In a surprise move, Sky Mavis has announced that it’s going to be migrating its Ronin blockchain to become an Ethereum-backed L2.
Currently describing Ronin as a “gaming-centric Ethereum sidechain” – effectively it’s own Ethereum-compatible L1 – the move to be a “fully-fledged L2” that it hopes will become the “gamification engine of Ethereum” combines both the increasingly maturity of the Ethereum L1 itself, as well as the failure of blockchain games to onboard a mass market audience.
In this manner, Sky Mavis hopes to improve some of Ronin’s features including security, while also attracting more non-gaming apps, both of which could improve speculative sentiment around the RON token.
Indeed, Sky Mavis points to the new dynamism of the Ethereum Foundation and ETH’s price rise as it’s gained adoption from financial institutions and serious infrastructure builders.
In terms of the impact on the Ronin chain itself, the process of becoming a L2 would accelerate transactions 12-fold. It will also change the RON staking protocol to a Proof of Distribution model, which will better reward projects actively building on Ronin, rather than rewarding passive validation nodes.
Of course, this announcement is just the start of a long process that is currently being discussed with Ronin’s governing validators and which will result in a formal whitepaper prior to the execution of the hardfork of the blockchain that will be required, perhaps in Q2 2026.
Sky Mavis is also talking to primary technology partners including Optimism, Arbitrum, zySync and Polygon about its plans. It will likely also talk to companies in terms of options for providing data availability.
Finally, this change of strategy means that the plans to launch a zkEVM version of Ronin have now been scrapped.