Thanks to the good folks at Messari for digging into the numbers. Ronin, the blockchain built for games, made a big move in the first quarter of 2025. On February 12, it went ‘permissionless.’ Now, what does that mean? Well, before, you needed a special invite to build on Ronin. Think of it like a private club. But now, anyone can just walk in and start building. It’s like opening up the whole town square to any shopkeeper who wants to set up a stall. And boy, did they set up stalls.
- Ronin transitioned to a permissionless blockchain, allowing anyone to build on it, leading to a surge in smart contract deployments.
- OpenSea integrated with Ronin, enabling Ronin-native NFTs to be traded on a larger marketplace and generating significant trading volume.
- Despite increased activity in some areas, Ronin’s market cap and token price experienced a decline during the first quarter.
This change meant a lot more smart contracts got deployed. Before, it was just a trickle, maybe three new contracts a day. After the switch, that number shot up, over eleven hundred percent, to about thirty-five new contracts daily. It was a real burst of activity. And guess what took the lion’s share? A meme token launchpad called Tama Meme. It launched in January and accounted for more than ninety percent of those new deployments in its first twenty days. You’ve got to love the internet, don’t you? Always finding a way to make space for the silly stuff, even when serious tech is on the table.
Beyond the meme madness, big players joined the party too. OpenSea, a huge marketplace for NFTs (non-fungible tokens), integrated with Ronin in March. This meant Ronin-native NFTs could now be bought and sold there. In just the first week, Ronin collections saw over $400,000 in trading volume on OpenSea. That’s like getting your local craft fair items into a big department store. It just opens up new doors. Compound, a DeFi (decentralized finance) protocol for lending and borrowing, also launched on Ronin. Users can now earn yield or borrow against their crypto assets right there. Ronin and Compound even put up $1 million in rewards to get people started. It’s like a grand opening sale for your money.
Now, let’s talk about the money side of things. Ronin’s market cap, which is basically the total value of all its tokens out there, dropped. It went from about $725 million down to $430 million. That’s a forty percent dip. The token price followed suit, falling from $1.94 to $0.69. It’s a bit like seeing your favorite coffee shop’s stock take a hit, even if they’re still brewing up great lattes. But here’s a twist: the circulating supply of RON tokens actually went up quite a bit. This wasn’t because more tokens were suddenly printed. No, it was Ronin getting more transparent. They updated how they reported tokens that were already out there but just weren’t being tracked properly by places like CoinGecko. So, it looked like more tokens, but it was really just a clearer picture of what was already floating around.
Network activity saw a broad pullback in Q1. Daily active addresses fell thirty percent. Total transactions dropped by a third. The number of RON holders went down quite a bit too. It was a quieter time, like a sleepy Sunday afternoon on the blockchain. But not everything went down. Bridge users, those folks moving assets onto and off Ronin, actually increased by almost thirty-six percent. This means people are still bringing their crypto over, which is a good sign for future activity. Even with the overall dip, Ronin still saw days with over a million transactions. So, it wasn’t exactly empty.
The NFT marketplace volume was a mixed bag. Axie Marketplace, which is Ronin’s original NFT spot, saw its volume drop. But Mavis Market, which handles other NFTs, actually saw a small increase. This hints that people are looking beyond just Axie NFTs on Ronin. And then OpenSea came along, giving Ronin NFTs a whole new shop window to display their wares. It’s like having your art displayed in a local gallery versus a big city museum. More eyes, more potential buyers. And that $400,000 in volume in the first week? That’s a solid start.
The ecosystem kept growing with new games and projects. Sunflower Land, a popular farming game, enabled full Ronin support. Pirate Nation, another game, announced its expansion to Ronin. Ragnarok Landverse launched in March. Kuroro Beasts launched an open alpha for its Wilds game. And Fishing Frenzy, a game that migrated to Ronin in February, saw some truly wild numbers: a three hundred percent surge in daily active users, over 330,000 installs, and ten times its revenue in just two months. That’s like hitting the jackpot in a digital fishing pond, isn’t it?
Ronin also launched some big programs to help things grow. A $10 million Ecosystem Grants Program started in January, offering funds to developers. Then, in March, a $13 million growth program was announced with Alpha Growth. Plus, there was a $3 million DeFi Rewards Blitz. It’s like Ronin is handing out gift cards to get people to try out new things and build cool stuff on its network. They’re putting their money where their mouth is, hoping to spark more activity.
On the technical side, Ronin got some serious upgrades. Project Leviosa was the big one, making Ronin permissionless. Sky Mavis, the team behind Ronin, also rolled out a Developer Console, which is basically a toolkit to make it easier for people to build games and apps. They also brought in Ronin Waypoint, a neat feature that lets one address pay gas fees for other users. Think of it like someone else picking up the tab for your transaction fees. Pretty sweet, right? And Chainlink’s CCIP (Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol) was integrated. This makes moving assets between different blockchains safer and simpler, like building a super-secure bridge between two islands.
Finally, the Cerastes Hardfork happened in March. This was a big network upgrade, bringing Ronin’s tech in line with some of Ethereum’s recent changes. It also introduced a new way to handle transaction fees, where a portion of those fees gets burned. It’s like a little bit of every transaction goes into a digital bonfire, which can be good for the RON token over time. So, while the numbers might have looked a bit sleepy in Q1, Ronin was busy building a stronger, more open foundation for the future. It’s like a construction crew working hard on the building’s bones, even if the paint job isn’t quite finished yet.
