I Was Wrong About Ronin
I'll be honest — when Pixels announced it was building on Ronin, my first reaction was skepticism. Not mild skepticism. The kind that makes you close a tab.
Because here's what you can't ignore: in March 2022, Ronin suffered one of the largest exploits in crypto history. $625 million. Gone. The kind of breach that doesn't just damage a network — it defines it. For a long time, Ronin *was* that hack in most people's minds, mine included.
So what changed?
The recovery. And I don't mean the technical patches — I mean the *character* of the recovery.
Sky Mavis didn't disappear. They didn't rebrand and pretend it never happened. They reimbursed affected users, restructured security architecture, brought in external auditors, and rebuilt — publicly, methodically, without the defensive posturing you usually see after catastrophic failures. That's genuinely rare in this space.
Here's what nobody tells you about infrastructure credibility: it isn't built during the good times. It's built in how you handle the worst ones.
Ronin today processes millions of transactions for games like Pixels with low fees, fast finality, and a gaming-native infrastructure that Ethereum mainnet simply wasn't designed to provide. The chain wasn't rebuilt despite the hack — it was hardened *because* of it.
What struck me most? Pixels chose Ronin deliberately. A project serious about onboarding millions of casual players chose the chain that learned the hardest lessons.
That's not a liability anymore. That's credibility.