Ronin

In 2021, Sky Mavis moved Axie Infinity activity onto Ronin because Ethereum and Loom Network could not give players the speed and cost profile the game required. Land plots and Axies crossed first. Ronin was therefore born as operating infrastructure for one crowded economy, rather than as a general-purpose chain searching for its first application.

RON arrived in January 2022 as the chain's fuel. The team says it rejected a private sale. Its published one-billion allocation reserved 30% for Sky Mavis, 30% for community uses, 25% for staking rewards and 15% for an ecosystem fund. That origin makes RON different from AXS and SLP: it paid for the road on which the game assets moved.

On March 23, 2022, attackers compromised four Sky Mavis validator nodes, then used an Axie DAO proxy-signature authorization that had not been removed to obtain the fifth signature required by the bridge's 5-of-9 threshold. They withdrew 173,600 ETH plus 25.5 million USDC from the Ethereum bridge. Sky Mavis called the attack socially engineered and accepted responsibility for the small validator set. U.S. Treasury later attributed the nearly $620 million theft to North Korea's Lazarus Group.

The loss concerned Ethereum collateral backing bridged WETH and USDC, not a hidden mint function in RON. That distinction matters: balances on a fast game chain could still depend on a narrow group of off-chain signing keys at the exit. The event turned Ronin's performance shortcut into a public lesson about bridge custody.

Sky Mavis initially announced a $150 million rescue round, then said it ultimately raised $11 million and used its own balance sheet to refill the bridge. When withdrawals reopened on June 28 after three audits, the design had governors, higher signature thresholds for large transfers, circuit breakers and daily limits.

The phrase 'all users made whole' did not cover every treasury balance. The same reopening notice said 56,000 wETH assigned to the Axie DAO treasury remained undercollateralized while recovery efforts continued. That exception is part of the outcome, not a footnote to erase.

Ronin activated Delegated Proof of Stake and RON staking rewards on April 12, 2023. Governing validators remained selected institutions while standard validators competed through stake; the change widened participation beyond the earlier Proof-of-Authority model without making every role identical.

Validators later selected Chainlink CCIP as the canonical bridge by a 10-3-0 vote. The legacy bridge was deprecated and the migration completed on April 25, 2025. That choice shifted cross-chain verification to an external network and its rate limits rather than preserving the bridge rebuilt in 2022.

On May 13, 2026, Conduit completed the state migration from the sovereign chain to an OP Stack Ethereum L2. Chain ID 2020 and native RON gas remained, so users did not receive a new native token contract. Ethereum users instead have wRON, a separate ERC-20 at `0x09B6…7982` that moves through CCIP at a stated one-for-one rate.

A July follow-up reported that Season 1 had actually distributed more than 410,000 RON to builders, evidence that the new route moved beyond launch copy. The same post still described a broader community governance dashboard as forthcoming. Governing-validator role renunciation and ZK fraud proofs also remained future steps, so none is counted here as a completed ordinary-holder control right.