Ronin Network growth and strategic realignment

Pixels and the user surge

Pixels maintains 2 million lifetime wallets on the Ronin blockchain and attracts 625,000 daily active unique wallets according to DappRadar data. This user density contrasts with the current asset values for Axie Infinity. Axie non-fungible tokens have a floor price of $0.33, which falls far below the $700 floor price from 2022. The AAXSUSD token trades at $8.07, while the Smooth Love Potion token sits at $0.0036. I find the discrepancy between growing user counts and crashing asset values difficult to ignore. You know the basics, so I will skip the usual market context. The AAXSUSD token once reached $164.90 in 2021, and the Smooth Love Potion token reached $0.39 in 2021. Ronin itself trades at $1.77, although it reached $4.45 in March 2024. Pixels grows its audience through play-to-airdrop events and collaborations with Mocaverse and Yield Guild Gaming. The sector trend appears to be strongly up, though users sometimes use automated bot wallets to maximize rewards from token giveaways. The market cap for the top 33 blockchain gaming ecosystem tokens, which includes all tokens worth more than $100 million, reaches $20 billion. Immutable’s IMX token leads this group with a $4.4 billion market cap.

Sky Mavis shifts focus

Sky Mavis laid off 21% of its workforce to pursue a "strategic realignment" and focus on a "new Axie game" and Ronin expansion. Sky Mavis CEO Trung Nguyen claims the decision to reduce the workforce by 21% allows for a sharper focus on a new Axie game and expansion of the Ronin Network. He states these layoffs do not reflect the company’s budget or financial health. The team intends to use freed resources to develop the Ronin Wallet, the Mavis Marketplace, and Web3 game publishing. While Sky Mavis restructures, the Axie Origins esports scene continues with the Season 14 postseason, where the total reward pool exceeds 10,000 AXS.

The S14 Elite 4 tournament, which takes place after the season concludes, follows the same rules as the Elite 8. Mythra reached the top of the leaderboard after several weeks of intensive competition. Players must register three teams, and each team consists of three axies. Teams cannot overlap by more than 9 out of 18 axie parts, and each individual axie belongs to only one team. Elite 4 competitors must join the Axie Tournament Discord server to receive further details.

Treasury and governance plans

The Ronin Treasury holds over 100 million RON, which constitutes more than 10% of the total RON supply after receiving an additional 90 million RON from the former staking reward allocation. During Proof of Distribution Season 1, the ecosystem distributed over 410,000 RON to builders. Axie Infinity claimed 97,000 RON from that pool, while Gas Infinity and Craft World earned roughly 32,333 RON each. The network prepares a governance dashboard for launch in Q3 to allow users to vote on ecosystem funding and treasury allocations.

Six of the top 15 gaming NFT collections by trading volume over the past 30 days exist on Ronin. Five of the top 10 gaming NFT collections by total sales also exist on Ronin. Angry Dynomites grew its transaction count 22.1% in Q2 compared to Q1. The ecosystem also introduces Honor Score, a reputation layer that uses signals like wallet age, asset holdings, and onchain activity to recognize meaningful participation. This system will combine a variety of onchain signals to estimate each user’s contribution to the network. The Honor Score aims to replace raw user counts with reputation weighted participation to make incentives more resistant to Sybil attacks and reward farming. I wonder if the upcoming governance dashboard will provide enough control to prevent the concentration of power among large builders.