Months after the blockchain itself went live, the Ronin Network has finally launched its utility token, RON.
The update comes much to the surprise of many Ronin Network users and has been slowly rolling out starting back in January 27, 2022.
As a utility token, RON will soon be used as the main token for transactions within the Ronin Network which usually involves transfer of funds from other networks and wallets.
Per their litepaper, RON aims to make transactions faster, easier and more environmentally friendly, as it efficiently utilizes less compute power compared to other major cryptocurrencies.
Faster and cheaper transactions are not the only key benefits of RON, most especially to Axie Infinity players. In the future it is planned that users and asset holders within the Axie Infinity ecosystem will be able to perform transactions free of charge. A daily number of free transactions will be made available to Axie Infinity users that will utilize the Ronin Network or use RON; however the exact rules for these free daily transactions are yet to be outlined.
Aside from being used as gas fees, the team behind RON also plans to introduce reward systems such as staking.
As outlined in their litepaper, RON’s staking mechanism will be through the use of Validators. In cryptocurrency, Validators, or Verifiers, are dedicated blocks of computing power used to continuously verify transactions over the blockchain before adding them to the public ledger.
As of the time of writing, the Ronin Network has a total of 8 validators, with half of them directly managed by Sky Mavis, developers of Axie Infinity.
The RON token is trading at $2.62 at the time of writing according to data from CoinGecko, down from a high of around $3.75 at the time of launch.