The Birth of an Ecosystem
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The Birth of an Ecosystem
Ronin was not built in a day
Today’s piece is a breakdown of how a gaming ecosystem can emerge from a user-governed digital economy. Sky Mavis - the firm behind Axie Infinity, was kind enough to offer inputs on how they believe the gaming ecosystem will have to make trade-offs if we are to see a 100 million users come to the industry.
We start with a look at the history of gaming, the challenges Axie Infinity and Ronin faced & the reasoning behind newer game studios moving to Ronin. Consider subscribing and sharing if you enjoyed reading it.
Hello!
It is uncommon for a venture to evolve from a simple application to a fully-fledged ecosystem within just a few years. Building an application is similar to constructing a house: you must ensure that the foundation is sturdy, that the furniture is in place, and that the house is cosy enough for its inhabitants. Building an ecosystem is closer to developing a city with many moving parts and resources. Applications and ecosystems are vastly different entities with unique unit economics and management requirements.
I first wrote about Axie Infinity in late 2020 when they were about to break out as a game, a few quarters before play to earn was even a thing. (FWIW, I don't think it is a thing anymore.) What caught my attention was a motley crew in Vietnam obsessed with users. It was diametrically opposite to the industry's focus at the time.
A year later, when they released Ronin, I was the first to cover its arrival. In January 2022, I did a somewhat flawed breakdown of the economics around the protocol and how it could evolve. The argument at the time was that Ronin was Sky Mavis' attempt at growing from being just a game. The network would not be worth much unless multiple studios were built on them. A year later, that vision is now coming to fruition.
At the end of March this year, Ronin announced that five other studios are coming to the network. I had early access to the team and their thinking for the following year. So, this is a breakdown of Ronin's goof-ups, evolution and vision for the coming year, starting with a walk down memory lane to the beginning of the gaming ecosystem.
Portability, Modularity and Value Chains
In the late 1940s, the world is emerging from a brutal war that displaced millions worldwide. Mankind is still figuring out how transistors and conductors work. One of the earliest variations of an arcade game came alive, named Bertie the Brain. It was what you could call an AI system that competed with players in tic-tac-toe.
Bertie the Brain was the first time we played against a machine on-screen. It did not have a modern consoles' success, but it was an excellent example of making the circuitry on these devices functional enough to keep a human engaged. Unfortunately for the game's creator, the circuitry was built on an additron tube - a far inferior version of the semiconductors that would dominate the market in the coming months. Bertie the Brain was taken apart and forgotten somewhere in Canada. But it had served its purpose: to prove that a machine could entertain a human for hours at a stretch, and people would pay for it. Gaming, as we know it, was born.
Well, not really. The version of gaming we are used to was born closer to 1962. Steve Rusell, a young computer engineer from MIT, was tinkering with a computer donated to the university. It was initially given to a think tank in hopes of finding some remarkable use cases for computers as a technology. Maybe they expected people to use the computer to help with the cold war.
Instead, Steve developed Spacewar — one of the earliest games to use keyboard inputs and allow multiplayer gaming. The use of the WASD buttons for movement in a game started with Spacewar. The computer used for the game cost about $120,000 in the mid-1960s, so it was not made available to the average person back then. Most early 'adopters' of the game were researchers with access to these devices at university.
Games reached the hands of the average person through local bars and arcade outlets. Atari released Pong in 1972 as a giant box with controllers and a screen attached to it. It was no longer researchers playing with one another. It was the average person hanging out at the bar competing with friends. The unit economics and social signalling of gaming had changed. Atari went on to release several coin-operated games that decade. (Their 40th employee was someone named Steve Jobs, who was found to be outsourcing work to a different guy named Wozniak.)
People still could not play games at home. Things were about to change with the arrival of the Atari 2600 in 1976. In two decades, gaming went from costing $160,000 to $199. That is close to $800 in today's prices. Enough to buy a PS5 today. But this also changed how people accessed games. Until then, games were neither portable nor switchable. Suddenly, you could buy the hardware (the console) and switch out the games. Games went from being something you played at the bar to an at-home convenience good.
The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) introduced IP such as Mario and The Legend of Zelda to the average gamer, ushering in the birth of ecosystems in gaming. Suddenly, there was a complex stack involving multiple parties in the equation. A game's value chain involves the console developer, the game developer, distribution outlets and cartridge manufacturers.
The focus shifted towards the medium as the fight to increase profit margins emerged among these players. Producing cartridges cost more than a game on a new compact disc (CD) technology. According to this paper, it could cost up to $30 between royalties and manufacturing costs to release a game on a cartridge.
The retail buyer was spending up to $98 when accounting for the wholesaler's margin and insurance costs in case the inventory didn't sell out. Even today, Nintendo's cartridge system adds to the consumer's cost of playing a game.
Sony benefitted from its existing music business. They had the supply chains to manufacture and create low-cost gaming CDs, which changed the gaming ecosystem forever. How low were the price points? Well, where Nintendo's cartridge system would have totalled $30 in costs to the user, Sony's game CDs were only $9, which went out as royalty fees. The game publisher made the same amount, but the retail user paid about $58 for the CD. This improvement in technology was a win-win for the publisher and the end consumer.
In the early 1990s, Sony and Nintendo announced a joint initiative to develop a CD-based gaming console. The two firms collaborated on it for over two years. The plan was for Nintendo to take care of the gaming side and for Sony to manufacture the CD and device. But things changed when it became evident that Sony had the ambition of launching its gaming ecosystem. Nintendo switched sides and partnered with a Dutch rival, Philips, to handle their CDs. As for Sony, the public humiliation led to the creation of what we now know as the Playstation Network.
By the late 1990s, hardware improvements and the emergence of the internet meant games could be distributed entirely digitally. Microsoft launched games like Age of Empires and, eventually, the XBOX ecosystem. Sony reduced the price of a console from $450 to $80 over five years in the late 1990s. The idea was that once a gamer was looped into an ecosystem, you could make money selling subscriptions or in-game items. Getting them “in” your platform was the equivalent of getting them “on” your chain. And much like gas wars today, there were price wars between platforms.
Console developers have routinely sold their hardware at a loss, hoping to recover money down the line. In 1998, Sega lost to Sony in a similar pricing war and booked $450 million in losses. There was a reason for this. There were more games on Sony's console. Gamers went where the best games were and stayed. The value chain became less about the medium over the 2000s (CDs vs cartridges) and more about how transactions occurred. If you remember, during the early days of games like Grand Theft Auto, you purchased the game, and that was it. Everything in it could be tried and tinkered with.
But as the cost of distribution and payments collapsed (cue Aggregation Theory), studios began tinkering with micro-transactions and digitally downloadable content, which could include expansion packs or in-game items. Along with this change, they focused on making gamers pay as often as possible.
That is, games went from being released multiple times with different IPs to experiences released once, with digital updates. In addition, the recurring payments model made it possible for games to increase revenue per game released. Consider, for instance, that of the $3.4 billion Take 2 games made in FY 2022, close to $2.1 billion came through recurrent consumer spending.
Once a company owns the means of distribution, it can dictate what portion of a developer's sale is expected to receive. Fortnite, for instance, does not operate anymore on Apple devices because they did not want to pay Apple's fees, which are some 30% of every sale. On the other hand, platform owners understood the need to loop in large troves of users to their ecosystem and keep them there.
Decades of development later, the map above became what we now know as the gaming ecosystem. Gaming became what we know today due to drastic cost reductions in storage media, distribution (the internet), and computing (Moore's law). I took you through this five-decade-long journey to show you the advances and changes needed to take gaming from a $160,000 experience to something as ubiquitous as taking your phone out and pressing a few buttons. There are a few concepts to be mindful of here.
The first is that of modularity. In simple terms, modularity is achieved when different parts designed to fulfill different functions are fit together to be a more extensive system. As I mentioned, Atari and Nintendo discovered a simple idea: Being able to swap out games meant the value of their consoles could increase. The consoles could be sold at break-even prices or even at a loss in some cases, but royalties on individual games meant continuing income streams.
Modularity would not occur unless multiple developers were building on an ecosystem. Like blockchain networks today, platforms had to compete to acquire developers who created a suite of games that made the platform worth the consumer's money. (I use the term' platform' loosely here to refer to the device a gamer would use.)
The second is that of curation. If a platform like Playstation or XBOX allowed everyone to release games, the odds are high that the gamers would find themselves lost in a sea of choices. A lot similar to DApps on L2s today. None of these is curated or optimised to taste. The implicit trust in an ecosystem drives consumers to tinker more with new products, thus increasing transactions. The problem is, it is hard to enforce curation in permissionless, completely decentralised ecosystems.
Platforms and developers play a weird tango. On the one hand, platforms are the lifeblood of all developers. They onboard users, develop consoles, ensure marketplaces are curated and market games from developers. On the other hand, unless developers are incentivised, platforms quickly become redundant. This tussle for royalty between developers and platforms has defined the gaming ecosystem over the last decade.
For instance, on desktop gaming, large studios like EA Games have broken out and released their marketplaces instead of relying on Steam for distribution. The mental heuristic to be used for how value is captured can be explained by the (flawed) stack I show below.
For most games, the base layer is the hardware used for gaming. Currently, it is a mix of mobiles, consoles and PC gaming. There is a distribution network built on top of it. In the case of mobile and console gaming, the hardware manufacturer tends to own their distribution network. This means they have a say in how much of every transaction they can command.
Above it sits developers who build an independent suite of games. They generate revenue on every transaction, passing a portion to the platform. And lastly, independent content networks are built around gaming franchises. While Twitch started with focusing exclusively on gaming, YouTube and Meta have slowly waded their way into it.
Content networks do not rely directly on platforms as a developer does. A creator could speak candidly about servers being done and neither strain relationships nor lose much of their royalties. Conversely, developers have to remain within the confines of the rules a platform develops to stay relevant. There are exceptions to this, particularly when the game has sufficient distribution outside a particular platform. Fortnite, for instance, could survive without access to Apple's user base because of the large swaths of console gamers they have. But how does this translate to Web3?
What is broken in the Web3 gaming ecosystem is this symbiotic relationship between platforms and studios. Open ecosystems like Ethereum are great for building on, but there are very few resources you can use if something terrible, like a hack, happens. Web2 studios have little incentive or reason to build on an open chain because the costs of on-chain transfers are prohibitive. This also ignores that games would have to find mechanisms to integrate wallets and sell the concept of 'digital assets' to gamers who just want to have a good time.
Asset interoperability has been one of the big promises of Web3 native gaming. The idea is that an asset in one game could be used in another. This may happen if we develop a market for these instruments as Binance did for ERC-20 tokens. But that has not happened yet at scale. For asset interoperability to happen, studios need to be willing to collaborate and use shared standards.
We do not see that happening in the immediate future. Consider, for instance, that the same studio owns Red Dead Redemption and GTA 5. But it is unlikely you can ever transfer money or assets from one of these AAA titles to the other. Studios will likely want games to stay as isolated economies that scale independently. This is partly because the growth of game economies is proportional to the time players spend within the game.
Web3 can allow markets to be created for these assets and have them settle on-chain. That is, traders may sell to USDC or ETH and buy a different asset from a different game. But assets moving between games may not happen. Because the incentives to permit that does not exist as of today.
What we have today are fragmented user bases in Web3 native games. Since the quality of the games themselves are not incredible, the pool of gamers in Web3 does not yet expand exponentially. The team at Sky Mavis has been building a fix for this situation for the past five years. They started with Axie Infinity in 2018 and scaled it to a user base with millions of users.
Last year, they launched Ronin as a stand-alone chain to support the development of a gaming ecosystem native to Web3. Their story involves a $625 million hack, millions flocking to gaming as a source of unemployment income and an NFT boom. I have been curious to learn how they build an ecosystem, and they were kind enough to share notes. Here's what I observed.
Play to Learn
Axie Infinity picked up steam in 2018 as a game that promised to combine financialisation with great gaming experiences, as the trailer here shows. (You know the startup cares about reducing burn when the voice-over is done by one of the founders). It was not the first Web3 game as such.
Other contenders were in the market, but being located in Vietnam was an advantage, and focusing on mobile first was a great strategy. It was one of the first games to reach millions of users and helped define the play-to-earn ecosystem. Several factors buoyed its success in the early days. For instance, during the pandemic, people were looking for meaningful distractions. Gaming was one of them.
For those wondering what play-to-earn is, it's a concept where users are rewarded with tokens for playing a game. Our previous post (on Airdrops) covered how applications offer tokens to bootstrap an early user base and incentivise usage. What if the same concept could be brought to games?
Axie Infinity allowed millions of users to receive their first cryptocurrency token in exchange for a few hours of play. Since there was a lot of latent interest in speculating on the price of these assets in 2021, even a few hours of gaming meant a player could earn between $20 to $50 for a day's work. A multiple of what people could earn in their regional economies.
The problem arises when millions of users flock to a product, and there isn't sufficient demand for the tokens issued on the buy side. Remember that one of the biggest criticisms of Smooth Love Potion (SLP, the token given out as earnings) was that nothing was backing it. And to a certain extent, that was true. Speculatory interest from large financial organisations buoyed the asset's price for a long time, which meant that when their interest declined, so did the potential earnings of users.
Now imagine you have spent months playing a game, recruited family members and potentially even took loans to acquire the NFTs needed to play the game. In the early days, you needed three NFTs issued by Axie Infinity to play the game and earn tokens. Those NFTs used to cost thousands of dollars during the bull run. I have broken down the economics of how it used to work here.
The problem happened when the dream fell apart. Users who looked at the game as a source of employment realised what it truly was in a very harsh lesson: It was just a game.
Axie Infinity was unique in that it was one of the first applications in crypto to reach large troves of retail users. It incentivised millions to set up wallets and be onboarded to the digital asset space. Most Layer 2s we know start with building out the infrastructure layer. In Ronin's case, things happened the other way around. The application grew to a point where it warranted the launch of an L2 where the variables could be defined to the standards of a game studio's needs. The network was launched in mid 2021 and the token went live in January 2022.
Things were off to a good start until the bridge used to transfer money to and from Ronin was hacked. Around $625 million worth of capital was lost to what is now considered hackers from North Korea. The hack was not a technical one. Rather, it involved tricking an employee with a job offer. Ronin's price tumbled from a high of around $4 to a low of $0.19 over the year.
One could argue that play-to-earn was a Ponzi scheme that collapsed, and Ronin's price crashing means there's nothing worth spending time on there. Right?
Zooming Into Trade-Offs
Well, not entirely. The bridge was back and functional within a matter of weeks. Binance joined as a lead investor in a $150-million round and the Sky Mavis team took a hit on their balance sheet to make users whole. If faith in the team's ability to make retail users whole was lost, the venture might have died entirely. Unlike degen DeFi farmers, who are comfortable with the smart-contract risks, most Ronin users were average retail users putting in a few hundred dollars at a time. Around the time of the hack, Ronin saw nearly half a million active wallets each day.
But why did Sky Mavis even bother going down the route of building a chain in the first place? The answer to that lies in something Jiho told me during one of their earliest interviews: You cannot build a startup on another startup. The plan was to use Loom Network initially as a mechanism to scale as costs for users on Ethereum surged. But there was a severe mismatch in the pace at which the Loom network became functional and the pace at which Axie Infinity was growing. The former could not meet the demands of the latter.
Owning the base chain meant studios building on Ronin could access a suite of other independently developed applications. It is the Web3 equivalent of launching a platform like XBOX. Studios can build, scale and reach users with minimal effort. From the gamer's perspective, the experience is curated as much as possible. In the case of Ronin, much of that discovery happens today on the Mavis hub, the Steam or App Store equivalent of the Ronin ecosystem.
According to internal inputs, games see upwards of 850% spikes in their DAU on being listed as a new launch on the Mavis hub.
There's a separate philosophy behind launching their chain: They can set parameters that advantage the games that build on them. Developers building on Ethereum may be unable to enforce royalties on in-game assets. This limitation is because Ethereum is a permissionless chain. Enforcing anything on-chain is impossible due to the protocol's relative decentralisation. And that is desirable for some use-cases. But maybe not as much in gaming.
Ronin's approach is that trading off decentralisation for relatively centralised governance is fine if it helps build the gaming ecosystem on the chain. This mental model may work for the gaming ecosystem for a reason: In DeFi, the crux of the product is code. Once code is deployed, you need third-party users to come in, deploy capital and use it. The more capital (or TVL) in a DeFi dapp, the higher the probable usage of the product because users have the liquidity to loan or trade-in size.
However, for creative game goods, the product's core is not code alone. To iterate and improve a game, creators (or developers) must control the narrative, flow of users and in-game economies. Trading the ability to do that for decentralisation theatrics and composability would leave us with where Web3 games are today. If Playstation or Xbox had launched in a completely decentralised manner, they'd never have become useable home consoles. This "tyranny" of decentralisation across all applications, regardless of use cases, has likely hampered the ecosystem's growth.
There is a middle ground between being user-governed and centralisation. That is what Ronin is shooting for. If they didn't have traction on Axie Infinity, they'd be just another enterprise chain among many alternatives with no traction. What makes Ronin, the chain itself, stand out today is that the team released it behind one of the very few applications in Web3 that can claim a user base of millions.
Over time, that attention and capital liquidity from millions of users has translated into a thriving ecosystem that can be funnelled to a mix of applications across Ronin’s ecosystem.
What does that look like? Well, I tried to map it out much as I did previously with the Web2 gaming ecosystem. At the base is the hardware used to interact with the consensus layer. Currently, mobile devices dominate that side of gaming. There were attempts to develop a few native Web3 mobile devices, but they have not yet found substantial PMF. I start with hardware because, much like XBOX and PS5 made gaming a plug-and-play experience, better solutions will be needed than Metamask and Ledger's hardware wallets for the average gamer to interact with the ecosystem today.
A layer above sits the consensus layer. I have mentioned Ronin here as it is what we are covering today, but any general-purpose blockchain like Polygon, Solana or Avalanche could fit the bill. The things that lie on top of that consensus layer make Ronin an "ecosystem" for gaming instead of an alternative chain. Firstly, gamers discover new games & experiences through the Mavis hub. It becomes the curated outlet where vetted applications can be found by gamers looking for an alternative.
Remember when I mentioned Ronin is comfortable sacrificing decentralisation theatrics for optimal user experience? It applies to the application layer too. Where most EVM-compatible chains rely on MetaMask, Ronin has its own wallet. A thriving ecosystem of applications has been released to help guild managers transfer tokens, offer loans, or exchange one token for another. They have even ensured the on-ramp experience gamers have is taken care of. Sky Mavis has curated and onboarded external businesses that are the best at what they do. Last week, they onboarded five new games to the mix.
Some 2,500 content creators cover the Ronin ecosystem today. The Discord for Axie Infinity is the sixth largest in the world, with 660k members. Ronin's mobile wallet alone sees some ~556k users every month. The wallet differs from what we are used to with MetaMask as it allows social logins while being non-custodial.
Developers from the Web2 world are keen on working with a studio that has managed a game in the industry for years. They generally look for low-cost transactions managed at a high enough frequency (TPS) without the possibility of a complete loss of funds. Ronin fits well in that Venn diagram (especially since the launch of DPoS, which makes cheating more difficult). There is one more moat Ronin can claim, and it is the fact that it has one of the most extensive gaming-centric userbases in crypto today.
This matters because if your chain is predominantly yielded farmers or leveraged traders, the odds are low that they would care about a new game launching on-chain. Being listed on Mavis Hub becomes a powerful mechanism for discovery, and only games built on Ronin are listed there today.
The challenge with this model is that it may not scale. Sky Mavis understands this well. I asked them about their KPI for a new game, and Bailey from their strategy team said, “Our focus is on finding games their first 1000 core users. True believers play the game long enough to help developers gather data to see what works and what fails.”Instead of optimising for the count of dapps, they examine gamers' engagement for the few gamers they support.
Naturally, a risk exists that Sky Mavis eventually becomes the gatekeeper on Ronin, an argument as good as believing Amazon is a gatekeeper on AWS. If the chain is to accrue value, it must enable as many transactions and users as possible. And the best way to do that is to empower many great developers to build and go to market faster. Ethereum's great advantage during DeFi summer was the network effect of each new DeFi protocol built on it.
You could borrow from Aave and deploy directly into a yield farm on the same chain. Developers were incentivised to build on Ethereum because that's where the liquidity was. If the same happens on Ronin, developers would have to be incentivised to build on the network because that's where the users are.
But let's not outpace ourselves. These things don't happen overnight. The table below shows how long it took for Ronin to reach where the network is today.
Much like the gaming ecosystem took five decades of improvements in technology and network evolution, Web3 native gaming would take years to materialise. However, we have application-specific chains with years of know-how in developing ecosystems instead of having general-purpose chains where users and developers are expected to navigate. The developer tooling and understanding needed to bootstrap a Web3 native game will be far more readily available than it was in the past few years.
This collapse in the number of resources a developer needs to ship a user-owned and governed game will hopefully drive a shift in the gaming ecosystem. Think of it as the difference between figuring out how to launch a rocket to get a satellite in the sky—and solely obsessing about how to build satellites.
Ronin, takes care of the proverbial rocket in this instance.
Ronin’s genius is in bringing together this use-case-specific bundle of tools. Where most other protocols see themselves as general-purpose, open-access networks, Ronin thinks the way to push things forward is by curation & scaling of a handful of smaller players. Will it work? Only time could reveal that.
But for now, I could verify that multiple gaming studios have a good incentive to work with Ronin. Because they take the burden of handling infrastructure, designing token economies & driving users on-chain from studios. So that developers can focus on games instead of keeping up with the latest drama on Twitter.
The moat Ronin has will come from commoditising Sky Mavis's learnings from five years of operations and offering it to a curated subset of studios. I think, that is a defensible moat as things stand today.
Motives and Reality
Virtual Society by Herman Narula is one of the most profound books on gaming I have read in the past few years. Narula argues that role-playing and myth-believing are crucial to humans and that we have believed in myth and lore because living in imagined worlds is innate. The guy painting bulls in caves from millennia ago and the one playing on his mobile on the subway ride home is engaging in the same activity. In meaningful distraction. In play.
A beautiful excerpt from the book goes…
Virtual worlds change the real world in ways that we cannot really predict when we create them. All that we can reasonably predict, in fact, is that those other worlds will in fact change our own given sufficient time and depth of belief.
You could even say that we create these worlds precisely so that they will change our own. If over the course of history we have done this subconsciously, in our digital future we will do so with intent, creating virtual worlds rich with experiences and meaning in order to put them in conversation with our own world and realize value from the ensuing changes.
This bilateral value exchange among the worlds in a set is what makes those worlds a metaverse.
The importance of gaming will increase in the decades to come because gaming is one of the few activities we partake in without negative emotions. Unlike social media, gaming does not require you to be heavily opinionated or consume content that makes you feel like you are missing out. Games give people an escape when they cannot find one. The metaverse may be a distant concept, but games are real and here, available for anyone to escape into at the click of a button.
The big 'failure' in the Web3 native gaming experience was its emphasis on financialisation before considering fun. Nobody wants to spend thousands of dollars on a game that is not fun to play. But reel in users and give them beautiful graphics, an elegant storyline, and a community where they can rank themselves. Now you have people wanting to express themselves through virtual assets.
You cannot have an economy without people in it. The problem with Web3 gaming is that we drove away the people and over-engineered economies.
It makes sense that most VCs in Web3 gaming have likely not played a game in the past decade. It is akin to investing in crypto without ever setting up a wallet. The latter seems like a dumb idea. Conversely, the former is a frequent occurrence. Finance and games haven't been the best of friends. In the early days of Diablo III in 2012, Blizzard introduced an auction house that allowed players to buy and sell game items. It created an imbalance in the game's economy and resulted in a massive community outcry. Blizzard completely removed the auction house from the game in 2014. You could observe similar outrage when Ubisoft tried releasing NFTs for their flagship Ghost Recon series.
Bringing elements of trading or finance to games without an obsession with the storyline and gaming experience is seen as scammy.
To expect one to trade items without a great game surrounding it is like visiting a restaurant and being told to trade the spices and protein that make up a good meal. You visit restaurants for food, much like you play games for fun. It has become painfully apparent that focusing on the current market of Web3 users alone will not onboard 100 million gamers to the ecosystem. To do that, you need to help a generation of builders from Web2 shift to a crypto-native way of operating.
In our view, that is the gap being addressed by Ronin. Naturally, it comes with trade-offs. The network is very much in the decentralisation process. In-network assets are not entirely user-owned or censorship-resistant yet. But the bet is you don't need those attributes on a fully decentralised chain yet. Ronin is building towards the middle ground. Will that attempt be futile?
I don't quite know. What I can observe so far is the continuity in their efforts. And those efforts are adding something meaningful. Sky Mavis built a culture around gaming on-chain, where none existed. At the very least, that commands respect.
Signing off to play games all weekend,
Joel John
P.s - If you are building for the Web3 gaming ecosystem, please reach out to joel@decentralised.co. I have a thousand hours of gaming clocked on Steam. And an obsession with Red Dead Redemption 2.
Saurabh co-authored this piece. Give him a follow on Twitter here.
Disclosures
None of this is financial advice. You should not take financial advice from a blog called “decentralised.co” which hosts itself on Substack.
Tokens are high-volatility instruments. Do not invest anything you cannot afford to lose. None of this is a solicitation to invest in the token or its future price performance.
Members that have worked on this piece hold exposure to Ronin. We have a no-trade policy of seven days post-publishing.
The blog holds exposure to Web3 native games & continues to build a portfolio in the sector focusing on emerging markets.
There were no commercial agreements between Sky Mavis and Decentralised.co for writing this piece. It is not sponsored. Members of Sky Mavis had access to the piece before publishing but did not influence what was written.
Acknowledgements
This piece would not have been possible without an abundance of help from several people that contributed proactively.
Shelly from Footprint Analytics for handing us data on Ronin. Make sure to check their product here.
Nelson from Nansen for a timely export from their dashboard.
Bailey, Quinn and Nix for inputs from the Sky Mavis side
Aleks and Jiho for building Sky Mavis and offering us an inside look at how they are building Ronin.
Developers deploying games on the Ronin ecosystem who sent us extensive voice notes explaining why they moved to the chain.
The broader community around Axie Infinity & Ronin.
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