRY holders has exceeded 100,000.

According to data, in November, Pixels performed the best in terms of traffic growth among blockchain games, with over 3 million visits that month, while popular blockchain games at the same time, such as Big Time and Shrapnel, had fewer than 500,000 visits. Among Pixels players, 51% are from Indonesia and the Philippines, making the Southeast Asia region the "stronghold" of Ronin and Axie Infinity.

Spread Matrix

Kathleen Osgood, Director of Business Development at Sky Mavis, mentioned in an interview that the Ronin ecosystem has a large amount of community capital. Therefore, the team has been taking a more strategic approach to promoting ecosystem games to the wider audience of Web3, using this community capital to bring Web3 users to the games. "Sky Mavis has over 2,500 creators, all of whom are enthusiastic about conveying the community culture and atmosphere of the Ronin ecosystem to the outside world. Now, Ronin has a community, a growth stack, and all the tools and platforms."

With over three years of community operations experience from Axie Infinity, the Ronin community has developed a systematic game promotion path. Axie Infinity has set up a column for game updates and released a total of 6 articles in November. Whenever new features or seasonal activities are launched, creators in the Axie Infinity vertical community on YouTube update related interpretations and strategies. Players who want to know the latest developments can directly obtain information from the community, and this smooth dissemination channel can greatly stabilize the retention of old players and reduce player churn.

The atmosphere on Twitter is more lively, with independent players posting game shares, second art creations, and other personalized content. For example, many players in the community recently shared a model of an Axie model released by Axie Infinity. In addition to independent players, guilds and KOLs frequently hold seasonal events and live broadcasts, providing momentum for community engagement. The Axie Infinity official team also actively participates in community interactions. One detail is that founder Jihoz follows many active players with fewer than 1,000 followers.

After Pixels' DAU exceeded 100,000, founder Luke stated in an interview that Pixels did not make any major changes after migrating to Ronin, so the "initial surge of new users is almost entirely attributed to Ronin."

The community strength accumulated during the Axie Infinity period has given Ronin a large player community. As of the time of writing, Axie Infinity's Discord community has 610,000 members, with nearly 40,000 online members. In contrast, the Discord online members of Big Time, a AAA-level blockchain game that attracted community attention due to its huge increase this year, is 30,000. Considering the vastly different levels of attention in the community this year, it is clear that Axie Infinity has developed a loyal community.

With Ronin's continued careful operation, these players often participate in the Ronin ecosystem as creators. Many players from the Axie Infinity community have formed a promotion matrix for Pixels on social media.

On YouTube, blogger Elijah MT8 has been posting videos about Axie Infinity since January 2021. Over the past two years, Elijah MT8 has released over 200 videos focusing on Axie Infinity, accumulating over 130,000 subscribers. Elijah MT8 describes himself as an "Axie Infinity Top 10 player" on his homepage. Since November, Elijah MT8's videos have started to cover content about Pixels, including beginner's guides, advanced strategies, and the guild section updated two weeks ago. There are many Axie Infinity creators like Elijah MT8 on YouTube and Twitter, and many of them have recently started promoting Pixels.

Tribally, a social platform for Web3 games founded in 2021, operates the community tool website Axie.tech, which is the official community partner of Axie Infinity. Tribally announced its partnership with Pixels on October 23 this year. After that, Axie.Tech launched a "Pixels party" on Twitter, which can be understood as a "team building" event for Axie Infinity community players in the Pixels game. This is the first time a non-Axie series game has appeared in Axie.Tech's tweets.

These promotions occurred just one week after Pixels officially migrated to Ronin. On November 26, the Axie community also held a Pixels x Axie art challenge, where players had the opportunity to win prizes by creating art that combines elements of both games.

Using Axie's community resources to promote Pixels is a joint effort from the player community to the game team. Jihoz, one of the founders of Ronin and responsible for growth business, is also a founder of Axie Infinity. Jihoz has mentioned Pixels several times on Twitter, sharing its growth data and even stating that "Pixels feels like Axie Infinity." Pixels also responded to Jihoz's enthusiasm in the game, with players discovering an NPC named "Jihoz" in the Pixels map. This Easter egg received positive feedback from players, "Simple idea, but very cool."

Ronin considers its collaboration with Pixels as a "homework" to showcase to the community. They refer to such achievements as the "Ronin Effect," relying on the experience of building and operating Axie for 4 years when building the Web3 game ecosystem. "We know how to connect games with their first batch of super fans. We did it with Axie, and now with Pixels.xyz."

After a month of rapid development, the founder of Pixels proposed new prospects, stating, "Axie has proven that Web3 games can reach 1 million DAU—the real question is how Web3 games can break through 10 million DAU. This is another scale that needs to penetrate untapped audiences." It remains to be seen whether Ronin can achieve such a breakthrough, but it is certain that more games are being attracted to the Ronin ecosystem.

On November 8, the PC collectible card game (TCG) Zoids Wild Arena, originally launched on Polygon, migrated to the Ronin ecosystem, and the studio behind it, South Korean game production company ACT Games, also plans to migrate all its games to Ronin next year. Axie Infinity's official Twitter account also retweeted the migration information.

On December 5, Sky Mavis announced a collaboration with Singapore game developer Foonie Magus. The card battle blockchain game Apeiron will migrate to the Ronin network, and Mavis Market will also launch its NFT series. Frank Cheng, CEO of Foonie Magus, stated that they chose Ronin because of its "game-centered vision and firm support for selected projects," and that "Sky Mavis has shown a deep understanding of the needs of blockchain game developers."

A week after Apeiron's migration to Ronin was announced, its UAW showed significant improvement.

In addition, the popular sandbox blockchain game The Sandbox, with a higher market value than Axie Infinity, has recently been rumored to be migrating to Ronin. The community discovered that a wallet deployed with the SAND token from Seb.ron's Ronin domain address appeared on the Ronin testnet and conducted multiple transfers. The Sandbox did not directly respond to this rumor, but its CEO Sebastian Borget tweeted on the 12th about a recently popular statue model in the Axie Infinity community, with the caption "Greetings to the limited edition mysterious statue of Axie Infinity, the newest member of The Sandbox Paris office collection."

New Cycle, New Imagination

On December 6, DeFi protocol Impossible Finance announced the deployment of Launchpad based on the Ronin network, allowing game studios on Ronin to launch their own ERC-20 tokens, and the liquidity of RON and AXS is likely to be directly linked to future game tokens on Ronin. In addition, Ronin recently integrated Binance Pay to increase the liquidity depth of AXS and SLP.

For Ronin, relying solely on the resources accumulated by Axie is not enough to support an attractive Web3 game ecosystem. From building infrastructure to planning community activities, to deploying Launchpad, Ronin is trying to be a comprehensive Web3 game chain. However, there are more experienced and larger competitors in this field, such as Immutable X, the first L2 protocol on Ethereum focusing on NFTs and blockchain games, which has strong infrastructure capabilities and will have over 200 Web3 games released on Immutable by 2024. In addition, Treasure DAO built on Arbitrum and the game-specific chain Oasys are also continuously improving their developer ecosystems, with no shortage of votes from experienced game studios.

Undeniably, the recent outstanding performance of Ronin is largely due to the overall warming of the blockchain game track, and it is still unknown how strong Ronin's driving force is. Currently, in the eyes of the community, Ronin's advantage seems to be only a "story," a story of a leading blockchain game that once defined the concept of GameFi, returned all user funds after being hacked for $600 million, and survived through the second bull market.

For investors, the focus is on how Ronin's related asset targets will appreciate. On the one hand, Ronin's TVL is already four times that of Immutable X, and its on-chain trading volume is much higher, but its market value is currently only 1/5 of Immutable X's. In the short term, Ronin's development momentum will continue. However, the market is also watching to see how far Ronin's story can support it in the fierce competition. Will the next Axie Infinity and Pixels also come to Ronin?

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。