Jeff Zirlin, co-founder of Sky Mavis, shared with Crypto Briefing what’s next for the Ronin ecosystem and how they plan to provide a permissionless infrastructure for game developers. According to DappRadar, Ronin recently reached the 2 million daily active user mark, boosted by gaming titles like Pixels and Lumiterra.
“We have some really exciting gameplay launches coming up, like the Forgotten Runes closed beta. They have been building throughout the bear market and are a super OG Ethereum collection. We also have Lumitera, which looks like a Chinese MMO that will also have a beta test this month. We’ve had a lot of games and I think there’s a lot of stuff playable on the Ronin Network,” said Zirlin.
Moreover, the co-founder of Sky Mavis also highlighted the launch of zkEVM, which was recently announced. Ronin zkEVM is a zero-knowledge layer-2 blockchain developed using a modified version of the Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK), allowing Ronin to be part of the Aggregation Layer ecosystem developed by Polygon.
“Ronin is currently about 10% full. So let’s say we have another huge success where we run out of cheaper and affordable blocks based on Ronin. Our approach will be to use the Polygon CDK to create the system where game developers can build their own layer 2 chains on top of Ronin.”
Road to decentralization
Zirlin explained that Ronin has been very selective with the games introduced on top of their blockchain infrastructure, and that is the strategy projects need when deploying their technology recently, focused on creating user and content experiences.
“But history shows that curated is better at the beginning of an adoption cycle, while in the long run something more scalable or open eventually runs out. That’s why we want to disrupt ourselves. We need to disrupt our composite strategy through a system that allows anyone to use Ronin. That’s basically the next thing for Ronin in terms of scalability.”
Therefore, the next steps for Ronin include opening up its ecosystem to game developers to build games without permission. “At the moment everyone is succeeding because we saw something in it. But eventually there will be game developers who come out of nowhere to succeed alongside Ronin.
Choosing genres
Role-playing games, trading cards and real-time strategy games are the most popular genres in Web3 gaming right now. Zirlin acknowledges that there is a lack of titles from more popular genres, such as multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) and first-person shooter (FPS).
However, it’s difficult for a Web3 title to thrive in both genres, as it’s very difficult to deliver better experiences than established titles like Fortnite, League of Legends, and Dota. “The gameplay there is so polished and so competitive,” says Zirlin. As a result, Ronin chooses to onboard games on a two-bucket basis.
Sapphire
“One of these is teams that exhibit leadership characteristics. They can lead the community, they can sell a vision, they’re going to be in the trenches, they’re going to collect feedback, and they’re going to build their products with love and an understanding of who they are. build for. These are teams like Pixels, like Axie.”
The second category concerns established intellectual properties (IP) that want to explore the Web3. “An example of Ronin is Ragnarok Online. They migrated to Ronin and still have millions of fans around the world, especially in Southeast Asia. So it overlapped with our ideal gamer demographic, and they’ve been successful.
As established IPs enter the blockchain gaming industry and more crypto-native teams build compelling titles, Zirlin believes this bull cycle will have a higher player retention rate than the last.
“I expect that during this bull cycle we will have a higher retention rate of the people we have on board because of the variety of content and the multitude of experiences that we have,” he concluded.