Four Ways to Transfer Assets to the Ronin Sidechain

Updated on September 3rd 2021

To either play or invest in Axie Infinity you will need three types of Assets: ETH, SLP and AXS. ETH is used to purchase Axies from the marketplace while SLP and AXS are ERC20 tokens that are required for breeding them. 

You can buy ETH with fiat money (USD, CAD, etc.) on pretty much any crypto exchange. AXS and SLP are more difficult to get as they can only be found on major exchanges like Binance. Of course dexes like Uniswap can also be used to get any of the two ERC20 tokens but not in exchange for fiat money and only if there’s enough liquidity for the trading pair.

Besides finding a way to get the assets you also need to send them over to the Ronin sidechain where the Axie Infinity game lives in order to use it. In this article I’m going to show you different ways to get each asset and send it over to Ronin starting from the simplest and cheapest to the most complex and expensive.

Sending WETH to Ronin

From the name of this section you might be wondering, what the heck is WETH? WETH stands for “Wrapped ETH” and it is the ERC20 version of ETH. The market value of WETH and ETH is exactly the same but ETH only exists on Ethereum. Ronin is a different blockchain that has a lot of similarities with Ethereum but has no native cryptocurrency. That’s why we can’t just send ETH over to Ronin, we can only “send” the ERC20 version of it, WETH.

Note: If you want to learn more about the Ronin sidechain you can read another of my articles here.

Because Ethereum and Ronin are two different blockchains you will need different wallets to interact with them. On Ethereum you can find multiple choices of wallets to interact with the network being Metamask the most popular of them. In the case of Ronin you’ll need to use a special purpose wallet that’s able to interact with the sidechain. The Ronin wallet can be found in the Chrome marketplace and installed as an extension on any Chromium based browser (Chrome, Brave, etc.) just like Metamask.

Method 1.1: Purchasing WETH directly on Ronin

The easiest way to get WETH inside Ronin is by using its fiat on ramp found here. It’s called a fiat on ramp and not an exchange because you can do purchases but not withdrawals. Currently you can only purchase WETH but the team is working on allowing the purchase of AXS and SLP in the future.

Figure 1. Ronin’s fiat on ramp

To purchase WETH you will need to connect your Ronin wallet to the dapp, provide personal information to create an account (you only have to do it once) and use a credit card to purchase the amount of WETH needed. Once the purchase is done, the WETH should become visible in the Ronin wallet and will be ready to be used in the Axie marketplace. The process is fairly simple and it’s the cheapest of all even when accounting for the fees associated with using a credit card for a purchase.

Figure 2. Getting Wrapped ETH from Ronin’s fiat on ramp

In the figure above you can see that there are no fees associated with the network as Ronin doesn’t charge anything for executing transactions on the network in clear contrast with Ethereum where gas fees can get so high that make even simple transactions impractical.

Unfortunately I’m unable to use this method as my bank doesn’t allow me to use my credit cards to interact with exchanges. If that’s your case as well or you don’t have a credit card, the next method is for you.

Method 1.2: Purchasing ETH from an Exchange

Update: Binance has created a direct integration with Ronin so now you can withdraw funds from Binance directly to your Ronin wallet address and viceversa. This is by far the cheapest option if you have an account on the exchange. Attempt one of the solutions listed below only if you are unable to create an account on Binance. Check out the announcement and the instructions here.

For this method you will need to have an account in a centralized exchange that is able to connect to your national banking system. Because I live in Canada my preferred choice is Newton but you can use any other exchange.

Figure 3. Getting ETH from a regular exchange

As in any exchange the first step is to deposit funds from your bank to the exchange and purchase the amount of ETH that you are planning to use on Axie Infinity. Then you’ll need to withdraw your money to an account on Metamask. I’m recommending the use of a hot wallet like Metamask and not a cold wallet like Ledger simply because of convenience. You can certainly withdraw the ETH to a hardware wallet and then use Metamask as the middle man for your transactions, that’s for sure a safer approach.

Once the ETH is on your Metamask account you will need to “send” the asset over to Ronin by using a bridge. The bridge is nothing more than a smart contract that when executed takes the amount of ETH sent and mints the same amount of WETH on the Ronin network and associates those tokens to your Ronin wallet. At this point you are done and you can use the WETH on the Axie marketplace.

Figure 4. Ronin’s bridge

Before you start the process make sure to check the gas fees of every step as it’s depicted in blue in figure 3. Using the Ethereum network can be very costly and if you are not careful you might spend more money on fees than on the purchase of the asset (ETH in this case). The best way to check how much this process will cost you is by using a gas tracker.

Figure 5. Example of cost estimation for different types of transactions on Ethereum

From the example above you can see that the average cost of transferring ETH is $2.24 (low fees), transferring an ERC20 token like SLP and AXS is $6.93 (medium fees) and doing a swap on Uniswap is $21.33 (high fees). All these costs are going to be relevant in this article. For the particular way of sending ETH to Ronin that we are discussing in this section we only care about the fees of sending ETH from an exchange to Metamask and the fees of using the Ronin bridge. From my experience, the cost of executing the bridge’s smart contract is similar to the cost of doing a swap on Uniswap.

If we use the values shown on figure 5 as a reference, sending any amount of ETH to Ronin will cost you about $23.57 in fees for the Ethereum network. If you were planning to send a small amount like $100 think twice, you’ll be paying more than 20% in network fees. You can either wait until the network is less congested and the fees decrease in absolute terms or increase the amount of ETH you are transferring to Ronin to decrease the proportion of the cost of the fees (the fees for sending $1000 will be 2.3% in our example).

We now know how to transfer ETH over to Ronin. It’s time to explore how to send over to Ronin the two ERC20 tokens used in the game: SLP and AXS.

Sending AXS or SLP to Ronin

Because AXS and SLP are both ERC20 tokens there’s no concept of “wrapped” AXS or SLP like with ETH. Contrary to WETH, these two tokens are not yet available on Ronin’s fiat on ramp so we are going to have to get them from Ethereum and send them over to Ronin using the bridge. 

Depending on the exchange you use you might be able to buy them directly on the exchange but then again you might not. On Newton for example (the exchange I use) I’m able to purchase AXS but not withdraw them (for now). SLP on the other hand is not even listed. Which one of the following two methods you should use will depend on the availability of those ERC20 tokens on your exchange of choice.

Method 2.1: Purchasing AXS or SLP on an Exchange

If you are lucky you might be able to directly buy AXS and SLP from your exchange and in that case the process is very similar to the second method described for moving Ethereum over to Ronin described before (method 1.2).

Figure 6. Getting AXS or SLP directly from exchange

The only difference from the process described in figure 3 is the cost of moving the ERC20 token to Metamask compared to the cost of moving ETH. Using figure 5 again as a reference we can calculate that the cost of completing this process is $28.26, almost $5 higher than moving ETH.

Method 2.2: Purchasing AXS or SLP through Binance

The final method is probably the worst case scenario when it comes to complexity and fees. If you are unable to buy the ERC20 token directly from your exchange you can use Binance as a middle man to get the tokens. For this to work you will need to have an account there.

Figure 7. Getting AXS or SLP through Binance

The first step is to buy ETH on the exchange and transfer it over to your wallet on Binance. You can technically do it with any other ERC20 token but using ETH is cheaper when it comes to the transaction fee. Once the funds are on Binance you will need to trade the ETH for either AXS or SLP and then transfer those tokens back to Metamask. After that the rest of the steps are the same as before.

Using the reference values of figure 5, the total cost of sending over AXS or SLP using this method is $30.50. The real cost will depend on the price of gas when you decide to start the process and how much of the withdrawal cost is your exchange willing to absorb.

Bonus Method: Purchasing AXS or SLP on Uniswap

Turns out that you can use the simple “Convert” interface on Binance to trade ETH for AXS but not for SLP. To obtain SLP on Binance you’ll need to use the “Advanced” interface that is overwhelming. This is probably due to the fact that SLP is still a small cap cryptocurrency and Binance treat those tokens differently. For me that was a deal breaker as I don’t want to spend too much time in learning how to use a complex user interfaces just for a simple trade. Instead I turned to Uniswap.

Uniswap is a decentralized exchange (DEX) where you can very easily trade any cryptocurrency that’s implemented on Ethereum (ETH and any ERC20 token) without the need to create an account like with Binance. The user interface is dead simple but it’s more expensive than a centralized exchange like Binance because it is a smart contract that needs to be executed paying the gas fees. As the figure below shows we will need Metamask to use Uniswap and to be able to exchange ETH for AXS or SLP.

Figure 8. Using Uniswap instead of Binance

Using figure 5 as our reference we will need to pay $43.62 in fees which is significantly more expensive than the previous method using Uniswap. Use this as a last resort if you are unable to use Binance to get SLP.

Conclusion

We have discussed 2 methods to send ETH to Ronin, 2 other methods to send SLP and AXS as well and a bonus method using Uniswap. The cheapest way is to buy those assets directly on Ronin using their fiat on ramp but sadly that it’s currently only available for ETH and only if you are able to use your credit card for such type of transaction (I’m not). When using any of the methods described, except the first one, you have to keep an eye on the price of gas to avoid nasty surprises in the amount paid in fees.

Holding for the long term crypto assets on a hot wallet like Ronin is a security risk as your machine could be compromised with malware. Luckily the Ronin wallet supports integration with Trezor, a hardware wallet, so the private key that controls all your crypto assets (WETH, SLP, AXS and your Axies) is securely stored offline but able to interact with Axie Infinity upon your explicit approval of every transaction.

To withdraw money from Ronin you simply have to follow the steps in reverse order until you get back to your exchange. In the future the team at Sky Mavis is planning to include the purchase of AXS and SLP directly on Ronin and there’s even a discussion of a fully functional DEX. This could simplify the process of buying the assets but I doubt it will help with the withdrawals. I guess we just have to wait and see.