The Ronin Treasury plans to buy back more than $4 million worth of RON tokens from the open market in an effort to reduce circulating supply and potentially boost prices.
In an announcement on Sunday, the gaming-focused Ronin Network said it will begin swapping all of its Ether and USDC holdings for RON starting Sept. 29, with the process taking place over the course of a month.
By reducing the number of tokens in circulation, the buyback will both strengthen the treasury’s holdings and potentially increase demand. Currently, 693 million of Ronin’s total 1 billion tokens are in circulation, giving the network a market capitalization of $355.7 million.
According to the team, the program is designed to “further align our ecosystem, tokenholders, and builders as Ronin evolves into a full-fledged layer-2,” while also supporting growth “as the rest of the world comes back to Web3 gaming.”
The Ronin Treasury is currently valued at around $5.5 million, with its largest asset being 896 Ronin Wrapped Ether (WETH), worth about $3.9 million. It also holds 652,000 USDC (set to be converted), 1.2 million RON and wrapped RON, along with several memecoins.
These funds were accumulated over several years from fees generated by the Katana DEX, Ronin Market, and Ronin Name Service.
Overall, the buyback represents roughly 1.3% of RON’s circulating supply, and the treasury has emphasized it has no plans to sell any tokens.
Ronin Returns to Ethereum
Ronin announced in August that it is rejoining Ethereum as a layer-2 network. The chain originally split from Ethereum in 2021 to power Axie Infinity, aiming for faster transactions and lower fees for its Web3 gaming ecosystem.
Now, the team says it wants to ride Ethereum’s growing momentum. “Ronin’s Homecoming to Ethereum is approaching. Wall Street is jumping into our industry,” the project stated.
Ronin has struggled since March 2022, when its Ronin Bridge sidechain was hacked for $600 million — still one of the largest exploits in crypto history. The network’s total value locked has since collapsed from around $1.2 billion in early 2022 to just $56 million, according to DeFiLlama.
RON Price Reaction
The announcement sparked a sharp reaction in RON’s price, which jumped 11% on Sunday to $0.54 before retreating to $0.51 at the time of writing.
Despite the short-term rally, RON remains down more than 88% from its all-time high of $4.45 in March 2024 and has traded largely flat over the past six months.
