Sky Mavis has launched an early version of its sidechain Ronin for their popular game Axie Infinity. For the next month players and developers can test Ronin and join a bug bounty program. The sidechain will launch to mainnet later in 2021.
UPDATE – mainnet release happening later in 2021, not in January.
When Ronin gets deployed onto mainnet, all land and items will transfer from Loom Network to Ronin. After that the team wants to move over all the Axies, of which there are now more than 236 thousand spread out over 27 thousand wallet addresses.
The game studio started working on Ronin after it became clear that Ethereum wasn’t suited for the growth Axie Infinity was going through. They announced their plans in June. Gas fees and transaction speed hampered adoption of the game, and Ronin offers a solution to both. The sidechain will allow free and fast transactions for all elements in the game.
“We prefer to hand craft the user experience for our players ourselves”, the studio wrote in their statement. The Ronin sidechain is specifically made for Axie Infinity, supporting its ERC-721 digital pets, kingdom-building land gameplay, land items, small love potions and the AXS governance tokens. The sidechain solution supports the entire ecosystem.
Validators and support for Ronin
The Ronin sidechain is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant proof of authority (POA) network that’s operated by validators. Sky Mavis appoints these validators themselves. Blocks on the sidechain get approval when 2/3th of the validators agree. Over time the developers want to introduce a proof-of-stake element as well as layer-2 solutions like Zk sync and rollups. These solutions provide for example more anonymity, but they aren’t ready for NFTs just yet.
Validators are the guardians of the Axie Infinity ecosystem. They approve deposits and transfers of Axie assets to and from the Ronin sidechain. In addition they also keep an eye on each other, automatically removing faulty validators. Among the first validators are gaming giant Ubisoft, crypto exchange Binance, data website Nonfungible, gaming company Animoca Brands, and Axie familiar Sparq.
What is Axie Infinity?
Axie Infinity is a tactical battle game in which two players fight each other using a team of cute creatures called Axies. These little weird balls of joy live in a world called Lunacia, and they come in all kinds of shapes in sizes. Their characteristics influence which moves they are capable of performing. They can be damage dealers, healers, or bad ass tanks.
Axies are deadly cute, that is an undeniable truth. But Axies are not only just cute, their appearance are almost unique. It is difficult to find two look-alike Axies since their body parts have various forms and shapes. There are more than 500 Axie’s body parts. Axies’ body and parts are classified into classes including Beast, Plant, Bug, Bird, Reptile and Aquatic, and more in future release. Moreover, the parts also come with four levels of rarity, which are Common, Rare, Ultra Rare, Legendary.
It is the battle system that makes Axie Infinity stand out. Axies will take turn to fight in a 3v3 battle. The Axies fight for their own will, but to win the victory, players need to a real strategist, from wisely choosing appropriate Axies for their team to placing them at the tactical positions. Soon the team will introduce land gameplay, their AXS governance token and there’s probably a lot more waiting beyond the horizon. Axie Infinity is becoming more than just a battle game.
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Robert Hoogendoorn is a gamer and blockchain enthusiast. He got in touch with crypto in 2014, but the fire really lit in 2017. Professionally he’s a content optimization expert and worked for press agencies and video production companies, always with a focus on the video games & tech industry. He’s a content manager and creator at heart, working on Play to Earn and for a variety of third party magazines and websites.
