Ronin network, an Ethereum sidechain that hosts Axie Infinity and other games, is experiencing a resurgence with about 1.4 million daily active users.
That puts it in second place across all blockchains, just behind Tron’s 2.2 million daily active users, according to Token Terminal.
But the Ronin network only generated the 13th highest fee revenue of all blockchains in the past 30 days with just $200,000. So something isn’t quite adding up.
The growth in user numbers is a dramatic turnaround from last October when Ronin was practically on life support with less than 20,000 daily active users.
That’s around the time when farming simulation game Pixels ditched its birthplace Polygon and migrated to the then-dying chain.
Pixels’ arrival kickstarted the revival of the network, helping push the chain to its current heights. Jeff Zirlin, the co-founder of Ronin developer Sky Mavis, recently said in March that the network is going “parabolic and exponential,” largely due to Pixels.Today, more than half of Ronin’s wallets are in Pixels, which involves in-game items, the PIXEL cryptocurrency and nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
But are those users all legit? Pixels had almost 779,000 unique active wallets on May 20, according to DappRadar.
Data from Singapore-based blockchain forensics firm ChainArgos suggests that Pixels’ high wallet count may be influenced by widespread bot activities.
The firms says the cumulative increase of daily unique Pixel recipients is “too smooth” for it to be determined as human activity, and is likely to be bots.
The game developers admit this is a problem and have been conducting regular bans to remove accounts engaging in bot behaviors. Pixels recently announced that it had banned 750,000 accounts in a single week.
To be fair, proponents say the game has a “huge” numbers of human players too, accounting for perhaps a third of the total. And as…
..
