Axie Infinity has been running its full economy in Ronin sidechain for the past 30 days and it’s delivering the results the creators had hoped for. Ronin is a custom sidechain tailored to the needs of Axie Infinity and its community. Ronin allows all Axie Infinity users to trade, buy or sell NFTs without paying any gas fees.
Sky Mavis, the developers of Axie Infinity, also built Ronin sidechain. They hit massive success being one of the first games to use the play-to-earn model.
Let the numbers do the talking
The 500% growth in transactions makes Axie Infinity the fourth biggest NFT Marketplace, ahead of Rarible at fifth. DappRadar recorded 114,368 NFTs sold with fiat value of $30.63 million. The other players ahead of Axie Infinity are Opensea, CryptoPunks and NBA’s Top Shot.
Axie Infinity now gasless thanks to Ronin Sidechain
The Ethereum gas fees have been very high resulting in reduced onchain activities especially for games. Imagine, why will players acquire a game item valued at $5 then pay gas fees 3x the value of the item? Sky Mavis solves the gas fee problem on Ethereum by moving the entire economy of Axie Infinity over to Ronin.
Ronin is an Ethereum sidechain designed specifically for the Axie Infinity community. The sidechain is compatible with everything Ethereum has to offer, but instead, it runs with the support of validators. Therefore, users don’t need to pay any gas fees when using the sidechain.
Axie Infinity is a tactical battle game in which two players fight each other using a team of Axies. Players receive ‘small love potions’ when they win. SLP is the in-game currency of Axie Infinity. Players can spend their SLPs to breed Axies.
Prior to Ronin, players needed to pay gas fees when they bought their first few Axies. Breeding Axies and growing them from egg to adult also costs gas fees. As such, these gas fees stack upon each other and increase the overall price of Axies. Ronin blockchain eliminated these costs which led to the meteoric rise of transaction volume.
More about Ronin Side Chain
Let’s breeze through the technology a bit. Ronin sidechains are emerging mechanisms that allow digital assets from one blockchain to be securely used in another blockchain. Then, these assets can be moved back to the original blockchain when needed.
Ronin currently supports Smooth Love Potions, the AXS governance token and Wrapped Ether. Using the Axie Infinity dashboard, users can move their ETH over from the Ethereum blockchain to a Ronin wallet. Here, it becomes Wrapped Ether or WETH. WETH has the exact same value as ETH. Users can easily move their WETH from Ronin back to the Ethereum mainnet.
In January 2020 an average of 523 people played Axie Infinity and by December that weekly average increased to more than 23,000. Axie Infinity is doing things right. First, they focused on user acquisition through the play-to-earn model. Now, they are moving to the scaling phase with the right technology in place. The NFT gaming world is eagerly waiting for its next move.
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