Sky Mavis removing free Ronin gas, suggests devs now cover the costs

Sky Mavis will cease offering free gas fees for Ronin wallet users. Instead, it’s introducing sponsored gas fees via its new Ronin Waypoint tech.

In effect from 9th October, the new feature enables thirdparty game studios on Ronin to sponsor users’ transactions. These will require two signatures, one from the user and one from the sponsor.

One pain point Sky Mavis hopes this will solve is onboarding. New users often start with an empty wallet, unable to pay gas fees or estimate how much RON is needed when getting started. 

So far, Sky Mavis has been subsidising a certain number of transactions for new wallet users, as well as for Axie and Axie Land NFT holders. Replacing the old service with Ronin Waypoint’s sponsored transactions will be “more extensible to other parties who want to sponsor users’ gas and requires less maintenance going forward,” Sky Mavis says.

Taking Ronin’s ecosystem growth over the last 18 months into account, letting thirdparty game studios pay their players’ gas fees makes sense. Previously, Sky Mavis’ native Axie games were the only ones deployed on Ronin, whereas now the network officially has around 20 external game developers building on Ronin, including one of the most popular web3 titles Pixels. Currently, the blockchain has a total of 28 million lifetime user wallets and 974 million transactions.

However, the change isn’t free. Shutting down the old service means users have to pay around 0.01 RON ($0.02) in gas for every non-sponsored transaction. To make the transition less painful, Sky Mavis will still offer five initial sponsored transactions for all new Ronin Waypoint users.