How Craft World Onboards Web2 Players to Ronin Without the Web3 Headaches
How a gentle on-ramp to web3 took Craft World to #2 on Ronin's PoD leaderboard ⚔
Key Points
Craft World is #2 of 51 projects on Ronin’s Proof-of-Distribution (PoD) leaderboard for Season 1, right up alongside Ronin’s most established games.
The engine behind that ranking is reach and growth: ~60,000 monthly active players, ~9,000 every day, and around 1,500 new installs daily.
Most of those players start out brand new to Web3. We don’t hide the blockchain from them. We make it easy and bring them on-chain step by step: a VOYA ID (the Ronin smart wallet we set up automatically), sponsored gas, and an in-game economy that trades on Katana. This post is about how.
What #2 on the PoD leaderboard really means
Ronin’s Proof-of-Distribution program rewards the projects that genuinely put the chain to work: real on-chain activity, real growth, real usage of the wider ecosystem. A high PoD ranking isn’t a vanity number; it’s a measure of how many people are actually doing things on-chain because of your game.
That’s why we’re proud to sit at #2 of 51, and prouder still of how we got there. Not with a small circle of crypto power users, but the opposite way: a large and fast-growing base of everyday players. Tens of thousands are active every month, transacting on Ronin and trading on Katana as a normal part of play.
Here’s the part that matters: most of those players didn’t come for crypto. They came for the game. On day one, a new player doesn’t have to think about wallets, tokens, or gas at all. From there, we bring them on-chain gradually, as the game gives them reasons to. The point was never to hide the blockchain. It’s to make it easy enough that anyone can use it, and to ease people in instead of asking them to figure it all out up front.
Because for most people, web3’s on-ramp is a series of walls: a wallet to create, a seed phrase to back up, a gas token to buy before you can move, a stream of confirmation pop-ups. Each wall is a place where a normal player quits. We took them down one at a time. Here’s how.
Meet your VOYA ID: a wallet created for you, not by you
When someone opens Craft World, they don’t go hunting for a wallet. They can start playing right away as a guest, then link an email or social login to secure the account. Behind the scenes, we set up their VOYA ID: a smart wallet on Ronin, tied to that login, that doubles as their account and on-chain identity.
No seed phrase to write down. Players never have to back up twelve words to get started. Access is built on the sign-in methods they already trust, and we handle the wallet behind it.
A real Ronin address. A VOYA ID isn’t a database entry pretending to be a wallet. It’s a genuine smart wallet on Ronin, the same kind of on-chain account the rest of the ecosystem uses.
Room to grow. Players who want to bring their own wallet, like Ronin Wallet, can link one whenever they’re ready.
The result is that the “set up a wallet” step, one of the biggest drop-off points in web3 games, basically disappears.
We pay the gas, so players don’t have to
Even with a VOYA ID in hand, most newcomers hit the next wall: you need the network’s gas token before you can make a single move. We took that one down for everyday play, too.
Gas is sponsored. For the on-chain actions in normal gameplay, we cover the network fee on the player’s behalf. They don’t need to acquire RON just to play.
No confirmation fatigue. Key on-chain actions like daily check-ins, claims, and Exchange trades don’t bury the player under transaction pop-ups.
It still feels like a game. Tap, play, progress. The chain settles the on-chain parts underneath.
For the player, the experience feels like a polished web2 game. Under the hood, the actions that matter on-chain are settling as real transactions on Ronin.
A player-owned economy, powered by Katana
This is the part we’re proudest of. Craft World runs a player-owned economy: the resources players gather, craft, and trade (EARTH, WATER, COIN, and the rest) are backed by real tokens on Ronin, with real value players can trade on the open market. Inside the game they feel like a normal inventory, and when a player trades, those tokens move on-chain.
And when players want to trade them, our in-game Exchange settles the swap on Katana:
Real liquidity, real swaps. A trade in our Exchange is routed through Katana’s on-chain liquidity. Players are trading against the same DEX infrastructure the broader Ronin ecosystem uses.
Priced from the live market. Quotes come straight from Katana’s on-chain liquidity at the moment of the trade, not a number we made up.
Wrapped in a simple UI. The player picks two resources, enters an amount, and confirms. Token approvals, routing, slippage protection, and settlement all happen automatically.
Players use it heavily. Our system facilitates around 180,000 trades a month: real swaps, on real liquidity, at real scale, on Ronin.
In other words: when our players use the Exchange, they’re trading on a real decentralized exchange, without needing the hardware wallet or DeFi know-how it used to take. It’s not that the blockchain is hidden; it’s that using it finally feels easy.
Why it shows up on the leaderboard
Put these pieces together (automatic wallet, sponsored gas, an economy that settles on Katana) and the usual web3 drop-off points disappear. Players who would have quit at “create a wallet” or “go buy some RON” simply keep playing. That’s the whole flywheel behind our PoD ranking:
The funnel stays full. The barrier isn’t “do you understand crypto?” It’s “do you want to play?” That’s how ~1,500 new installs a day compound into a ~60,000-strong monthly player base.
Every active player is on-chain. They each have a VOYA ID (a real Ronin smart wallet), and their trades settle on Katana, including the many who started out brand new to web3.
Growth and on-chain activity become the same thing. A large, growing, genuinely a
ctive player base is exactly what PoD measures. It’s how a game built to ease players into web3, rather than gate them behind it, ends up #2 on a blockchain leaderboard.
And the door keeps opening wider: as players get comfortable, they can link their own wallet like Ronin Wallet and step further into the ecosystem at their own pace.
Final thoughts
We think this is how the next wave of players comes on-chain: not by asking them to learn blockchain first, but by giving them a great game and easing them into the on-chain world as they go. Ronin and Katana gave us the foundation to make that real.
Blockchain is an incredible technology. The art is in making it easy enough that anyone can use it, and inviting players in rather than asking them to figure it out first. We’re excited to keep building that on Ronin and grateful to the Ronin team for collaborating with us to share how we do it.
See you in Craft World. ⚔