With so many gaming blockchains launching these days, it's hard to stay on top of them all. As of late, the Ronin blockchain (along with its native coin RON) has been garnering quite a bit of attention on social media, and in this article we are going to investigate why.

Axie Infinity

In order to understand the origins of the Ronin blockchain, we need to go back to 2018, when the web3 game Axie Infinity was released.

Partially inspired by CryptoKitties, Axie Infinity allows you to collect creatures called Axies, and build a team to battle other players.

Not only can you engage in battle, you also can breed your Axies together to produce a baby Axie, which has a unique set of characteristics making it completely different from all other Axies.

From Ethereum to Ronin

At first, Axies were non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain, where players would collect them, and trade them on decentralized marketplaces.

The act of breeding or trading an Axie required that the user sign and broadcast an Ethereum transaction, which was relatively inexpensive when the game first launched.

However, as we headed into the bull run of 2021, Ethereum transaction fees went through the roof, and simple actions like breeding and trading Axies became prohibitively expensive for most players.

So Sky Mavis, the team behind Axie Infinity, started working on an Ethereum sidechain called Ronin. The idea being that Axie Infinity transactions would be offloaded from the Ethereum mainnet and executed on Ronin instead.

While the migration of player's Axie Infinity assets from Ethereum to Ronin went fairly smoothly back in 2021, the Ronin bridge was famously hacked a year later, and over 500 million dollars worth of cryptocurrency was stolen.

Harsh lessons were learned, and after patching the vulnerability, the team increased the number of validators on the network from 9 to 17 to boost security.

Ronin Blockchain Tools

You can interact with the Ronin blockchain by either installing their mobile wallet or browser extension.

You can then connect to Ronin's decentralized exchanged Katana and use it to swap the native coin RON (if you buy some) for other tokens on the blockchain.

You are also able to stake your RON tokens to earn a small amount of interest, and participate in the blockchain's governance decisions.

More Games

Although Axie Infinity was the first game launched on the Ronin blockchain, Sky Mavis has been announcing that more web3 games will be utilizing the platform.

As promised, a new farming game called Pixels recently migrated from Polygon to Ronin, and has been making waves in the crypto space. In fact, the game is so popular that it has reached gaming rank #2 on dappradar.

The PIXEL token, which powers the game's economy, was airdropped to tens of thousands of early players based on their activity. No doubt other games will use this strategy in the future to incentivize gameplay.

Taking a step back, the entire web3 gaming space has a lot of room for growth. As we continue heading into the next crypto bull run, it may be worth your while to investigate some alternative gaming platforms like GALA, Enjin Coin, and ImmutableX.

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If you learned something new from this post, be sure to check out my other articles on crypto and finance here on the HIVE blockchain. Also consider following me on InLeo for more frequent updates.

Until next time...

Resources

Axie Infinity Battle [1]
Ronin logo [2]
Pixels Screenshot [3]