Yesterday, Ronin made what could be their most significant announcement of the year, transitioning to a permissionless model. Until now, the team controlled who could deploy smart contracts on Ronin via an allowlist. Only approved entities could sell NFTs, create staking contracts, or mint their own tokens. As a result, the ecosystem until today was entirely comprised of their partnered games, a single NFT marketplace, and a DEX to complement it. That allowlist has now been deprecated. With 31M transactions executed by 1.7M addresses over the last month, this memo will investigate the broader market implications for consumer apps looking for a home and competing infrastructure layers.

Origins: The Permissioned Era

Under its permissioned framework, Ronin maintained complete control over who could tap into their community. This approach served multiple strategic functions:

• Quality Control: The team could evaluate games based on their alignment with audience preferences and quality standards
• Liquidity Management: Careful control over player base distribution prevented excessive dilution of their time and capital
• Resource Allocation: Direct support could be concentrated on key strategic partners

The system demonstrated early signs of success shortly after the Pixels migration, which proved Ronin’s ability to support growth beyond the core Axie ecosystem (and was instrumental in securing a Binance listing for both PIXEL and RON in early 2024). Although comprised of bots, their peak daily unique active wallet