Hackers Steals Over $650M from Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network

The Ronin Network, a blockchain network that runs Sky Mavis' popular NFT game Axie Infinity, has been hacked, with about $625 million, the biggest yet in DeFi's history.

Biggest Hack in Crypto's 13 Year History

According to a Substack post from Ronin, the security breach took place on March 23 but was only discovered earlier today. The attacker apparently used “hacked private keys” “in order to forge fake withdrawals,” thus was able to forge transactions to claim the funds, per the Substack post. Overall, the attacker overall took 173,600 WETH worth nearly $597 million and 25.5 million USDC stablecoin worth $25.5 million, adding up to about $622 million worth of stolen crypto at the time of writing. Most of the stolen funds are still sitting in the hacker’s wallet though 6,250 ETH has been transferred to various other addresses. https://twitter.com/Ronin_Network/status/1508828722085867521

Ron Token Crashed Following the News

Ronin and Axie Infinity operator Sky Mavis said that it has tapped law enforcement, forensic cryptographers at Chainalysis, and its own investors to “make sure all funds are recovered or reimbursed.” Following the news, the price of RON, the native token of the Ronin network, is down 19.4% from the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. The Ronin bridge hack appears to be similar to that of Poly Network when a hacker stole $611 million from the DeFi protocol though the majority of funds were ultimately returned.