Sky Mavis Makes Ronin Gaming Blockchain Permissionless

Sky Mavis, the studio behind one of blockchain’s biggest games, Axie Infinity, has opened its Ronin blockchain to all developers, moving from a permissioned blockchain model to a permissionless one.

The goal is for the new Open Ronin to go beyond just bringing new game developers onto the blockchain. It also seeks to move beyond its gaming roots by adding DApps and decentralized finance (DeFi) onto the chain.

“We have just submitted a transaction to break down the allowlist for deploying contracts on Ronin. From this moment forward, Ronin is open,” Ronin said on X.

“As our success has started to snowball, the amount of work it’s taken to maintain exclusivity has increased,” Ronin said in a January blog post. “It’s becoming more likely that we’ll miss promising developers.”

Recent additions to Ronin include prediction market Forkast and Rumble Kong League, a Web3 mobile basketball game backed by Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry, which migrated to Ronin last month. It also added Tama Meme, a memecoin launchpad.

Having a permissioned chain limited innovation and led to slower ecosystem growth, Ronin said.

Flagging Users

The move comes as Ronin looks to reverse a big drop in daily active users, which grew dramatically in the first half of last year, peaking in July at more than two million. Since then, usage has dropped off substantially, according to Dune Analytics. On Feb. 11, there were just under 570,000 daily active users.

Still, it has 1.75 million monthly active users. The network’s total value locked (TVL) is nearly $100 million, and bridged TVL is $626 million, according to DeFiLlama.

Meanwhile, the RON token is up 18% in the past week. It has been in a protracted downtrend, dropping 70% from a high of $4.42 in March 2024 to $1.24 on February 12.