Sky Mavis's Ronin Network will complete its transition from an independent Ethereum sidechain to a full Ethereum Layer 2 on May 12, 2026, triggered at block number 55,577,490. The migration closes a four-year chapter that began with a North Korean state-sponsored theft of $625 million and continued through a prolonged collapse in user activity and token value. The network will be offline for approximately 10 hours, from 8am to 6pm Pacific Time, while the upgrade takes effect.

The new infrastructure runs on the OP Stack, the open-source framework developed by Optimism and used by Coinbase's Base, Sony's Soneium, Unichain, World Chain, and several other high-volume chains.

Ronin is pairing the OP Stack with EigenDA, a data availability service that lowers the cost of posting transaction data. Infrastructure partners Conduit and Boundless are also involved in the rollout. Sky Mavis had previously announced a zkEVM version of Ronin but scrapped that plan in favor of the OP Stack approach. That selection followed a competitive process in which Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, and ZKsync each submitted proposals to power the migration before Sky Mavis chose the OP Stack route.

The technical gains are substantial on paper. Block times are expected to drop to 100 to 200 milliseconds, roughly 12 times faster than the current chain. Sky Mavis has stated a long-term aspiration of reaching 1 million transactions per second, without specifying a timeline for achieving it.

Tokenomics Overhaul Accompanies the Migration

The infrastructure change arrives alongside a significant restructuring of how RON tokens flow through the network. Annual token inflation will fall from above 20 percent to under 1 percent, a shift the Ronin blog described as lower than the rate of US dollar inflation and as representing roughly 20 times fewer tokens entering circulation each year.

The team is redirecting 90 million RON tokens previously earmarked for staking rewards into a network treasury instead. Marketplace fees will rise from 0.5 percent to 1.25 percent, with that revenue also flowing to the treasury.

A new program called Proof of Distribution will replace the previous reward allocation system, which the Ronin blog and industry sources have described as historically opaque and manually administered.

Payouts will be calculated monthly using the prior four weeks of on-chain data across six weighted categories: NFT trading volume (20.95 percent), DEX volume (20.54 percent), gas spend (18.13 percent), contract interactions (16.37 percent), active users holding at least 10 RON (12.89 percent), and new users with at least 10 RON (11.12 percent).

Sky Mavis has stated it will review the weighting quarterly.

One immediate operational note for holders: all staked RON will be automatically unstaked during the migration window. Anyone staking on Ronin must manually restake after the chain comes back online.

RON Token Sitting 98% Below Its 2024 Peak

RON is trading at approximately $0.111 as of May 11, 2026, with a market cap between $86 million and $89.5 million and a 24-hour trading volume of roughly $5.6 million.

The token ranked 342nd by market cap on CoinGecko.

It sits approximately 98 percent below its March 2024 peak of $4.45 and is down about 81 percent over the past year.

The migration announcement produced a 30 to 35 percent price increase in the 30 days following the announcement.

The network's total value locked, a measure of assets held in on-chain contracts, sat around $64.6 million according to DefiLlama data from mid-2025, the most recent available figure. That represents a roughly 95 percent decline from the approximately $1.2 billion recorded before the March 2022 bridge hack, in which the Lazarus Group compromised five of Ronin's nine validator keys through social engineering and drained 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC.

The US Treasury sanctioned a wallet allegedly tied to the Lazarus Group the following month, the first time its OFAC office had ever blacklisted a crypto address on that basis.

Philippine and Emerging-Market Users Face Structural Changes

No country is more directly tied to Ronin than the Philippines.

At Axie Infinity's 2021 peak, roughly 40 percent of the game's 2.7 million daily users were Filipino, and in July 2021 the game's earnings briefly exceeded remittance inflows to the Philippines from overseas workers in Hong Kong in a single month.

Axie's daily active user count has since fallen to the tens of thousands, a sharp reversal from that 2.7 million peak.

The existing integrations that supported that player base remain in place, including a GCash partnership covering roughly 80 million users and a Coins.ph arrangement aimed at enabling PHPC stablecoin QR payments at more than 600,000 Philippine merchants.

The May 12 maintenance window runs from approximately 11pm Philippine Time on May 12 through 9am on May 13, which limits disruption during peak gaming hours but will affect late-night NFT traders on the network.

For developers in South Asia and Africa, where play-to-earn adoption was significant during the 2021 cycle, the OP Stack migration carries practical weight. In South Asia, developers in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka gain EVM composability that opens direct access to Ronin's active user base for DeFi applications that previously required a custom bridge. In Africa, Nigeria ranks second globally in Web3 gaming interest according to Chainalysis data, the continent counts more than 53 million crypto owners, and Nigerian Web3 startups raised $43 million in 2025. For studios in those markets, publishers such as Carry1st, and developers navigating regulators at Nigeria's SEC, Kenya's CMA, and South Africa's FSCA, Ethereum Layer 2 architecture presents a more recognizable compliance framework than a standalone sidechain.

Ronin will now be natively composable with other Ethereum DeFi protocols, removing the custom bridge requirement that previously isolated the chain.

The Superchain interoperability layer connecting OP Stack chains was targeted for an early 2026 rollout. If completed, it would enable direct communication between Ronin and chains like Base without external infrastructure. The current status of that rollout should be confirmed against up-to-date Optimism announcements.

The Proof of Distribution model is also relevant for smaller studios in emerging markets. Under the previous system, smaller Southeast Asian teams lacked the leverage to negotiate reward allocations with Sky Mavis. Automated, metric-based allocation makes the rules transparent, lowering a structural barrier that smaller developers previously faced when building a business case on the network.

Node operators running Ronin RPC infrastructure must upgrade to release 1.2.2 before block 55,577,490 to remain compatible with the migrated chain.

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Price and TVL figures should be verified against live CoinGecko and DefiLlama data at time of publication. TVL data cited in this article is from mid-2025. Direct named-executive quotes from Sky Mavis were not available at press time. Superchain Interoperability Layer rollout timeline should be verified against current Optimism announcements before publication.