Axie Infinity announced yesterday that they will be migrating their game items from Loom to their own Ethereum sidechain before the end of the year. Dubbed "Ronin", the custom sidechain will be built specifically to support Axie Infinity and the unique operations that the game requires.
Similar to the infamous CryptoKitties blockchain game, Axie Infinity is another Ethereum-based collectables game in which players purchase unique Axies, breed them, and sell them for Ether on the open marketplace. Expanding upon the original idea, the team is working to incorporate a land map and launched a landsale last year.
In order to avoid congestion on the Ethereum mainnet, shorten transaction times, and reduce gas fees, the landsale was carried out on the Loom sidechain, where user's land parcels and items are currently stored. These items are currently tradable via Axie Infinity's web marketplace that links to the Loom blockchain.
Loom is an EOS-like sidechain, originally designed to be a scaling solution for Ethereum-based games. Earlier this year however, Loom made a surprise announcement that they would withdraw from gaming to pursue blockchain solutions for storing government and health care data.
Axie community members had been speculating that the developers may migrate the game to Matic, another Ethereum sidechain that is honed in on supporting blockchain games. According to the team though, most existing Ethereum sidechains are focused on payments or decentralized exchanges and not capable of supporting the unique and complex operations that Axie Infinity requires, therefore a custom solution was necessary.
The team intends to migrate land parcels and items from Loom to Ronin before the end of the year. The game's smart contracts will also be optimized and converted over during this period.
Eventually users will have the ability to move their Axies back and forth between the Ethereum mainnet and the Ronin sidechain. The team also plans to use Ronin to simplify the onboarding process for new users, as installing and configuring an Ethereum client such as Metamask can be a challenge for beginners.
Whether or not the team will achieve a sufficient level of censorship-resistance with their new sidechain remains to be seen. The validators for the Ronin sidechain have yet to be disclosed, and it is still unknown if token holders will be have the ability to elect the block producers.
You can learn more about Axie Infinity by checking out their website, following their Twitter account, or by joining their Discord server.