Ronin appears again after 600,600 days were stolen

The "bull return" signal expected by the crypto community has lasted for more than two months, and the narrative of the blockchain game track has once again attracted the attention of investors, with hundreds of games The game public chain Immutable

When it comes to Ronin, most people’s memory still remains on Axie Infinity, the leading chain game that created GameFi fever in the last bull market. Two years have passed and Axie Infinity is still alive, as is Ronin.

Ronin recovery

Axie Infinity from 2020 to 2021, you can’t brag about it Pass. With monthly revenue reaching US$300 million, daily revenue once surpassed that of Honor of Kings, and spawned large game unions such as YGG. The success of Axie Infinity attracted a large number of game enthusiasts and developers to join the Web3 game field, shaping today's GameFi track.

But like most popular projects in the encryption industry, Axie Infinity has not escaped the curse of ups and downs in the currency circle. After hitting 2.8 billion daily active users in November 2021, the vastly expanded gaming assets have raised Axie Infinity's new user threshold to unsustainable levels. Without new players entering the game, the internal economy of the game is also unsustainable due to the demand mechanism and inflation model. At the end of the year, as the crypto market gradually turned bearish, Axie Infinity fell into a "death spiral", with its market value falling from US$10 billion to US$3 billion, evaporating nearly 70% in two months .

According to data released by Nansen, in November, the number of active addresses of Ronin exceeded 460,000, which is more than The month-on-month increase of 368% in the previous month was the largest increase among all Ethereum side chains. After a round of bulls and bears, Ronin is still here.

600 million stolen

Sky, the development team behind Axie Infinity For Mavis, the blow of the "Big Crash" was particularly painful, because just a few months ago, they had just launched their next ambitious "big voyage plan"-the Ronin Network.

Ronin is an Ethereum sidechain originally created specifically for the Axie Infinity community. During 2020 to 2021, due to the influx of players into Axie Infinity, Ethereum’s slower settlement and excessive gas costs became the team’s biggest headaches. Sky Mavis needed a reliable, fast and affordable network to support Axie's continued growth. After partner Loom decided not to customize the L2 network for To C applications, the Ronin network independently developed by Sky Mavis came into being.

After having its own application chain, Sky Mavis can design the functions and features of this chain according to its own ideas and according to the needs of the game and its community, Axie From now on, there is no need to compete with other DeFi projects for on-chain space and Gas. In addition to faster and lower speeds and costs, Axie players on the Ronin network also have their own game DEX and wallet, and players no longer need to leave the ecosystem to complete trading activities. In February 2021, the Ronin network was officially launched, and by November, the daily active addresses on the chain exceeded 1 million.

The new feature that attracts players the most is the staking economy that comes with the Ronin network. Ronin has a separate AXS staking pool for users to stake AXS to earn profits. Half a year after the launch of the network, the total amount of AXS pledged exceeded 20 million, accounting for nearly 30% of the circulating supply.

However, even if Ronin's achievements prove Sky Mavis's vision of "games need an independent network", at the end of 2021, this ambitious "Ronin Network" It is still unable to reverse the decline of Axie Infinity from the general bearish trend of the crypto market. To make matters worse, the theft occurred early the next year.

In March 2022, a hacker attack occurred on the Ronin network cross-chain bridge, and 173, 600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC were stolen. In the days following the incident, the entire community could only watch as hackers moved and liquidated approximately $600 million worth of assets, with little the team could do.

Related reading: "Ronin was stolen official summary : The vulnerability was discovered 6 days ago, 5 private keys were stolen》

Two weeks after the incident, Sky Mavis announced that it would accept the Binance led the investment, and Animoca Brands and a16z participated in the US$150 million financing. According to the plan, this round of financing will be used together with Sky Mavis’s account funds to compensate all users affected by the attack. But in reality, Sky Mavis only raised $11 million in this funding round. A spokesman for Binance, which withdrew the funding shortly after leading the round, said Sky Mavis had been able to steadily recover funds since April and was able to cover stolen user funds without investment from Binance.

"$600 million stolen", this seems to be the last memory left by Sky Mavis and Ronin Network before fading out of people's sight.

Repairing the situation

Binance’s divestment is seen as a sign that Sky Mavis is no longer optimistic. Sky Mavis' valuation dropped from US$3 billion to US$1.9 billion. Under the shadow of "serious hidden dangers in network security", the price of RON tokens fell further, and the network TVL shrank by half within a month. In pursuit of speed and cost, Sky Mavis was ultimately sanctioned by the "Impossible Triangle" in the encryption field.

But Ronin is not dead. In an effort to win back the trust of the community, Sky Mavis has been strengthening Ronin’s cybersecurity following the theft.

In April 2022, Ronin announced the addition of five new verification nodes, namely Nansen, Delphi Digital, Stable Node, Animoca Brands and Dialectic. Animoca Brands was bullish and invested in Axie Infinity in its early stages and has been a staunch supporter of Ronin ever since.

Two days after Ronin announced that it had been stolen, news broke that Animoca and the Sky Mavis team were discussing a compensation plan. Animoca later participated in a $150 million financing led by Binance, and issued a special announcement to support Sky Mavis, "We firmly believe that the kingdom of Axie Infinity will not only continue to exist, but will also flourish."

Related reading: "Animoca: Why did we renew our investment in Axie Infinity? 》

In July 2022, Ronin added 4 more verification nodes. These nodes are all early supporters of Axie Infinity. These include Web3 Gaming Guild YGG, whose DAO holds over 26,000 Axie and 235 Axie Land. YGG founder Gabby was an early player of Axie Infinity and met Sky Marvis founder Jihoz in 2018. Gabby founded YGG in 2020, and as of March 2022, 20,000 of its 27,000 scholars across Southeast Asia, India, and Latin America were Axie Infinity players.

The second one from the left is Sky Mavis Lianchuang Jihoz, the third one from the left is YGG Lianchuang Gabby Dizon;

Half a year after the theft, at the end of September 2022, Ronin announced that Google Cloud would become its 18th verification node. Google Cloud has deep technical expertise in blockchain infrastructure and running validators, and has been Sky Mavis’ strategic cloud provider since 2020. Its executive Ruma Balasubramanian regards Sky Mavis as "a powerful example of cloud technology enabling blockchain to bring innovation and value creation to individuals."

The DPos mechanism upgraded in March 2023 has drawn a small knot in Ronin's security plan. After switching from a PoA mechanism to a DPoS mechanism, RON holders can delegate their shares to selected validators, who will verify transactions, generate blocks, and earn rewards. And representatives who vote for them will also share in the rewards. According to Ronin’s explanation, people with 250,000 RON can become validators and produce blocks. Currently, Ronin has 22 validating nodes.

Most people noticed Ronin again, perhaps because its founder Jihoz announced in November this year that the daily active addresses of the chain game Pixels on Ronin exceeded 100,000. At the same time, Ronin’s transaction volume has increased fourfold in the past three months, and the number of daily active addresses on the Ronin chain has grown from less than 20,000 in early October to nearly 150,000 today.

More than just enthusiasts

In March this year, Ronin stationed at Directive Games, Tribes Studio, etc. A group of game studios. Why choose to join the Ronin ecosystem? For Web3 game developers, the answer is actually quite simple. Developing games is not an easy task. You need to invest a lot of time and money, continue trial and error, and grow. In the field of Web3 games, Sky Mavis has become a role model and spiritual leader for many game development teams. Their love, persistence, professionalism and deep understanding of Web3 games have become the key factors for Ronin to attract high-quality Web3 game development teams.

From Axie to Ronin

The founders of Sky Mavis Aleksander Larsen and Nguyễn Thành Trung met In the OG chain game CryptoKitties community, Larsen was the community moderator at that time. Trung appreciated Larsen's contribution to the CryptoKitties community and invited him to work together to create Axies, which was just an NFT series at that time.

Axies NFT was pre-sold in 2018 and attracted a group of fans, one of whom was Jihoz Zirlin. Jihoz Zirlin and Larsen have known each other for a long time in the CryptoKitties community. So Larsen suggested that Trung hire Jihoz. "This guy is really excited. He will chat with everyone and is very suitable for running a community." 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 wealth effects already contain huge hidden dangers. , Larsen recalled in an interview, "We didn't expect it to become so big and grow so fast, and we realized that if we were not careful, we would lose control of the game's narrative."

After the glory faded, Sky Marvis was left with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and an unfinished story. Ronin's future was put in front of him. What was originally an attempt for Axie Infinity became "Since we want to build a chain for ourselves, we can also consider using it to serve the entire Web3 game ecosystem."

In the second half of 2021, Sky Mavis begins to brew a new version of Axie Infinity, Origins. In the new version, players will get an entry containing three free non-NFT Axies. Bao, the direction of the game has shifted from "Play to Earn" to "Play and Own". With the community support accumulated during the Classic period, Origins has continued to maintain the popularity of Axie in the past year instead of Classic.

On September 6, 2023, Yield Guild Games concluded the first Axie Infinity Superquests event on the Ronin Network, with an initial goal of 2,000 people signed up, but ultimately attracted 4,322 participants, in addition, 1,023 participants received in-game rewards and soul-bound achievements on the Ronin network. By all accounts, Axie Infinity's player community is still active. Axie Infinity's trading volume has increased by 144% in the past month to nearly $90 million, and UAW has also increased by 92.3%.

In September 2022, when both TVL and currency prices showed no improvement, Ronin carefully planned a three-day AxieCon in Barcelona with more than 2,000 people participating, trying to Send positive signals to the outside world. During this time, the community heard a variety of presentations covering a variety of topics, from speakers from the Sky Mavis team as well as a number of community members.

From the founder of Ronin to the Axie Infinity development team, to game guilds such as YGG and Sura Gaming , a16z and other investors, Sky Marvis stakeholders gathered together to discuss Sky Marvis’ mission, vision, and Ronin’s product roadmap. AxieCon is viewed by Sky Marvis as “an opportunity to meet past, present and future allies in the community.”

In Jihoz’s introduction, Ronin is actively building extended solutions that can be tested in actual combat, and is exploring different zero-knowledge solutions to improve transaction bandwidth. , so that the interaction cost between developers and game players can be minimized. In addition to technical efforts, Aleksander, co-founder of Sky Mavis, shared the criteria for an ideal game studio, including that the founding team needs to be experienced, the product needs to cover mobile games, and the game has unissued tokens, and emphasized the studio’s Growth mindset.

A two-way ecology

In March this year, Sky Mavis held a press conference at GDC (Game Development Conference) in Los Angeles. "Introducing" Ronin to the outside world at the Game Developer Conference and launching Axie Infinity's Ronin "signature", "I hope our game studio can take advantage of everything we have created for Axie Infinity." Ronin believes that his understanding of games and in-depth operations are his advantages over other Web3 games.

2023 Los Angeles GDC venue

Game studios are also willing to pay. During 2022, Ronin talked to more than 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.

The connection between Tribes Studio, which is positioned to create immersive social MMO products, and Ronin can be traced back to July 2022, when its CEO Glenn Mcguire was in business with Sky Mavis That's when director Kathleen Osgood made the first contact.

Tribes Studio was founded by a former executive of King and Scopely. Before launching the MMO, Tribes planned to launch a community engagement platform to use the power of the community to promote the game. Construct. This coincides with Ronin’s preference for community operations. In the following months, Tribes Studio contacted other partners one after another. After considering the technology stack, community culture and cooperation model, Tribes Studio chose Ronin at the GDC venue. After reaching the cooperation, Tribes Studio immediately received comprehensive help from Ronin from technical guidance to marketing solutions.

Bali Games, launched by South Korean game studio Anipang, has developed and operated well-known IPs such as Disney Pop and Snoopy Puzzle, with revenue exceeding US$1.8 billion and downloads Over 130 million times achieved. In its cooperation with Ronin, Bali Games values ​​the IP value of Axie Infinity and hopes to bring the Axie series to the Korean market. This is perfect for Ronin, which has already established a foothold in Southeast Asia and needs to expand its territory. Ronin also customized the market strategy for Bali Games, "so that they will not encounter the mistakes we made."

Directive Games is also the first group to join Ronin One of the five game studios, Directive Games is launching a shooting game called The Machines Arena. Kent Byers, the game's chief product officer, mentioned in an interview that he respects the Sky Mavis team very much.

In the eyes of other game development teams, the rapid development of Axie Infinity has exceeded everyone's expectations. It has brought many new users to Web3 and also brought Sky Mavis is thrust into the spotlight, setbacks occur suddenly and doubts arise. Sky Mavis did not give up its efforts under pressure, but insisted on continuing to build the ecosystem. This enthusiasm and persistence for Web3 games also influenced other game development teams.

In addition, Ronin can continue to keep updating, which is inseparable from the support of its community. Although the collapse of Axie Infinity is an undeniable fact, it has precipitated A loyal community with gamers who are inclusive enough to believe in and support this team. This tenacious and solid relationship also attracts developers. "Continuously being liked by players" is the goal that every game strives for.

In addition to his sincere attitude, Ronin is also very professional. The entire process from concept to release of a game is often measured in years. For Web3 game developers, compared to traditional public chains with a wide range of use cases, it will be more frank and direct to cooperate with Ronin, who focuses on games. . Kent Byers said that Directive Games and Ronin had communicated long before the partnership was established, and Ronin initially raised a lot of questions about the game team. "After more communication, we found that there was a lot of consensus between each other, and we began to gain their approval."

"Ronin is a good person for us. Home, we want to be a part of it.” In March 2023, at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) in Los Angeles, Directive Games and Ronin completed their cooperation.

Ronin Effect

With the arrival of the first batch of game studios, Ronin has grown from the The "Axie Infinity Chain" has entered a new, more mature stage: an infrastructure for a wider range of chain games. In this role, Ronin began to reap the fruits of its triumphs. Footprint data shows that Ronin’s daily active addresses are close to 150,000, an increase of 10 times in the past two months; the number of transactions on the chain has exceeded 300,000, a new high this year.

Pixel Fruit

10 At the end of the month, Pixels, a metaverse chain game that was once on Polygon, was officially launched on Ronin. Previously, with over 1.5 million monthly transactions and over 5,000 daily active players, Pixels was the most popular Web3 game on Polygon.

Pixels founder Luke Barwikowski said on Twitter, "Moving to Ronin Network is not just about acquiring users. Sky Mavis is the only real solution in Web3 The team has understood the many pitfalls that all Web3 games encounter in terms of economics and scaling. This guidance is invaluable."

The most direct data comparison is, One month after migrating to Ronin, the number of daily active players in Pixels fluctuated around 100,000. This number was 20 times that of Polygon. According to OpenSea data, the floor price of Pixels Farm Land NFT increased in two months. 600% .

Left picture: Number of new players of Pixels; Right picture: Number of daily active players of Pixels Purple is Polygon and green is Ronin

Related reading: "Pixels 2nd Anniversary: ​​The Metaverse Pixel Farm Chain Game Carrying Ronin Ecology》

From wallet payment to token trading, you can The effects of Ronin's infrastructure updates can be felt through the Pixels player experience.

The first is the wallet. Players can use the Ronin wallet as a plug-in in the Chrome browser, and use legal currency to directly purchase in-game tokens. The mobile version of the Ronin wallet Also launching as early as 2021. After integrating Binance pay on December 2 this year, users can make direct deposits through Binance on the Ronin wallet mobile terminal without scanning or copying the wallet address.

Ronin has also taken into account the liquidity needs of gamers for assets and launched Ronin's DEX platform Katana in 2021. Its locked-up volume was at the peak of Axie Infinity Over $1 billion. Since the beginning of this year, Katana’s new staking incentive program launched in January has caused RON to increase by more than 300% within a month. Ronin’s TVL has increased from US$40 million to US$77 million, and Axie Infinity’s game tokens SLP and AXS They are also nearly doubled.

In addition, in May this year, Ronin launched the first NFT market Mavis Market, and the Genkai series of NFT products cyberkongz developed by YGG founder OWL became Mavis The first mint on the Market, 3,000 Cyber ​​Kongz Genkai NFT priced at 0.25 ETH sold out in less than an hour, with Ronin processing it in three minutes during the mint 1,500 successful transactions and daily active addresses nearly doubled in three days.

Ronin shared the results in a newsletter and wrote, "Ronin is the best place to launch a variety of game-centric NFT collectibles. "Genkai's successful mint means Ronin is opening its borders to the Web3 native community outside of Axie Infinity.

After the official launch of Ronin, Pixels opened the casting of Pixels Pets NFT, and Mavis Market simultaneously launched these NFTs. Currently, the RON/BERRY trading pair is also available on Katana. As of December 12, the number of BERRY holders has exceeded 100,000.

According to data,  in November, Pixels was the best-performing chain game in terms of traffic growth, with more than 3 million visits that month. During the same period, popular chain games such as Big Time and Shrapnel had no more than 500,000 visits. Among Pixels players, 51% are from Indonesia and the Philippines. Southeast Asia is the "home base" of Ronin and Axie Infinity.

Communication Matrix

Sky Mavis Business Development Director Kathleen Osgood once mentioned in an interview It is recognized that the Ronin ecosystem has a large amount of community capital, so the team has been taking a more strategic approach when promoting ecological games to the broad audience of Web3, by using these community capital to bring Web3 users to the game, "Sky Mavis has There are more than 2,500 creators, all of whom are passionate 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."

In Axie Infinity's more than three years of community operation experience, the Ronin community has developed a systematic game promotion path. Axie Infinity has a column for game updates, and a total of 6 articles were published in November. Whenever new features or seasonal activities are launched, the creators of the Axie Infinity vertical community on Youtube will update relevant interpretations and strategies. Players who want to know about new trends can obtain information directly from the community. Smooth communication channels can be used in large areas. To a certain extent, it can stabilize old players and reduce the loss of players.

The atmosphere on Twitter is even more lively. Independent players will post personalized content such as game sharing and secondary art creation. For example, many players in the community have recently checked in to Axie An Axie model from Infinity. In addition to independent players, guilds and KOLs that frequently hold season events and live broadcast sharing on Twitter also provide impetus for maintaining community popularity. Axie Infinity officials are also very active in community interaction. One detail is that founder Jihoz pays attention to many active gamers with no more than 1,000 fans.

After Pixels' DAU exceeded 100,000, founder Luke said in an interview that Pixels did not make major changes after migrating to Ronin, so "initially The surge in new users is almost entirely attributable to Ronin."

The community power accumulated from the Axie Infinity period has allowed Ronin to have a large player community. As of the time of writing, Axie Ininfinity's Discord community has 610,000 members. There are nearly 40,000 online members, and the AAA chain game Big Time, which has attracted community attention due to its huge growth this year, has 30,000 online Discord members. Considering the contrasting attention the two have received in the community this year, it's clear that Axie Infinity has already cultivated a loyal community.

With Ronin's continued careful operation, these players often participate in the Ronin ecosystem as creators. On social media, many players from the Axie Infinity community formed a promotional matrix about Pixels.

Youtube blogger Elijah MT 8 has been posting videos about Axie Infinity since January 2021. For more than two years, Elijah MT 8 has He has published more than 200 videos, all of which revolve around Axie Infinity. These videos have accumulated more than 130,000 subscribers for him. Elijah MT 8 introduces himself as "Axie Infinity Top 10 player" on the homepage. Since November, content about Pixels has begun to appear in Elijah MT 8’s videos, covering everything from beginner guides and advanced strategies to the guild section of the Pixels update two weeks ago. There are many Axie Infinity creators like Elijah MT 8 on Youtube and Twitter, and many of them have been promoting Pixels recently.

Axie.tech, a community tool website owned by Tribally, a Web3 game social platform founded in 2021, is the official community partner of Axie Infinity. Tribally announced its partnership with Pixels on October 23 this year. After that, Axie.Tech launched the "Pixels party" on Twitter, which can be understood as the "team building" of Axie Infinity community players in the Pixels game. This is The first non-Axie series game appeared in a tweet from Axie.Tech.

These promotions took place a week after Pixels officially migrated to Ronin. On November 26, the Axie community also held Pixels x Axie Art Challenge, players create works of art that combine elements of both for a chance to win prizes.

Using Axie's community resources to promote Pixels is something that everyone from the player community to the game team is promoting. Jihoz, one of the founders of Ronin and responsible for the growth business, is also the founder of Axie Infinity. Jihoz mentioned Pixels on Twitter many times, shared its growth data, and even bluntly said that "Pixels has the feeling of Axie Infinity." Pixels also responded to Jihoz's enthusiasm in the game. Some players discovered that an NPC named "Jihoz" appeared in the Pixels map. This little easter egg was well received by players, "The idea is simple, but cool."

Ronin regards the collaboration with Pixels as a "homework" to show to the community. Ronin calls this achievement the "Ronin Effect" )", 4 years of experience in building and operating Axie is still the confidence Ronin relies on when building the Web3 game ecosystem. "We know how to connect games with their first super fans. We did it once with Axie and we've done it again with Pixels.xyz."

After a month of rapid development, the founder of Pixels put forward a new outlook, "Axie has proven that Web3 games can reach 1 million DAU - a true The question is how do Web3 games break 10 million DAU. This is another scale that needs to penetrate an audience that has not yet been reached.” Whether Ronin can achieve such a breakthrough is still unknown, but what is certain is that more games are being attracted to the Ronin ecosystem.

On November 8, the PC trading card game (TCG) Zoids Wild Arena, which was originally launched on Polygon, was moved to the Ronin ecosystem. The people behind it Studio, 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 that it would cooperate with Singaporean game developer Foonie Magus. The card duel chain game Apeiron will be migrated to the Ronin network, and Mavis Market will also Launched its NFT series. Frank Cheng, CEO of Foonie Magus, said that they chose Ronin because of its “game-centric vision and unwavering support for selected projects.” “Sky Mavis has demonstrated a deep understanding of the needs of on-chain game developers. ."

A week after the announcement of Apeiron's migration to Ronin, its UAW has improved significantly.

In addition, the popular sandbox chain game The Sandbox, which has a higher market value than Axie Infinity, has also been rumored recently. Might be migrated to Ronin. The community discovered that a wallet with a Ronin domain address from Seb.ron deployed SAND tokens on the Ronin testnet and made multiple transfers. The Sandbox did not directly respond to this rumor. Its CEO Sebastian Borget posted a tweet on the 12th about the statue model that has been popular in the Axie Infinity community recently, with the text "Say hello to the Axie Infinity limited edition mysterious statue. It is the latest addition to the collection of The SandBox Paris office."

New cycle, new imagination

On December 6, DeFi protocol Impossible Finance announced that it will deploy Launchpad based on the Ronin network, which will enable game studios on Ronin to launch their own ERC-20 tokens, and the liquidity of RON and AXS is likely to directly Deeply bound to the game tokens on Ronin in the future. In addition, Ronin has recently integrated Binance Pay, also to increase the liquidity depth of AXS and SLP.

For Ronin, the resources accumulated by Axie alone are not enough to support an attractive Web3 game ecosystem. From building infrastructure to planning community activities to deploying Launchpad, Ronin is trying to build a comprehensive Web3 game chain. But there are more experienced and large-scale opponents in this field. For example, Immutable published on. In addition, Treasure DAO and game-specific chain Oasys built on Arbittrum are also constantly improving their developer ecosystem, and there is no shortage of votes from senior game studios.

It is undeniable that a large part of the reason why Ronin’s recent results have been outstanding is because of the overall recovery of the chain gaming circuit. Ronin himself How strong the driving force is is yet to be determined. At present, in the eyes of the community, Ronin's advantage seems to be just a "story". Ronin created the leading blockchain game that once defined the concept of GameFi, returned all user funds after 600 million US dollars was stolen, and is still alive. A survivor of the second bull market.

For investors, they are more concerned about the appreciation space that Ronin brings to its related asset targets. On the one hand, Ronin’s TVL is currently four times that of Immutable X, and its on-chain transaction volume is much higher than the latter, but its market value is currently 1/5 of Immutable X’s. In the short term, Ronin’s momentum will continue. But how far can Ronin’s story support it in the fierce competition? The market is also waiting to see. Will the next Axie Infinity and Pixels come to Ronin?