Axie Infinity suffers $625 Million exploit via Ronin Network

The popular crypto game Axie Infinity was hacked via the Ronin Network, and $625 million worth of cryptocurrencies has been stolen from the platform. The hack came about after the attacker hacked into Sky Mavis’s validator nodes with private security keys and withdraw a large amount of Ethereum tokens and USDC stablecoins.

The company was the brains behind the NFT game that sparked the GameFi industry, and the Ronin Network is an Ethereum-linked sidechain that was made specifically for Axie Infinity to handle large amounts of transactions efficiently.

The Ronin chain consists of nine validator nodes, and a majority vote of five is needed to approve transactions. In a classic 51% attack, the hacker gained control of Sky Mavis’s four Ronin validators and a third-party validator run by Axie DAO. This allowed the hacker to approve all withdrawals from the platform without any issues.

Sky Mavis has stated that it will be “working with law enforcement officials, forensic cryptographers, and our investors to make sure there is no loss of user funds”. It has paused the Ronin network while the investigation is ongoing, and they have increased the validator threshold from five to eight.

The latest exploit sets a new record for amount of funds stolen in the crypto space compared to last year, where a hacker exploited cross-chain DeFi protocol Poly Network and made off with a total of $612 million worth of cryptocurrencies that was later returned.