Gaming Tokens Plunge as Bitcoin Nears $40K—But Ronin Is On Fire

The cryptocurrency market is in the red Monday with Bitcoin slipping closer and closer to $40,000, and the largest gaming tokens have fallen harder than the average coin. However, the Ronin network’s RON token is still enjoying a hot streak thanks to a weekend surge that pushed it near a two-year high.

Ronin is up 34% over the last week to a current price of $2.32, according to data from CoinGecko, pushing RON into the top 100 cryptocurrencies. It jumped as high as $2.52 on Sunday—the highest price seen for the token since February 2022.

The Ethereum sidechain network is designed for games and was originally launched for Axie Infinity in 2021, fueling the monster-battling game’s surge as the play-to-earn experience generated billions of dollars of NFT trading volume that year.

Developer Sky Mavis has gradually onboarded additional developers, and found a hit with Pixels, a game that migrated to Ronin from Ethereum sidechain Polygon late last year. Amid interest in the game and excitement around its play-to-airdrop campaigns, Ronin saw a surge in daily active wallets.

Pixels ended its final play-to-airdrop campaign on Friday ahead of the upcoming PIXEL token launch, though the game will offer further in-game earning opportunities in the future. However, another Ronin game—Apeiron, a card-driven riff on the “god game” genre—just launched its own airdrop campaign last week.

RON has jumped 325% over the last year, per CoinGecko. But amid the down market, it has fallen about 3% over the past 24 hours, matching the market average during that span.

Most gaming tokens have seen sharper drops during the span. Immutable’s IMX token is down 8% today to $1.80, while Beam (BEAM) and Gala Games (GALA) are both down about 7%. Axie Infinity’s own AXS governance token is down over 5% today, while the in-game SLP reward token is down 6%.