About

Ronin Chain is a blockchain platform designed for gaming applications, supporting developers in building, deploying, and managing blockchain-based games and assets. It enables token transactions, NFTs, and offers scalability features optimized for gaming ecosystems.

History

Ronin was announced in June 2020 as the long-term solution designed to make participating in the Axie Infinity economy fast, inexpensive, and seamless. Sky Mavis, the core developers of Axie Infinity, introduced the Ronin network to yield fast transactions, drastically reduced gas fees, native ecosystem value retention, and simplified onboarding for new users.

Now the flagship play-to-earn (P2E) game, Axie Infinity and its users regularly experienced network congestion on Ethereum as a result of the game's increasing popularity in its early days. In May 2019, Axie Infinity partnered with Loom Network for a layer-2 scaling solution to combat the slow transaction speeds and high transaction costs sometimes encountered on Ethereum, but within a year the Loom team decided to optimize their network for enterprise solutions instead of user-facing applications. Sky Mavis decided to end the partnership in light of the misalignment of goals between the two teams, leaving the game once again in search of a scaling solution in March 2020.

Enter Ronin, a sidechain solution built specifically for Axie Infinity. Within a month after Ronin was announced, the network was in testnet with the public testnet opened five months later in December 2020. Mainnet launched shortly thereafter in February 2021, and migration of in-game assets took place in April 2021. By May 2021, a native fiat on-ramp was introduced, allowing users to deposit funds directly onto Ronin. Continuing the buildout of the ecosystem, Ronin's native decentralized exchange (DEX) Katana launched in November 2021 along with a mobile wallet. The network's native token RON launched in January 2022 with allocations for Sky Mavis, the community, staking rewards and an ecosystem fund.

On March 23, 2022 the Ronin Network bridge was exploited for 173,600 ETH and 25.5M USDC due to Sky Mavis's Ronin validator nodes and Axie DAO validator nodes being compromised. In total, five validator keys were "hacked"; 4 Sky Mavis validators and 1 Axie DAO. According to Bloomberg, of the 173,600 ETH lost in the attack, 56,000 ETH belonged to the Axie Infinity treasury.