Ronin RON Reaches New All-Time High Following Pixels Hype

Key Takeaways

• RON reached a new all-time high price of $4.56 on March 13.
• While Ronin’s flagship game Axie Infinity has not recovered, Pixels has taken its place.
• Is the PIXEL and RON rise legitimate, or will they face the same fate as Axie Infinity?

In the landscape of cryptocurrency gaming, Ronin has recently witnessed a resurgence. This revival comes on the heels of the demise of Axie Infinity, once the crown jewel of Ronin’s gaming ecosystem.

But, amidst Axie’s fall, a new contender has emerged: Pixels, and its native token PIXEL, are spearheading Ronin’s revival with a surge its value. As this increase continues, the question arises: Will PIXEL face similar pitfalls to its predecessor, or is the resurgence genuine?

What is Ronin?

RON is the native token for the Ronin sidechain, an Ethereum scaling network focused on gaming. Ronin was extremely popular in 2022 because of its flagship game Axie Infinity.

Axie Infinity used a two-token tokenomics models, where AXS was the governance token and SLP was the utility token. Over the course of 2020 to 2022, the
circulating supply of SLP soared from a modest $45 million to a staggering $41 billion , while the token’s value plummeted from $0.06 to a mere $0.0015. This sharp devaluation had profound consequences, which became more apparent once the player base started to decrease.

Additionally, Ronin suffered a hack worth more than $600 million hack in March 2022,  speeding up its demise. At the time, Axie had more than 3 million monthly active players. This figure has now dwindled nearly tenfold to 350,000. 

The SLP mint/burn ratio  has stabilized since. In fact, more tokens have been burned than minted since the start of 2024. However, with the aforementioned decrease in the player base, the total amount of tokens burned is not significant to noticeably affect the total supply. So, even though the SLP price now trades at $0.007, the circulating supply is still at $41 billion.

RON Reaches New All-Time High

The RON price had fallen almost since its launch in January 2022, culminating with a low of $0.20 in November 2021. However, the RON price began an upward movement afterward, which accelerated after the price created a higher low in October 2023 (green icon).

After moving above $3 in January 2024, RON consolidated for a period of time before starting another upward movement that led to a new all-time high of $4.56 on March 13. The new token that could be driving the RON growth is PIXEL, the native token of Pixels, which reached its all-time high price of $1.03 on March 11.

Pixels is a farming game that supports NFT avatars and has a token-driven economy. It was initially built on Polygon but migrated to Ronin in 2023. Unlike Axie Infinity, Pixels has single-token tokenomics, with PIXEL being the only token in the gaming universe. PIXEL was distributed through an airdrop  based on the total amount of RON staked. It is worth mentioning that PIXEL faces a 53.5 million token unlock  on March 19, which amounts to 1.07% of the total supply.

On March 13, another Ronin game called Kaidro announced its inaugural mint , where users were able to mint a free NFT until March 14 at 6:00 pm PST. This could have further contributed to the ongoing RON price increase.

What’s Next After All-Time High?

The daily chart shows that RON has increased since completing an A-B-C correction in February and March. The all-time high on March 13 coincided with the 1.61 external Fib retracement of the previous drop, a potential level for a top.

However, neither the MACD nor the RSI show any signs of weakness. To the contrary, both indicators broke out from their bearish divergence trend lines (green) and are increasing.

If RON successfully clears the $4.33 resistance area, it can increase by another 30% and reach the next resistance at $5.55, created by the 2.61 external Fib level. Conversely, the closest support is at $3.60, 16% below the current price.

RON’s Comeback is Legitimate

To conclude, the RON price has recovered admirably since the downfall of Axie Infinity. The RON price is at an all-time high, facing no more horizontal resistances for potential future increases.

The comeback was greatly influenced by the rise of PIXEL, the native token of the new farming game Pixels, which could take the place of Axie Infinity as Ronin’s most popular game. Even though PIXEL faces a token unlock on March 18, the amount unlocked is not as significant as to greatly affect the supply.