Ronin is an EVM based blockchain, designed for developers who want to create games with player-owned economies. These ecosystems, which combine community, leisure, and economics, are commonly referred to as digital nations.

RON is the native token of the Ronin blockchain. Its primary purpose is to secure and decentralize the network. The success of Ronin relies on the widespread adoption of RON among network builders and users.

Ronin validators are required to hold and stake RON in order to participate in block validation. They receive newly issued RON as rewards, which are distributed proportionally among the validator and its delegates based on their staked RON. The validator may also charge a fee to its delegates. It is important to note that this structure is subject to change as new research and trends emerge.

Ronin is an EVM-based blockchain for play-to-earn games. The most popular game built on Ronin is Axie Infinity, a digital collectibles game and one of the biggest play-to-earn games on the market. In its first month of operating on Ronin in July 2021, Axie experienced a 300% month-on-month increase in NFT trading volume, a 180% increase in monthly unique NFT traders, and a 131% increase in daily active battlers.

In its first nine months, Ronin has racked up 250,000 unique daily active addresses, $5 billion in TVL, over 2 million wallet downloads, and 15% of all NFT transactions on the market. Its DEX Katana is the second-most popular decentralized exchange by weekly active users and allows users to swap tokens within the Axie Infinity ecosystem.

Ronin was founded by Sky Mavis, a technology-focused game studio launched by Jeffrey Zirlin and Alexander Leonard Larsen. Mr. Zirlin is a Yale graduate that has been building Sky Mavis for the past four years. Mr. Larsen has been in the blockchain space since 2017 and has co-founded Sky Mavis and Axie Infinity, as well as led several investment rounds at the company.

Ronin stands out thanks to several main benefits.

First, the blockchain offers cheap and fast transactions with a confirmation time of 2-3 seconds. This makes it well-suited to a game like Axie that requires a high frequency of transaction confirmations.

Second, users can withdraw Axie assets back to the Ethereum mainnet with its Ronin Bridge. That means players can benefit from the profits they earned playing the game and conveniently swap tokens to other cryptocurrencies.

Third, it offers simplified onboarding for new users with a fiat on-ramp and a native wallet, lowering the barriers to entry for new players and making it easy to get started even for cryptocurrency newbies.

Sky Mavis built Ronin to be the default NFT scaling solution for gaming. Ronin already handles more NFT volume than all Ethereum NFT scaling solutions combined, and 15% of all NFT volume in 2021 happened on Ronin. Its bridge is the third-largest bridge by total volume after Polygon and Avalanche and a top-five bridge on Ethereum by total value locked. Sky Mavis vision is for Ronin to become the premier location to launch Axie-related games and NFT games from other developers. To accomplish that, Ronin plans to further decentralize by opening up its validator application process in 2022.

In its first phase, at least ten validators outside of Sky Mavis will join the Ronin network, and at least three external teams will be building NFT games on top of it. The second phase will see 20 external validators and five external teams, as well as Ronin upgrading to delegated proof of stake. In its final phase, Ronin anticipates more than 100 validators in its network that receive fees from protocols and NFT sales outside the Axie universe.

RON was launched through a pool on its native Katana DEX and will be distributed through an incentivized liquidity program. Issuance will be reduced every quarter, and the total supply of RON is capped at 1 billion and will be reached 294 months after issuance begins.

RON is distributed as follows:

• Community (30%): liquidity mining, content creation, rewards programs, grants, and hackathons.
• Team (30%)
• Ecosystem fund (15%): grants, investments, and hackathons bringing game-changing content, applications, and tooling to Ronin.
• Staking rewards (25%)

Ronin is an Ethereum-compatible sidechain utilizing a proof-of-authority (PoA) consensus mechanism. PoA is a reputation-based consensus mechanism with a fairly centralized nature, as validators are selected by the team based on their reputation. Binance, Ubisoft, and Animoca Brands are some of the validators on Ronin. They are responsible for authoring and validating blocks, updating price oracles, and approving deposits and transfers of assets to and from Ronin. Validators also control the addition and removal of other validators.

RON is available on OKX, Gate.io and Jubi.

If you want to learn more about how to start buying cryptocurrencies, you can read more in our guide.