Author: AI Publisher

Fully onchain games represent the most radical vision of blockchain gaming: games where every piece of state — every player position, every item, every action — lives on the blockchain rather than on a centralized server. The movement draws inspiration from the “autonomous worlds” concept: game worlds that exist permanently on-chain, can’t be shut down by any company, and can be modified by anyone who writes compatible smart contracts.

Dark Forest, launched in 2020 by Brian Gu and others, was the first widely recognized fully onchain game. It used zero-knowledge proofs to create a “fog of war” in an onchain strategy game — a technical achievement that demonstrated complex game mechanics were possible entirely on-chain. The game attracted a dedicated community of builders who created bots, tools, and mods that interacted with the game’s smart contracts directly.

By 2024, fully onchain games had their own ecosystem: MUD (by Lattice, the team behind OPCraft), Dojo (by Realms, built on StarkNet), and other frameworks made it easier to build complex onchain game logic. Projects like Realms, Loot Survivor, and Primodium explored different genres — from RPGs to survival games to strategy — all running entirely on smart contracts.

Fully onchain games remain niche. They’re slow, expensive (even on L2s), and can’t match the performance of traditional games. But their proponents argue that’s missing the point: the value isn’t in graphics or speed, it’s in permanence, composability, and player sovereignty. A fully onchain game world can’t be shut down, can’t have its rules changed unilaterally, and can be extended by anyone. Whether that’s a meaningful advantage for actual players, or just an ideological commitment by builders, is a question the category is still answering.

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Axie Infinity launched in 2018 as a Pokémon-style game where players collected, bred, and battled digital creatures called Axies. Built by Sky Mavis, a Vietnamese studio founded by Trung Nguyen, the game introduced the “play-to-earn” model: players earned SLP (Smooth Love Potion) tokens by winning battles, which could be sold for real money. By 2021, millions of players in the Philippines, Venezuela, and other developing countries were earning meaningful income — sometimes more than local minimum wage — just by playing the game.

At its peak in late 2021, Axie Infinity had over 2.7 million daily active users. The AXS governance token hit $165, giving the project a fully diluted valuation exceeding $40 billion. The Ronin sidechain, built specifically for Axie, processed millions of transactions daily. Sky Mavis raised $152 million at a $3 billion valuation. Play-to-earn was hailed as the future of gaming and a revolutionary tool for economic inclusion in the developing world.

Then the Ronin bridge was hacked in March 2022 for $625 million by North Korean hackers (Lazarus Group) — one of the largest crypto thefts in history. The hack, combined with the broader bear market and the unsustainable token economics of the SLP reward system, triggered a death spiral. Player counts dropped 95%. SLP became nearly worthless. The “play-to-earn” economy that had supported millions of players in developing countries evaporated, leaving many worse off than before they started.

Axie Infinity’s legacy is dual. It proved that blockchain gaming could attract millions of users and create real economic value. It also proved that play-to-earn economics are inherently unsustainable without real revenue from non-earning players. Every subsequent blockchain game has had to answer the question Axie raised: where does the money come from? If the answer is “from new players,” it’s a Ponzi. If the answer is “from players who enjoy the game enough to spend,” it’s a business. The distinction matters, and Axie learned it the hard way.

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Immutable launched in 2018 as Immutable X, an Ethereum L2 specifically designed for NFT gaming. Founded by Robbie Ferguson and James Ferguson, two Australian brothers, Immutable used StarkEx (later expanding to zkEVM) to provide gasless, instant NFT minting and trading. The pitch to game developers was compelling: build on Ethereum’s security with zero gas fees for players, instant transaction confirmation, and carbon-neutral operations.

Immutable’s flagship game was Gods Unchained, a competitive card game that demonstrated blockchain gaming could have real depth and genuine gameplay. Unlike many crypto games that were thinly disguised farming simulators, Gods Unchained was actually fun to play — and it proved that players would engage with a blockchain game if the game itself was good enough, not just because of token rewards.

The IMX token launched in 2021 and became one of the largest gaming tokens by market cap. Immutable expanded from a single L2 to a broader gaming platform, partnering with dozens of game studios including major names like GameStop, Ubisoft, and Warner Bros. The Immutable Passport — a wallet-as-a-service that let gamers create accounts without knowing anything about crypto — became a key onboarding tool.

Immutable’s challenge is the same as every Web3 gaming platform: most blockchain games still aren’t good enough to compete with traditional games on gameplay alone. The blockchain adds ownership and trading capabilities, but if the game isn’t fun, players won’t stay. Immutable has done more than most to attract quality game developers, but the killer Web3 game that achieves mainstream success on gameplay merit hasn’t arrived yet. When it does, Immutable is well-positioned to host it.

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Ronin was built in 2021 as an Ethereum sidechain specifically for Axie Infinity, designed to solve the gas fee problem that was pricing players out of the game. Created by Sky Mavis, Ronin used a proof-of-authority consensus with a small validator set — nine validators total, with Sky Mavis controlling four of them plus one operated by Axie DAO. This centralization made Ronin fast and cheap but also created an enormous attack surface.

On March 23, 2022, hackers compromised five of Ronin’s nine validators through a social engineering attack targeting Sky Mavis employees and exploiting a vulnerability in the Axie DAO validator. With five of nine validators controlled, the hackers authorized two fraudulent withdrawals totaling 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC — approximately $625 million. The attack went unnoticed for six days until a user tried to withdraw funds and couldn’t.

The aftermath was chaotic. Sky Mavis raised $150 million led by Binance to reimburse affected users. The FBI attributed the attack to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. Ronin halted operations for three months while the bridge was rebuilt with improved security. The validator set was expanded to reduce centralization risk. It was the most expensive lesson in crypto security history.

Remarkably, Ronin survived. The chain relaunched, attracted new games beyond Axie (including Pixels, which became one of the most-played blockchain games in 2024), and built a genuine gaming ecosystem. The RON token was airdropped to users, and by 2025 Ronin was processing millions of daily transactions primarily from actual gamers rather than DeFi farmers. The comeback story is improbable — most chains wouldn’t survive losing $625 million — but Ronin’s focus on gaming and its committed community pulled it through.

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Pixels launched on Ronin in late 2023 as a free-to-play farming and social game with pixel art aesthetics. The game combined elements of Stardew Valley and Farmville with blockchain-based land ownership and in-game token rewards. What set Pixels apart from most blockchain games was a crucial decision: make it genuinely fun first, and add the crypto elements second.

The strategy worked. By early 2024, Pixels had over 1 million daily active users, making it one of the most played blockchain games ever. The PIXEL token launched with an airdrop to early players, briefly reaching a market cap exceeding $1 billion. Ronin, which hosted Pixels, saw its daily transaction count surge past Ethereum mainnet on multiple days purely from gaming activity.

Pixels’ founder, Luke Barwikowski, had spent years in traditional game development before entering crypto, and it showed in the product. The game had genuine depth — quests, farming mechanics, social features, seasonal events — that kept players engaged beyond the initial token airdrop. Unlike many crypto games where players left immediately after earning their rewards, Pixels retained a significant portion of its user base.

Pixels matters because it’s one of the first evidence points that blockchain gaming can achieve traditional gaming’s engagement levels. The game isn’t competing with AAA titles, but within the casual gaming category, it demonstrated that adding ownership (of land, items, and characters) to a fun game creates stronger player engagement than either element alone. If Pixels can sustain its player base through token price fluctuations, it becomes a template for how blockchain gaming actually works at scale.

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The Web3 gaming token category went through a brutal cycle between 2021 and 2024. At the peak, gaming tokens collectively represented over $30 billion in market cap. AXS, SAND, MANA, GALA, IMX, and dozens of others attracted massive speculation from investors betting that blockchain gaming would disrupt the $200 billion traditional gaming industry. By 2023, most of these tokens had lost 90-95% of their peak value.

The failure pattern was consistent. Most Web3 games launched tokens before their games were ready, attracting speculators rather than players. When token prices dropped and speculative interest waned, the “player” base evaporated because it was never a player base to begin with — it was a trader base. Games that needed ongoing revenue from player spending couldn’t generate it because their users were trying to extract money, not spend it. The play-to-earn model turned players into employees who quit when wages dropped.

The survivors shared common traits: actual gameplay quality (Gods Unchained, Pixels), infrastructure value independent of any single game (Immutable, Ronin), or strong enough IP and community to survive the bear market (Loot, Dark Forest). Projects that invested in game quality over token mechanics fared better, confirming the obvious-in-retrospect lesson that games need to be fun before they need to be financialized.

By 2025, the narrative had shifted from “play-to-earn” to “play-and-own” — a subtler framing that emphasized player ownership of in-game assets without promising income. This reframing acknowledged that sustainable gaming economies require most players to spend (as in traditional gaming) while a minority of skilled or dedicated players might earn. It’s a less exciting pitch than “earn money playing games,” but it’s a more honest one, and the games being built around it have a better chance of actually working.

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