RON, the native token of the Ethereum-based Ronin Network, continued its recent ascent Wednesday as it popped to a nearly two-year high price of $2.89, according to data from CoinGecko. It’s up 5% on the day and 57% over the past 30 days.

Ronin, an Ethereum sidechain designed for crypto games, has seen a recent rise in users and increased momentum tied in part to the success of Pixels, a social farming game that migrated from fellow Ethereum scaler Polygon last fall. The game’s play-to-airdrop campaign, which will reward top players with PIXEL tokens, helped fuel a surge in Ronin users.

However, the latest RON pump came after a couple of notable events in the world of Axie Infinity, the NFT-based monster-battling game developer Sky Mavis originally built Ronin to support back in 2021.

On Tuesday, Sky Mavis launched its seventh in-game competitive season in Axie Infinity Origins. Dubbed “Epic Era,” Season 7 will serve up 18,900 AXS and over 13.7 million SLP in reward tokens, collectively valued at about $175,000 as of this writing.

Then, early Wednesday, a rare NFT monster from Axie Infinity sold for 105 Ethereum, or nearly $246,000 worth at the time of sale. Axie Infinity co-founder Jeff Zirlin tweeted that the particular Agamogenesis Axie NFTs originally sold for 6 ETH in 2018, back when that sum would’ve been worth approximately $3,300.

Axie Infinity saw skyrocketing success in 2021, generating billions of dollars’ worth of NFT trading volume as the game attracted millions of active players.

 NFT Revolution

What Is Ronin? The Ethereum Gaming Chain Behind 'Axie Infinity' and 'Pixels'

In the wide world of crypto, there are now many blockchains specifically designed for gaming—but Ronin was among the first to launch. Gaming blockchains are typically built to offer low transaction fees and a higher number of potential transactions, so they’re supposed to be more affordable and more scalable than blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Some gaming chains are also private, meaning that developers must gain approval from a blockchain’s creators in order to join its ecosystem. Ronin...

However, the game’s play-to-earn economy began struggling in early 2022 and the Ronin network’s bridge to Ethereum was hacked for $622 million. Sky Mavis eventually repaid affected Ronin users and has since continued to evolve the Axie ecosystem, gradually onboarding more third-party game studios to the network.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.