16 games on one chain: where Ronin stands after the Karst upgrade

Ronin is a blockchain of its own built for games, and it is one of the few from the play-to-earn wave still running today. The network's official games overview lists 16 titles, from Axie Infinity through Pixels to Wild Forest. Since October 7 the chain has rested on a new technical footing: the Karst upgrade has brought Ethereum's latest changes across to Ronin. At the same time, holders of the RON token have something to decide for the first time.

The short answer to where the Ronin network stands: technically closer to Ethereum than ever, economically small. RON traded at around $0.069 on Sunday morning, or about €0.061, and market capitalisation, listed as market cap in price tables, stood at around $53 million. That leaves the price a good 98 percent below the peak of $4.45 in March 2024. Buying in here means buying not an established large project but a niche network with a narrowly drawn audience and a high risk of total loss.

In practical terms for investors in Germany, RON is not a standard holding that every platform carries. For buying, the project itself points to large exchanges and to decentralised venues on Ethereum. Anyone considering it should establish beforehand which venue offers the token at all and under which licence it operates in Germany; our comparison of crypto exchanges ranks providers by cost and regulation.

Where the name Ronin comes from and what the Ronin network is today

The word comes from Japanese, where it denotes a masterless samurai, a fighter without a lord. Type the term into a search engine and you land somewhere between feudal history and finance. The second is meant here: a blockchain, that is a network of computers that records ownership in a shared, continuously extended database.

This gaming chain was built by the studio Sky Mavis, originally for a single game. The large public chains were too expensive and too slow for a game with many small actions a minute, so Axie Infinity got one of its own. The network later opened up to outside developers. Today Ronin describes itself as a chain for entertaining and practical applications, and reports in its own figures a trading volume of $14.44 billion across decentralised exchanges, $4.3 billion in NFT volume and $250 million in secured value.

These figures are totals since launch, not daily values, and they come from the network itself. What they measure is what has run through the chain over the years, not how much is happening on it today. How the industry's big gaming brands have fared overall is set out in our review of Web3 gaming in 2026.

The Karst upgrade brings Ethereum's Fusaka hard fork to Ronin

Karst went live on the main net on October 7 at 16:00:01 UTC. An upgrade of this kind is called a hard fork: every computer in the network adopts new rules at the same time, and any that keep the old ones stop following the chain. That is exactly how the project described it in its announcement: nodes without an update cease to follow the chain.

In substance, Karst pulls Ethereum's Fusaka hard fork across to Ronin, meaning the latest improvements at the execution layer. For players, nothing changes. The project stated explicitly that no downtime was needed and that nobody had to do anything. Testing took place beforehand on Saigon, the project's test net, which had been running the new rules since September 2.

What is notable is what Ronin ties itself to in the process. Karst lifted the contracts on the Ethereum side to op-contracts version 7.0.0. Those are the building blocks that the Optimism project maintains for rollups. A rollup bundles many transactions and anchors the result on Ethereum. Ronin's bridge and rollup mechanics have followed these standards since then, and the network runs the same node software that other Optimism chains use.

The L2 Contract Manager replaces the detour via multisig transactions

The second change sounds technical but touches the question of power. Karst brought the L2 Contract Manager. It allows the network's core contracts to be updated in a single block. Previously that required transactions through a multisig address on Ethereum, an account that first has to gather several signatures, or changes deep in the node operators' software.

The gain is speed in maintenance and repair. The price is that an update to the core contracts takes fewer detours. To judge how solid a chain is, look closely at switches like that: who is allowed to flip them, and how many eyes are watching. The project has documented the change openly; the question of who holds the keys behind it remains hard for outsiders to verify.

16.8 million gas per transaction as the new ceiling

With Karst, a ceiling of around 16.8 million gas per transaction applies. Gas is the unit of account for effort in networks like this, and it is paid in RON. Deposits from Ethereum are exempt from the ceiling. For everyday use it plays no role: an ordinary swap on a decentralised exchange costs about 10,000 gas, according to the project, and therefore sits far below it.

The ceiling becomes noticeable in very large batch operations, for instance when a game hands out thousands of items at once. Alongside that, individual cryptographic steps became more expensive. Verifying passkey sign-ins now costs roughly twice as much, and a background operation for proofs accepts 300 pairs per call instead of 427. Developers therefore had to test their applications against the test net beforehand; users did not.

16 games, one ecosystem: Pixels, Fableborne and Yakkamon

The network's games page currently lists 16 titles. They include two Axie games, namely Atia's Legacy and Den of Mysteries, plus Pixels, Wild Forest, Lumiterra, Fableborne, The Beacon, Party Icons, Chicken Saga, Calamity, Angry Dynomites, Aquarium Quest, Last Odyssey, Moku Grand Arena and two offshoots of Ragnarok Landverse.

The project's most recent round-up of October 8 shows where the movement is. Fableborne closed its fifth season with prizes of more than 500,000 units of the in-game currency. The game Moku lets players burn NFTs from discontinued games and turn them into units in a new title, a notable route for an industry with many shut-down projects. Yakkamon counted more than 150,000 pre-registered players before launch, and its collection of 10,000 free NFT eggs reached more than 1.30 million RON in trading volume in the first few weeks. Pixels, meanwhile, is opening its technology up to its own community.

Axie Infinity itself, launched in 2018, remains the flagship. There the project now relies on community-built games using AI-assisted tools. How the associated token has developed is shown on our Axie Infinity price page; AXS and RON are two different tokens with different jobs.

RON pays gas, secures blocks and from now on counts votes

RON is the network's token. According to the project's documentation it serves three purposes: transactions are paid with it, participation runs through it, and it is deposited with validators. Validators are the computers that verify and append new blocks; they have to hold and lock RON, and they are rewarded with newly issued RON. Holders who do not run a computer themselves can assign their tokens to a validator and receive a share of the reward. That assignment is called delegating.

Maximum supply stands at one billion RON, released over 108 months, that is nine years, since January 27, 2022. Around 772 million tokens of that are in circulation, a good 77 percent. The total is split between rewards at 25 percent, community incentives at 30 percent, Sky Mavis at 30 percent and an ecosystem fund at 15 percent. That almost a third sits with the studio is a concentration worth knowing about when valuing the token.

How rewards for locking tokens work in principle, and what matters when picking a provider, is set out in our comparison of staking platforms.

The Ronin Bridge and the hack of 2022

No text about this network gets past its history. A bridge connects two chains and locks up on one side what is issued on the other. The Ronin Bridge was emptied out in March 2022. As we reported on the attack on March 30, 2022, more than $600 million was involved.

Two things count for placing it today. First, the incident is four and a half years back, and the network has renewed its bridge contracts several times since, most recently with Karst to the current Optimism standard. Second, the sum explains why secured value on the chain, at $250 million, sits well below what was there in 2021 and 2022. Trust in a bridge builds more slowly than it disappears.

ERC-721 on Ronin: the standard the in-game items follow

In-game items on Ronin are NFTs. The abbreviation stands for non-fungible tokens: unlike a unit of currency, each piece is individually distinguishable, in the way a particular game character is, with its own attributes. Technically these tokens follow the ERC-721 standard, originally developed for Ethereum, which sets out how a single digital object is managed and transferred.

Because Ronin uses the same standards, collections and tools from the Ethereum world can be carried over, and developers do not have to start from scratch. That also explains why dApps, meaning applications without a central operator, can be ported to the chain relatively easily. For owners of in-game items the most important point nevertheless stays the same: an item is worth something only as long as there is a game and a market for it.

RGP-1 sends treasury money into the RON/WETH and RON/USDC pools

In September the project announced a framework for participation. RON holders are in future to vote on economic questions and on the shared coffers, the treasury. Decisions on protocol and security stay with the validators for now. The rule is: one RON, one vote, and a proposal needs a majority of 66 percent.

The first proposal carries the code RGP-1, and the process for it was due to begin in October. In substance it is about putting funds from the treasury into two trading pairs as liquidity: RON against WETH, that is wrapped ether, and RON against USDC, a token pegged to the dollar. Both on Katana, the in-house decentralised exchange. More liquidity in a pair means larger orders move the price less. The project names as its goal deeper markets, smaller deviations in trading and additional fees for the coffers.

85,234,252 RON move from staking rewards into the treasury

Behind the vote sits a reallocation larger than the first proposal. 90 million RON from staking rewards, announced earlier, are flowing back into the ecosystem. A first tranche of 16,234,252 RON was due to go into the treasury in October, combining the portions from April, July and October, with around 2,456,748 RON deducted that had already been paid out as rewards to developers. In total, 85,234,252 RON from former staking rewards are to move into the coffers, spread over fixed quarterly instalments that run out by January 2031.

This is the point where participation and money come together. Coffers filled predictably over years, and a voting process that decides on their use, change the token's role: away from being purely a fee currency, towards a voting right over real funds. Whether holders take up that opportunity can only be judged after the first votes. Against a stock of around 772 million tokens in circulation, the October tranche amounts to a good two percent.

Ronin Stash replaces Waypoint: a wallet without a seed phrase

A wallet is the software that keeps your keys and authorises payments. The network's access account, until now Ronin Waypoint, is now called Ronin Stash. The stated purpose is an entry without a seed phrase, that is without the long sequence of words with which an account can be restored. Holders who prefer self-custody can still use a classic wallet with a seed phrase.

The convenience has a flip side. Access without recovery words shifts part of the responsibility onto the provider and its technology. For small amounts inside a game that is defensible; for larger holdings the question remains who can reach the keys if it comes to it. Which wallet types exist and where the differences lie is shown in our comparison of software wallets.

Where investors in Germany can get hold of RON

The project's documentation names several routes to RON: buying through a centralised exchange, known in the jargon as a CEX, swapping on a decentralised exchange, and earning it in a game. For the German market that means in practice that RON is not on offer at every provider, and that an exchange licensed under the European crypto regulation should be the first choice. Which providers hold that licence changes constantly and belongs in the checks before any purchase.

For tax, the usual framework for private disposals applies in Germany: a sale within a year of purchase is tax-relevant, and a swap of RON into another token also counts as a sale. Tokens earned in a game are not a tax-free side effect either. Anyone playing and trading regularly should record their transactions from the outset.

Our assessment: $53 million in market value compared with 98 percent below the high

In our editorial view, Ronin is currently a technically sound but economically marginal network. The evidence for that: the Karst upgrade ties the chain to maintained Optimism standards, 16 games are on its own list, and with 85,234,252 RON there are coffers behind it that are being voted on for the first time. Against it stands the order of magnitude. Around $53 million in market capitalisation means rank 467 among cryptocurrencies, the price sits a good 98 percent below the high of $4.45 from March 2024, and over the past seven days barely anything moved, while the month brought a gain of almost 37 percent.

What follows from that: the price depends on something that is hard to plan for, namely a game with enough pull to bring many people back onto the chain. Technology and coffers create the precondition for that but do not produce it. This is expressly not a recommendation, and a total loss is possible at this order of magnitude.

What to check before your first RON purchase

Three points are worth the effort before any money moves. First, tradability: is RON on offer at a provider with a European licence, and how expensive is trading there? Second, custody: does the token stay at the exchange, or does it move into a wallet of your own, and how is that secured? Third, the reason: a game that interests you is a different motive from the hope of a price jump, and it leads to a different amount.

Added to that is watching the coming weeks. The voting process on RGP-1 was announced for October; whether it gets going and how many holders take part will show whether participation is more than an announcement.

Ronin: after Karst, the first vote decides on liquidity

The network has tidied up its technology and is putting its coffers to a vote. What is missing is the influx. Three steps help you place the situation for yourself:

1. Settle the venue. Check where RON is tradable in Germany at all and at what cost. The exchange comparison names fees and licensing per provider.
2. Decide on custody. Decide before buying whether the token stays at the exchange or moves into a wallet of your own; our wallet comparison shows the differences.
3. Value in-game items separately. NFTs from games follow rules of their own; to trade them, start with the NFT marketplaces.

(As of October 11, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)