Key Points

• The Ronin Name Service (RNS) public sale will take place on November 15th at 10am ICT! Soon, you’ll be able to secure your .ron name and pay with $RON.
• Read more about pricing for Regular Names, Protected Names, and High-Value Names below. During the public sale, we’ll also host an auction for some High-Value Names in the following special collections: bushido, gaming, animals, four digits. More details coming soon! Sales of RNS names will contribute to the Ronin Treasury. 
• We’ve shared a few of the lessons we’ve learned from Ethereum Name Service (ENS) below, and how we’ve applied them to RNS.

On November 15th, the RNS public sale will go LIVE at 10am ICT! Web3 users and gamers around the world will soon have the opportunity to secure their own .ron names. RNS is more than a naming system: it will be the pillar of your Ronin identity across our games, dapps, and more. There are 11M Ronin addresses, and soon many will have unique, human-readable names. What will yours be?

What is RNS?

RNS translates long strings of characters into simpler names – like ENS. However, you’ll see that RNS names use a .ron suffix instead of a .eth suffix. 

Today, RNS works with the Ronin Wallet, Ronin Explorer, Mavis Market, App.Axie, Sky Mavis Account Service – with Origins and Homeland coming next. We have plans to make our integration docs public and work with partners to integrate RNS in what they’re building on Ronin. Our vision for RNS is a naming service that works everywhere you need it to on Ronin.

Ronin is a blockchain built for gamers, by gamers. So, we’re building RNS to meet the needs of those gamers! If the Ronin wallet is a gamer’s digital boarding pass into our ecosystem, RNS is the name stamped at the top. We envision RNS integrations everywhere throughout the Ronin ecosystem, from Axie to the Ronin wallet to partner games and more. RNS will make it easier than ever to onboard millions of people.

Onboarding onto Ronin, one RNS at a time

Imagine helping a friend or family member play Axie for the first time. They need some funds to buy an axie team, so they pull their phone out of their pocket and click the Ronin Wallet app with their thumb. “Hey,” they ask, “can you send me some extra WETH so I can buy this really cool Reptile axie?” You say yes, ask them for their address, but they realize it’s a complicated string of characters. “This would be so much easier if I could just use my gamertag, you know?” Yes, we know. Your friend needs an RNS!

Or, think about forming a Pixels.xyz guild with players from around the world. In your group chat, your guild decides they want to host a friendly esports tournament in Terra Villa. Whoever can earn the most $BERRY in 24 hours gets to keep 100% of everyone’s earnings. At the end, everyone grumbles as they transfer their $BERRY to the winner’s address. Here’s the catch: the addresses all look the same! You’re a bit worried that you’ll send your hard-earned $BERRY to the wrong address. Wouldn’t it be easier if members of your guild had their own clear and identifiable RNS names?

After November 15th, every user’s Ronin address will be nameable.

How to Secure your .ron Name

On November 15th, the Ronin Name Service (RNS) public sale will go LIVE at 10am ICT. Choose a name, pay with RON, and start using it right away! 30% of every RNS sale goes to the Ronin Treasury, which means the RON token accrues value from gas fees, staking rewards, ownership of the Katana DeX’s 0.05% fee, Mavis Market’s 0.5% fee – and now RNS sales! There are three types of RNS names: Regular Names, High-Value Names, and Protected Names. Here’s how their pricing works:

There is a fourth category of Blacklisted names, but these are unavailable for purchase and therefore cannot be priced. We will share a contact form for protected name inquiries after the public sale is live. 

Regular Names

Regular names are RNS names that are neither High-Value nor Protected. Users will pay a fixed, annual fee to maintain ownership of their names. There is no Reservation Fee for these names, and they are available on a first-come, first served basis following the public sale on November 15th.

High-Value Names and the Reservation Fee

We define a High-Value name as one with terms related to Web3 gaming, short English words, or a high-price on other chains. For example, gamefi.ron, angel.ron, and 12345.ron are all High-Value names. We will auction these names to the highest bidder over time to generate revenue for RNS. This definition is important because it determines whether we apply the Reservation Fee to a particular name or not. Here’s how that fee works:

On other chains, we’ve seen speculation around the monetary value of human-readable names cause harm to the name service ecosystem. In essence, speculators may hoard names with the sole purpose of selling them at a higher price than they paid. That makes it hard for users to acquire the name they want at a reasonable price.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a demand-based fee system to solve those problems. We’ve adopted that fee system with RNS with one important difference: we only apply a similar demand-based fee system for our predefined list of High-Value names. This allows us to discourage unhealthy speculators without any effects on the users seeking to register regular names such as their personal names or nicknames.

Again, the purpose of the Reservation Fee is to discourage speculative hoarding of High-Value RNS names. Here’s how we apply that fee:

• The owner of a high-value name pays 15% of the domain price (on top of the fixed fee)
• The domain price remains fixed unless 1) the domain is sold at a higher price or 2) someone makes a valid offer to purchase the domain name
• If the domain price does not increase for 3 months, it decays by 5%.

Protected Names

Protected names are RNS names we’ve reserved for trademark branches, our partners, and key community members. These individuals or organizations can reach out to Sky Mavis to secure these protected names. This proactive measure remains in effect even if these parties have no immediate plans to use RNS. Our commitment to safeguarding their identities is unwavering, serving as a robust defense against any potential misuse or malicious activities conducted under their names.

Users of these names will pay a fixed, annual fee to maintain ownership of their names. However, it’s important to note that we prohibit the trading of all protected names. In adherence to this policy, any protected name will lose its status as a protected name if its owner attempts to sell it. In this case, the name would then become a regular name. 

Inspiration from ENS

ENS is a popular naming system for addresses on the Ethereum blockchain. It turns long strings of alphanumeric characters into shorter, human-readable names on Ethereum. For example, the first-ever ENS name turned 0x0904Dac3347eA47d208F3Fd67402D039a3b99859 into rilxxlir.eth in 2017. Today, there are over 2.5M active ENS names belonging to 745K+ owners! 

In 2017, the ENS team understood the risk speculators and squatters presented to their naming system. Speculators might choose to hoard or trade names that were in demand instead of using them for their intended purpose “to serve as a public good for the most people.” The ENS DAO implemented a sealed-bid auction system to solve this problem, and later transitioned to an instant registration model with an annual fee. The RNS Reservation Fee builds on this idea with the purpose of deterring speculative squatting.

Final Thoughts

Over the past few weeks on Ronin, years of work have started to bear fruit and attract the world’s attention. Pixels’ viral growth showed builders that Ronin is a great place to build Web3 games. ZOIDS’s migration confirmed what we already knew: established brands trust Ronin as the foundation for their communities. On November 15th, we’re taking an important step with the RNS public sale. Gamers will soon have the ability to name their addresses and claim a gamertag in our ecosystem – and this is just the beginning.