NFT battler Axie Infinity was one of the biggest success stories in the world of crypto gaming. Now it’s responsible for one of the biggest thefts in the history of the technology. The gaming-focused blockchain Ronin Network announced earlier today that an Axie Infinity exploit allowed a hacker to “drain” roughly $600 million worth of crypto currency from the network.
“There has been a security breach on the Ronin Network,” the company announced on its Substack. “Earlier today, we discovered that on March 23rd, Sky Mavis’s Ronin validator nodes and Axie DAO validator nodes were compromised resulting in 173,600 Ethereum and 25.5M USDC drained from the Ronin bridge in two transactions.”
The person responsible allegedly used hacked private keys to order the fraudulent withdrawals. According to Ronin, “the attacker found a backdoor through our gas-free RPC node, which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator.”
Basically, the Ronin “side-chain” for games like Axie Infinity uses “9 validator nodes” to prevent fraudulent transactions. However, in November, due to overwhelming demand by new Axie players, Ronin gave special privileges to Sky Mavis, the company behind the game, so it could sign transactions on its behalf.
Ronin has apparently locked down accounts while it continues its investigation into the hack, meaning no one can get their funds out even as the price of RON, the network’s native token, has reportedly plummeted more than 25%.
(All information was provided by Kotaku)
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