It was recently announced that Sky Mavis, the creators of Axie Infinity, will pay back $450 million out of their own pocket after the bridge system of their game’s native blockchain, Ronin, was hacked. This repayment was first reported by the Twitter page, WatcherGuru.
About the Hack
Unfortunately, Axie Infinity was the victim of one of the biggest hacks in NFT and crypto history. Their platform was hit massively with a hack worth around $600 million. In the hack, money was stolen via the Ronin bridge, which was soon after frozen. Around 173,000 ETH and 25.5 million USDC was stolen in the hack.
According to Sky Mavis, an attacker used hacked private security keys to compromise the network nodes that validate transfers to and from the Ronin blockchain. That let the attacker quietly withdraw large quantities of Ethereum and USDC. The hack was only discovered around a week later.
According to the company, the Ronin attack was possible partly because of a shortcut the company had taken to relieve an “immense user load” on its network in November of last year.
Sky Mavis’ Repayment
At the present time, Sky Mavis is set to repay $450 million worth of the hack. This will be out of its own pocket. For the company, who was worth circa $3 billion at its peak, it is a large amount to pay. Although, it is absolutely the right thing for them to do. A fault in their security system has to be made up for. As part of the attempt to get the money to resolve the hack, the company raised $150 million in a financing round to refund users. This was led by Binance.
Emphatically, other companies included play-to-earn giants Animoca Brands and other firms like a16z, Dialetic, Paradigm and Accel.
Furthermore, Binance’s CEO, Changpeng Zhao, spoke about their part played, saying: “We strongly believe Sky Mavis will bring a lot of value and growth for the larger industry and we believe it’s necessary to support them as they work hard to resolve the recent incident.”
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