Ronin: The OG Gaming Chain That Survived a $620 Million North Korean Heist and Lived to Tell About It
By BCGamer —
Tags: ronin, ron, sky mavis
Before Immutable. Before BEAM. Before every VC was throwing money at "Web3 gaming infrastructure," there was Ronin. Built by five guys in Vietnam who just wanted their Pokemon knockoff to stop costing players $50 in gas fees per transaction.
This is the story of the chain that launched play-to-earn, survived the largest crypto hack in history, and somehow came out the other side still standing.
The Vietnam Origin Story
Sky Mavis was founded in 2018 in Ho Chi Minh City by five co-founders: Trung Nguyen (CEO), Aleksander Larsen (COO), Jeffrey "Jihoz" Zirlin (Growth Lead), Tu Doan, and Viet Anh Ho Sy.
Trung Nguyen, the CEO, had previously spent money playing CryptoKitties – one of the first NFT projects that famously clogged Ethereum. Instead of just complaining about it, he decided to build something better. What emerged was Axie Infinity: a game combining CryptoKitties' breeding mechanics with Pokemon-style battles.
The first battle system dropped in October 2018. The alpha launched in December 2019. But by 2021, the game was exploding in popularity – and Ethereum was absolutely not keeping up.
Gas fees were hitting $50-100 per transaction. Network congestion would halt the game's economy entirely. New players couldn't afford to start playing. This was killing everything.
Sky Mavis had a choice: wait for Ethereum to scale (LOL), or build their own solution.
They chose option B.
Building Ronin: Necessity Was the Mother of Invention
Ronin mainnet launched in February 2021 as an Ethereum sidechain purpose-built for gaming. The core innovation: nearly instant transactions with negligible fees. The kind of infrastructure you actually need when your game involves millions of micro-transactions.
The technical approach was Proof of Authority (PoA) – a consensus mechanism where trusted validators (not random miners) confirm transactions. This meant centralization, yes. But it also meant speed and cost-effectiveness.
Early validators included some heavy hitters: Google Cloud, Animoca Brands, DappRadar, and Nansen. The network was designed to handle what Axie needed: millions of daily players making countless in-game transactions.
Within months of launching on Ronin, Axie experienced a 300% increase in monthly NFT trading volume and a 131% increase in daily active battlers.
The sidechain gamble paid off.
The Play-to-Earn Explosion
What happened next was unprecedented in gaming history.
Axie Infinity became a global phenomenon, particularly in developing countries where earning $10-20 per day playing a video game was life-changing money. In the Philippines, during COVID lockdowns when traditional jobs disappeared, Axie became a legitimate source of income for entire communities.
At its peak in January 2022, Axie had 2.3 million daily players. The game had generated $1.3 billion in revenue. The AXS token hit an all-time high of $164.90. Total NFT trading volume exceeded $4 billion.
The scholarship system emerged – wealthy players lending their Axie NFTs to players who couldn't afford the entry cost, splitting earnings 70/30. Gaming guilds like Yield Guild Games were funding thousands of "scholars" across Southeast Asia.
It was weird. It was revolutionary. It was also about to get absolutely destroyed.
The $620 Million Hack
On March 23, 2022, hackers compromised the Ronin bridge.
173,600 ETH. 25.5 million USDC. Total value at the time: approximately $620 million.
It took Sky Mavis six days to notice the hack – they only discovered it when a user's 5,000 ETH withdrawal attempt failed because the funds weren't there anymore.
The attack vector? Social engineering. A fake LinkedIn job offer to a senior engineer at Sky Mavis. The attacker gained access to five of the nine validator private keys (the minimum needed to approve transactions), and drained the bridge in two transactions.
On April 14, 2022, the FBI confirmed what everyone suspected: North Korea's Lazarus Group and APT38 were responsible. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned the wallet addresses. The funds were being laundered through Tornado Cash and dozens of other mixers.
This was the largest cryptocurrency hack in history (at the time). The security model that made Ronin fast – relatively few validators – had become its fatal weakness.
The Comeback
Here's where the story gets interesting.
Sky Mavis didn't collapse. They raised $150 million in emergency funding in April 2022 specifically to reimburse affected users. Investors included Binance, Animoca Brands, and others. Combined with existing treasury funds, they made every single user whole.
Let me repeat that: they got hacked for $620 million by North Korean state hackers, and refunded everyone.
The rebuild was comprehensive:
Security Overhaul:
Expanded from 9 to 22 validators
Onboarded independent enterprise operators
Implemented zero-trust security organization
Sky Mavis now operates only 1 of 22 validators
250,000 RON minimum staking requirement for validators
Consensus Upgrade: In April 2023, Ronin shifted from Proof of Authority to Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS). Now any RON holder with enough stake can delegate to validators or become one themselves. More decentralization, better security.
Fund Recovery: By late 2022, Chainalysis and law enforcement had seized over $30 million of the stolen funds – the first time cryptocurrency stolen by North Korean hackers had ever been recovered.
Even after the hack, Sky Mavis remained – in their own words – "one of the only companies in Web3 that actually went through adversity and came out stronger."
Pixels and the Second Act
By October 2023, Ronin was on life support. Daily active users had crashed to under 20,000. The play-to-earn economy had collapsed. AXS was down 99% from its peak.
Then Pixels showed up.
Pixels is a retro-style farming game – think Farmville meets Stardew Valley, but on blockchain. It started on Polygon but migrated to Ronin in October 2023. At the time, it had about 3,000 daily active users.
By March 2024, Pixels had 750,000 daily active users. Ronin's user base grew 700% since the start of 2024, faster than both Solana and TON. The chain hit nearly 900,000 daily active wallets in February 2024.
Jeff Zirlin put it perfectly: "Some people thought crypto gaming would only take off when the industry had studio-quality video games. Instead, the top title pumping energy into the sector is a somewhat nostalgic pixelated farming game."
The "Ronin Effect" became a real thing. Games migrating to Ronin were seeing exponential growth:
Pixels: 1.7 million MAU by June 2024
Apeiron: 70,000 DAU, $74.5M staked for token launch
Kaidro: 9,999 NFTs sold out in seconds, raising $2M
Wild Forest: Successful token launch, 34,000+ holders
The Ecosystem Today
Ronin has grown well beyond Axie:
Gaming:
Pixels (farming simulation)
Apeiron (god simulation game)
Wild Forest (RTS)
Kaidro (action RPG from Apex Legends devs)
The Machines Arena (4v4 hero shooter)
Ragnarok: Monster World & Landverse (iconic IP with 68M+ historical players)
Lumiterra
Forgotten Runiverse (fantasy MMORPG)
Infrastructure:
Mavis Market (NFT marketplace)
Katana DEX (90%+ of TVL)
Ronin Bridge
Ronin Wallet (31 million downloads)
MetaLend (lending protocol)
Stats (as of late 2024/early 2025):
1+ million daily active wallets
$9.41 billion total DEX trading volume
$6.47 billion total NFT trading volume
$750 million TVL
31 million wallet downloads
22 validators with 209 million RON staked
Coming Home to Ethereum
In August 2025, Sky Mavis announced the big pivot: Ronin is migrating from a sidechain to a full Ethereum Layer 2.
The announcement was titled "Ronin's Homecoming to Ethereum."
Why now? Several reasons:
Ethereum got better. Transaction costs dropped. Speeds improved. The scaling roadmap is actually delivering.
Security. Inheriting Ethereum's security means Ronin doesn't need to pay validators as much in RON rewards. The chain becomes economically more efficient.
Institutional credibility. L2s are where the institutions are looking. Being a sidechain was a technical necessity in 2021; in 2026, it's a competitive disadvantage.
Beyond gaming. Sky Mavis wants Ronin to be "the gamification engine of Ethereum" – expanding into DeFi, payments, and consumer apps.
The migration is planned for Q1-Q2 2026, using technology from Polygon CDK (or potentially Optimism/Arbitrum). Transactions will be 12x faster. RON remains the gas token. Users don't need to hold ETH.
The broader vision: emerging markets payments starting with the Philippines, then Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand. Saving, spending, remittances – the same user base that made Axie huge, but for everyday financial services.
The Team
Sky Mavis has proven one thing: they can take a punch.
Trung Nguyen (CEO): PhD-level technical background, original CryptoKitties player who decided to build something better. Led the company through the hack, the rebuild, and the pivot.
Aleksander Larsen (COO): Norwegian co-founder who helped scale operations from a Ho Chi Minh City startup to a global operation with 250+ employees.
Jeff "Jihoz" Zirlin (Growth Lead): Yale grad who became the public face of Axie's community building. Known for his optimistic "we're going to make it" energy even during the darkest days.
The company raised $311 million total across multiple rounds:
Seed (2019): $1.5 million from Animoca Brands, Hashed, 500 Startups Vietnam
Series A (May 2021): $7.5 million led by Libertus Capital (Mark Cuban, Alexis Ohanian participated)
Series B (October 2021): $152 million led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with Accel, Paradigm, and FTX
Emergency Round (April 2022): $150 million to reimburse hack victims
Valuation hit $3 billion in 2021, making Sky Mavis Vietnam's third unicorn after VNG and VNLIFE.
In November 2024, Sky Mavis laid off 21% of its workforce (about 50 people) – not for financial reasons according to CEO Trung Nguyen, but to "sharpen focus" for the Ronin opening and emerging markets expansion.
Tokenomics
RON:
Gas token for Ronin network
Total supply: 1 billion tokens (distributed over 108 months)
ATH: $4.45 (March 2024)
Allocation: 30% Sky Mavis, 30% community incentives, 25% rewards, 15% ecosystem fund
AXS (Axie Infinity Shards):
Governance token for Axie
ATH: $164.90 (November 2021)
Current floor price for Axie NFTs: ~$0.33 (down from $700+ in 2022)
SLP (Smooth Love Potion):
The Honest Assessment
What Ronin Got Right:
Built infrastructure when no one else was doing gaming chains
Survived a nation-state level attack and refunded all users
Created the play-to-earn model that defined a cycle
Attracted external games (Pixels migration was huge)
Actually has users – not just hype metrics
Pivoting to L2 shows strategic awareness
What Went Wrong:
Initial PoA security was inadequate for the assets at stake
Axie's economic model was unsustainable (needed constant new player inflows)
Six days to detect a $620M hack is... not great
Play-to-earn became a race to the bottom
Token values collapsed 90-99% from peaks
The Real Question: Can Ronin succeed as something beyond Axie? The L2 pivot, the payments expansion, the emerging markets strategy – these are all bets that the user base and infrastructure can support more than just gaming.
The "Ronin Effect" suggests maybe yes. Games that migrate to Ronin do see growth. The user base is real. The infrastructure works.
But the ghost of play-to-earn still haunts the ecosystem. Many people's first experience with Ronin was losing money on Axie. That reputation doesn't disappear overnight.
The Bottom Line
Ronin is the OG gaming blockchain. Before the term "Web3 gaming" existed, these guys were in the trenches building it. They made mistakes. They got hacked. They watched their ecosystem collapse 90%+.
And they're still here.
The L2 migration is the right call. The emerging markets payments play makes sense given their user base. The games ecosystem is actually growing.
Will RON hit its ATH again? Will Axie ever matter again? Those are speculative questions. What's not speculative is that Ronin has proven it can survive catastrophe and adapt. In an industry where most projects die the first time something goes wrong, that counts for something.
This post is for informational purposes only. Always do your own research before investing in any cryptocurrency or blockchain project.