Who?

• All star cast of partners from traditional gaming, crypto, and NFT space to serve as validators of the network

What is it?

• EVM based blockchain for devs who want to build player owned economies
  Why?
• Axie Infinity was stunted because of Ethereum's limited scalability
  Some numbers
• In the 1st month of operating on Ronin, Axie experienced +300% monthly NFT trading volume, +180% monthly unique NFT traders and +131% daily active battlers
• 9 months later -> 250K unique daily active addresses, Katana becomes #2 dex by weekly active users, 5B in deposited value, 15% of all NFT transactions in 2021 happened on Ronin, 2M+ Ronin wallet downloads

Main Benefits

• Cheap & Fast transactions with quick confirmation time (2-3s)
• Ability to withdraw Axie assets back to Ethereum Mainnet using Ronin bridge
• Simplified onboarding of new users with fiat on-ramp and native wallet

Why is Ronin touted to be 'the' battle tested NFT scaling solution/

• Axie Infinity network effects are strong and growing stronger by the week
• Ronin already handles more NFT volume than all other Ethereum NFT scaling solutions combined in 2021 (more than 15% of all NFT volume on Ronin)
• Ronin bridge is the 3rd largest bridge by total volume transferred right behind Polygon and Avalanche
• Over 3B value deposited on Ronin bridge - Top 5 Ethereum bridge by TVL

Current Consensus model - POA

• Currently structured as a POA sidechain. It's an EVM compatible Ethereum fork
  1) Blocks require approval from 2/3rd of all validators in order to be approved
• Validators are responsible for authoring and validating the blocks, updating price oracles, and approving deposits and transfer of assets (ETH, ERC20, and ERC721) to and from Ronin
• Validators also control the addition and removal of other validators
• Developed on Ethereum codebase so you can use a web3 client to connect to Ronin

Future Consensus model
Decisions will be made with these principles in mind

• Scalability: Can this infra scale to support billions of users?
• Decentralization: what degree of trust is required to use & reply on this infra?
• Security: How safe is this infra for use by the Ronin community?

• Staking incentivizes RON holders to lock up their tokens and gives them more ownership of the network for this conviction
• Validators are incentivized to grow their network, which increases the value of the fees collected from their delegates

• RON stakers can choose a validator
• Validators can set a fee that they take from these delegates
• Validators receive gas fees, Dapp revenues, and staking issuance and share them with stakers pro-rata - a validator fee (commission) set by each validator

Who are these validators?

• Ronin has been live since Feb 2021 and currently secured by 13 validators
• More validators will be added in time and a list of all validators will always be up to date on https://stats.roninchain.com/

How are validators selected?

• Blockchain infrastructure experience and specifically exp running validators
• Building useful apps on top of Ronin - Validators might excel building analytical tools
• Driving adoption of Ronin's apps - Introducing our products to a new audience (partners/vendors)

• Each validator is required to stake 50,000 RON once RON DPoS is live
• If a validator fails at producing the correct blocks their RON stake is at risk of being slashed
• RON staked by the public is also at risk of being slashed so choose wisely

Key actions to be taken to decentralize Ronin even further

• Adding validators: Adding a geographically & ideologically diverse stream of validators to Ronin
• Adding new developers: a) wide range of apps for player owned economies b) Financial apps that democratize basic financial services c) Social coordination tools that ensure digital communities can build together efficiently & systemetically

Phase 1

• Add at least 10 validators outside of Sky Mavis
• At least 3 external teams building NFT games/experiences on top of Ronin

Phase 2

• Ronin is upgraded to delegated PoS with RON staking through validators
• Validators vote on contract deployment process on Ronin
• At least 5 teams building NFT games/experiences on top of Ronin
• At least 20 validators outside of Sky Mavis

• Upgrade Ronin's consensus based on breakthroughs in scalability and security research
• 100+ validators
• Fees from protocols & NFT sales outside of Axie universe sent to validators and shared with delegates

Introduction

• Ethereum's L1 was not built for gaming
• Games require fast & cheap transactions in order to handle 1000s of micro transactions
• Transactions cost $50-100 and speeds are measured in mins instead of secs
• Enter Ronin for GameFi

What is Ronin?

• An Ethereum sidechain for Axie infinity's community
• Sky Mavis decided to create a fast, reliable and cheap network
  What are sidechains?
• Ethereum compatible, independent blockchains which have their own consensus model, block parameters and run in parallel to the Ethereum mainnet
• Many L2 scaling solutions on Ethereum (E.g. Polygon, Arbitrum)

Ronin specs

• Consensus: PoA model which is reputation-based
• Limited no. of validators and more centralized currently since handpicked
• Unlike PoS blockchains, validators are staking their reputation instead of tokens
• Validators risk losing their reputation if they become bad actors or negatively affect the network
• E.g. Binance, Ubisoft and Animoca brands

Why create their own chain?

• Before Ronin, sky mavis partnered with Loom network, an alternative L2 scaling solution
• After about a year, the Loom team decided to focus on Enterprise solutions instead of user facing apps leading to misalignment of goals
• Sky Mavis decided to build their own soln to avoid such dependency in the future
• Most L2 solns today are built with DeFi and payments in mind, not gaming. So this gives Sky Mavis the opportunity to build the first L2 scaling solution dedicated for the gaming community

• Partnered with Ramp to create their own wallet to allow users to purchase Axie ecosystem tokens directly using fiat
• A custodial wallet
• Wallet enables over 300K daily active addresses to interact with the network, peaking at 1.1m in Nov 2021

• At its peak in Nov 2021, ronin processed over 560% of the total no. of transactions on Ethereum
• Block time of 3s (ETH averages 13s)
• ETH gas fees are over 50-100 gwei making micro transactions uneconomical
• Ronin offers 100 free transactions per wallet per day. In future, there will be a small fee once the $RON token is released but it will cost less than a $1

Katana

• Ronin's flagship DeX
• Swap between tokens without leaving the Ronin network
• Reduces the need to bridge assets out of the ecosystem and reduces friction when swapping between Axie's tokens
• The DeX has 2 staking pools - SLP/ETH, AXS/ETH
• Being an LP is the only way to obtain RON tokens currently

• Beside the LPs on Katana, there is a separate staking pool
• Users stake their AXS to generate yield
• Does not require to stake equivalent wETH or ETH alongside their AXS
• Estimated yield for staking is at 87% APR which does not account for compounding
• 30% of circulating supply is being staked currently (20.7M AXS)

Two ways to get Axie infinity ecosystem tokens onto the Ronin network
1) bridging ERC-20 ETH, AXS and SLP from an Ethereum wallet or 2) Transferring Ronin AXS and SLP from Binance

Note: As Ronin is a sidechain, bridging is required to get ERC-20 tokens onto the network

• Users will have to have an Eth wallet like Metamask to interface with the Ronin bridge
• Ronin bridge is the third largest bridge by total volume transferred
• Supports 2 way transfers and transactions typically take no longer than 10-15 mins to complete
• Problem: Bridging will require users to pay Eth fees to send tokens to Eth wallet. So recommendation - Use Binance to send Ronin AXS and SLP directly to and from the Ronin wallet. This is because with Binance the transactions go through the Ronin network directly (1/1116th cost)

• PoA consensus model means the n/w is relatively centralized due to its limited no. of validators and the inability of the common man to run a node
• Benefits? Ability to push out upgrades quickly and to fix any issues that might arise but goes against the ethos of the player owned game that Axie infinity is striving towards
• Progressive decentralization on the cards
• First community run validator node managed by 50 members has been launched (first step)
• Open to changing the consensus model. Evaluating zkSync etc