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Ronin, the gaming-focused blockchain behind Axie Infinity, is migrating to an Ethereum Layer 2 on May 12, with roughly 10 hours of scheduled downtime. The upgrade will be triggered by a hard fork at block 55,577,490, expected around 15:16 UTC.
Ronin said the migration will complete its transition from an independent sidechain to an Ethereum Layer 2 built on the OP Stack. During the migration window, all Ronin activity will pause for approximately 10 hours, including transfers, swaps, NFT trades, and smart contract interactions.
Node operators on the Ronin mainnet are required to upgrade to release 1.2.2 before the hard fork.
Ronin described the move as “plugging back into the mothership,” linking the network directly to Ethereum for settlement and data availability. The upgrade replaces Ronin’s older nine-validator sidechain model with OP Stack rollup infrastructure.
Ronin’s RON token inflation is set to fall sharply under a new Proof of Distribution model, dropping from over 20% annually to below 1%. Ronin also said marketplace fees will increase from 0.5% to 1.25%.
As part of the change, 90 million RON tokens previously allocated for staking will be redirected to the Ronin treasury as marketplace fees rise.
Ronin will integrate EigenDA to manage data availability for transactions. Under the approach described by Ronin, transaction data will be stored off-chain while remaining verifiable and accessible to Ethereum.
The Layer 2 migration follows the $625 million hack Ronin suffered in March 2022, when ETH and USDC were drained from its bridge. Ronin said the incident highlighted structural risks of the sidechain model, where security depended on a small number of centrally managed validators.
Ronin’s move to an Ethereum-backed Layer 2 is intended to address those concerns by inheriting Ethereum’s security rather than relying on Ronin’s own validator set. As an earlier step, Ronin previously migrated its bridge to Chainlink’s cross-chain interoperability protocol in April 2025 ahead of the full L2 transition.
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