Introduction
What is Ronin?
Ronin is an Ethereum L2 built for gamified experiences and real-world crypto adoption. Launched by Sky Mavis, the creator of Axie Infinity, Ronin is the only blockchain proven to scale a single game to millions of daily active users and billions of dollars in transaction volume. It has processed over $4 B USD in NFT volume and hosts 31M wallet downloads across the USA, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Originally forged for gaming, Ronin is now evolving into Ethereum's gamification engine: a platform where play and finance merge to broaden financial access.
Why we built Ronin
When Axie was born, crypto was only for hobbyists and early adopters. Ronin changed that.
Axie was originally built on Ethereum Mainnet but due to the complex transactions involved in breeding and performing other activities in game, Axie players were spending huge amounts on gas fees. Gas fee spikes and network congestion would periodically slow the game's economy to a halt, freezing our momentum.
When Sky Mavis began developing Ronin in 2020, Ethereum's layer 2 options were still in their infancy. Rather than wait, we built our own solution. Ronin mainnet launched in February 2021, purpose-built to provide the high-throughput, near-zero-fee environment that a mass-market game demanded.
In 2021, we deployed Axie on Ronin and reached exponential growth. Within months, users spiked from 19,000 to millions with over 75% of new users having never transacted onchain before.
With Axie's success, we began receiving interest from builders to also come to Ronin. They knew it worked for mass-market crypto experiences and were interested in leveraging Ronin's tech and community to jumpstart their projects. Much like how Amazon began with books, or Apple with the personal computer, our targeted approach has set us up to start small and focused, and gradually increase the scope of what Ronin excels at over time. Ronin started very niche, serving just one game. Over time, we've added more applications, more games.
The second major proof point came in late 2023, when Pixels, a browser-based social farming game, migrated to Ronin from Polygon. At the time of migration, Pixels had roughly 3,000 daily active users. Ronin's distribution, low fees, and existing wallet base changed that quickly. By June 2024, Pixels' monthly active users had peaked at 1.7 million, making it the second breakout success story on the network. Notably, of the 18 million visitors to the Pixels website in April 2024, 18% were from the Philippines, with Brazil, Thailand, and Indonesia each accounting for roughly 9% of traffic, reinforcing that Ronin's reach into emerging markets wasn't a fluke of Axie, but a characteristic of the platform.
Ronin, the L2
In 2026, Ronin returned to Ethereum, as an L2, retaining the scalability that necessitated the move in the first place while inheriting Ethereum's security.
To sustain and accelerate that growth, we introduced the Proof of Distribution (PoD) system, a merit-based rewards mechanism that allocates RON emissions directly to the builders contributing most to the ecosystem. Rather than rewarding passive stakers, PoD tracks real on-chain activity: gas spend, new and active users, NFT volume, DEX volume, and contract interactions. The more a builder grows the network, the more they earn. It's a fundamental shift from inflation as subsidy to inflation as incentive, and it means the 5M RON emitted annually flows to the people actually building Ronin's future.
Looking ahead
Today, Ronin is home to a majority of the most successful crypto games on the market. With deep penetration in emerging markets across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and beyond, Ronin is also positioned to extend its gamification engine into adjacent territory: payments, real-world assets, and the broader challenge of making crypto accessible to the people that need it the most.