Ronin is set to reconnect to Ethereum after four years, but RON price fell over 4% despite plans to cut inflation.
A gaming-focused blockchain Ronin Network built by one of crypto’s biggest play-to-earn studios Axie Infinity is heading back to where it started. In an X post on Wednesday, April 23, Ronin said it will reconnect to Ethereum on May 12, ending a four-year run as a standalone network.
The move comes with a full redesign. Ronin will shift into an Ethereum Layer 2 using OP Stack tech. This means the network will rely on Ethereum for security while handling transactions separately for lower costs.
Tokenomics Reset and Supply Squeeze
Beyond the network move, there’re also plans for Ronin’s RON token. Inflation is set to drop from over 20% to under 1%, meaning the rate of new token supply slows by roughly 20 times.
- At current levels that implies a shift from around $15 million in new tokens per year under the old model to roughly $700,000 after the update.
At the same time, new money flows are being redirected. The Ronin treasury is set to receive inflows from about 90 million RON allocated for staking, sequencer profits, and a larger cut of marketplace fees. The team explained:
“The vision is simple: Ronin’s Treasury should belong to RON holders. That’s why we’re also looking at learnings from recent Axie Treasury and Governance experiments to empower our ecosystem’s most devoted missionaries.”
- Originally launched in 2020, Ronin was one of crypto’s earliest breakout blockchain games.
- At the time, Ethereum was slow and expensive, which forced projects to build their own chains.
- But that tradeoff is now shifting back as Ethereum’s Layer-2 ecosystem has matured, making it cheaper to plug back into the main network.
Read also: 200 Million Transactions: Why Record Ethereum Activity Isn’t Lifting ETH’s Price
What Ronin Update Means for Gamers and RON Price
As the X post reads, there will be around 10 hours of downtime on May 12 where users “won’t be able to complete any onchain actions.” The team added that “games may be paused during this time,” reassuring that once the migration is complete, “everything will go back to normal.”
Under the hood, rewards will also be reworked.
- A new “Proof of Distribution” system will allocate RON using a scoring formula, where each project is ranked based on activity.
- In that formula, NFT volume accounts for 20.95% of the score, DEX volume 20.54%, and contract usage 16.37%.
- The higher the score, the larger the share of RON rewards a project receives.
The update didn’t really land well with the community. According to data from CoinGecko, RON price fell 4.3% to $0.093, wiping about $3 million off its market cap, now around $72 million market cap in just 24 hours.
Read more: Major Ethereum Updates 2026: Overview, Protocol Upgrades and Strategic Roadmap
