Ronin, the gaming-focused blockchain built by Sky Mavis to power titles like Axie Infinity, will migrate to Ethereum on May 12, the team said this week.
This move ends a four-year run as an independent sidechain and brings major upgrades to the ecosystem.
The migration will reduce RON inflation from over 20% to less than 1% and increase government bond inflows. Ronin also plans to roll out Proof of Distribution, a system that automatically rewards builders based on their contributions.
Proof of Distribution rewards contributors based on measurable impact, including gas spend, user growth and trading activity. Meanwhile, government bond inflows will increase through staking allocations, sequencer income and higher market costs.
The result is a more efficient, secure and incentive-driven network for both builders and users, Ronin said.
The migration will require approximately 10 hours of downtime, during which no activity in the chain will be possible, as noted by the team. Node operators must upgrade before the planned hard fork in block #55577490.
What made Ronin independent in the first place
When Sky Mavis, the Vietnamese studio behind Axie Infinity, started developing Ronin in late 2020, Ethereum’s layer 2 options were still in their infancy.
With mainnet gas costs becoming prohibitive for the game’s growth, Sky Mavis officially launched the Ronin mainnet in February 2021 to provide the high-throughput and low-cost environment needed to onboard millions of players.
This move allowed for Axie’s massive expansion through early 2022, but independence came at a price. In March 2022, North Korea-linked Lazarus Group exploited the Ronin Bridge and drained some $625 million in assets, one of the largest hacks in crypto history.
The Ethereum ecosystem is nothing like it was six years ago. Layer 2 solutions have been put to the test, data availability costs have plummeted, and the OP Stack processes millions of transactions across multiple chains every day.