This guide will help you buy RON token of Ronin sidechain. Ronin is an Ethereum scaling solution (Layer-2 on Ethereum) that has helped Axie Infinity grow from 1000 users to 2 million users in a year.
Tldr – RON is flying under the radar because it is not yet transferrable and there is no market price. But you can buy RON perpetuals on FTX. It has higher TVL and more users than all of Polygon/Matic, the most valuable Ethereum L2 today but is trading at a fraction of its price. If you are already farming RON and want to hedge, sell RON PERPs via FTX.
Update – RON token is now released! Read more about it on the announcement post.
What is Ronin Sidechain / Ethereum L2?
Sky Mavis, the developer behind Axie Infinity built Ronin as an Ethereum sidechain to help scale Axie Infinity, the most valuable NFT game in existence today. In fact, Axie Infinity has been so successful that its marketcap rivals some of the largest names in traditional game studio world.
The below comparison is from Messari.
The Axie team built Ronin because it was all too aware of how Ethereum’s scaling issues can kill a nascent game economy like Axie. Today, Ronin is one of the most successful scaling solutions on Ethereum.
Not many know this, but Ronin has the highest TVL locked into any Ethereum bridge to date at $6 billion. This is higher than some other better known scaling solutions like Matic (Polygon). You can run or modify this Dune Analytics query to see the results.
The best thing for investors is that Ronin and RON token have gone under the radar so far because RON is not transferrable yet. Once it is released, you will see a lot more interest from crypto investors in owning a piece of the largest scaling solution on Ethereum today with both highest bridge TVL as well as highest number of unique wallets (over 100k+).
Therefore, if you think Ronin is undervalued based on usage and TVL metrics, you can buy RON token.
This graph from CryptoSlam showing blockchains by NFT sales volume should tell you everything you need to know about usage and volume. Sales volume is harder to fake than users (users are Sybil attacked with ease as creating new blockchain addresses is free). Ronin only trails Ethereum mainnet in terms of total traded volume, and is miles ahead of Polygon, the nearest Ethereum L2 competitor (ahead by over 10x).
What is RON Token?
RON is the native token of the Ronin sidechain. This is similar to how MATIC is the native token of the Polygon sidechain. In the future, all transaction fees on Ronin will be payable via RON, so RON is used as gas on Ronin.
The team will likely reserve some RON for yield farming and liquidity incentives purposes which can further increase the TVL on Ronin. Currently, 10% of RON is emitted for AXS/ETH and SLP/ETH LP stakers on the native DEX called Katana.
If you are bullish on the Ronin sidechain, then you should buy RON which is expected to become more valuable as usage of Ronin increases.
Future of Ronin and RON
Here is where this gets so much more interesting. Today, Axie Infinity is the only game on Ronin sidechain and all contracts are whitelisted and deployed only by the Sky Mavis team. They are taking a slow and steady approach. There is a native DEX Katana and the contracts to stake AXS and LP tokens like AXS/ETH and SLP/ETH. Then there are some claim contracts and that’s pretty much it.
However, as we have seen with all kinds of new blockchains or L2s, this is just the beginning. Once Ronin opens up to developers, there will be a whole host of DeFi applications and contracts built on top of Ronin.
The big advantage that Ronin has is in terms of installed wallets. Over 2 million people have downloaded and installed the Ronin wallet. This is very important because if you are just starting to build an NFT game, why would you not build on an ecosystem with millions of users and installed base already? Ronin can become the most used NFT gaming sidechain.
How to Buy Ronin’s RON Token
RON is currently released and listed on Ronin’s native Decentralized Exchange (DEX) Katana.
You can also farm for RON on Katana via AXS/ETH and SLP/ETH LP (liquidity provider) tokens and now also with RON/ETH LP tokens. From Feb 3 to Dec 31 2022, this the reward structure for farming RON on Katana:
- AXS/ETH daily rewards: 24,169.18 RON
- SLP/ETH daily rewards: 132,930.51 RON
- RON/ETH daily rewards: 84,592.15 RON