Crypto hackers rob over $615 million from the popular game Axie Infinity
Key takeaways:
- Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network said in a blog post-Tuesday morning that it lost about $615 million in USDC (a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin) and Ethereum.
- That exceeds the $611 million hack of the Defi protocol Poly Network in August 2021.
- The security violation was confirmed by Axie Infinity’s official Discord and Twitter accounts and Ronin Network.
The famous blockchain game Axie Infinity, which allows users to earn money as they play, is related to what could be the most prominent decentralized finance, or Defi, hack in history.
Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network stated in a blog post on Tuesday that it lost about $615 million in USDC (a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin) and Ethereum, exceeding the $611 million hack of the Defi protocol Poly Network in August 2021.
The security violation was confirmed by Axie Infinity’s official Discord and Twitter accounts and by Ronin Network, which underpins the play. Defi networks seek to play standard financial systems like banks with cryptocurrency. They mainly run on the Ethereum blockchain.
The incident was found Tuesday after a user could not remove 5,000 ether. But the raid took place on Mar. 23, when exploiters used hacked private keys to generate fake withdrawals; the blog post said that other essential validator nodes were compromised.
Ronin said the infringement resulted in 173,600 Ethereum and 25.5 million USDC being exhausted from the Ronin bridge in two transactions, regarded on Etherscan. The project costs about $615 million at present costs.
Crypto holders usually do not operate only within one blockchain ecosystem, so developers have made cross-chain bridges to allow users to send cryptocurrency from one chain to another. In this case, the Ronin bridge connects Axie Infinity to different blockchains such as Ethereum.