An Axie Infinity network called the Ronin Network was hacked and $615 million worth of cryptocurrency was stolen.
People who broke into the Ronin Network, which is part of the Ethereum blockchain, stole more than $615 million in ether and US dollars worth.
Ronin Network developers found out about the hack on Tuesday morning, six days after the theft, when a single user said they couldn’t get their money out of the Ronin bridge.
During the attack, the stolen funds were worth $540 million. By Tuesday, they were worth $615 million, making it the second-largest theft in the crypto world.
A side chain of the Ethereum blockchain called the Ronin Network is used mostly to pay for the popular game, Axie Infinity, which has a low transaction fee for gamer.
According to a blog post from the Ronin network, the theft happened on March 23 when the attackers used private keys that had been hacked to “forge fake withdrawals” through a backdoor. They took 173,600 ether (ETH) and 25.5 million USD coins (USDC).
Blockchains use “validator nodes” to check, vote, and keep track of transactions. Ronin has nine different nodes that can be used to check things. To make a withdrawal or deposit, five of the nine nodes must sign off on it.
If true, attackers got a signature through an open loophole in the play-to-win game’s decentralized autonomous organization.
This all goes back to November 2021, when [Axie creator] Sky Mavis asked the Axie DAO for help because there were so many users. The Axie DAO let Sky Mavis sign for it in a lot of different transactions. People who wrote the report said that this was stopped in December 2021, but they didn’t take away access to a “allowlist.”
Worked with law enforcement and the blockchain forensic firm, Chainalysis, to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again.
As of right now, Ronin Network users can’t get their money out or put it in. Sky Mavis wants to make sure that all of the money that was stolen is returned or reimbursed, the blog’s authors said.
It has been found that the funds that were stolen were taken in two separate transactions. The money has been traced back to the hacker’s digital wallet He says some of it has been put into accounts on FTX, a crypto exchange.
FX CEO and founder Sam Bankman-Fried has said that his team is investigating.
Since the Ronin Network announced the theft, the value of its native cryptocurrency, Ronin (RON), has dropped by 11% on the day, Coinmarketcap says. This means that the value of RON has dropped from $2.30 to $1.80 per coin.
Chainalysis says that last year, attackers stole $3.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency from investors, which is how much money was stolen. It was a big hack before Ronin. The $325 million that was stolen from Wormhole, which lets people move money between the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, was because of a flaw.
One of the first people to work on the Wormhole bridge project, Jump Trading, paid back investors who had money taken from them.
