Hackers Steal $625 Million From Blockchain Platform Ronin

Synopsis – Addressing queries related to the hacked funds, the company said that most of the hacked funds are still in the wallet of the hacker. This is reportedly the second-largest crypto theft that is recorded as per a blockchain analysis firm Elliptic.

Blockchain network Ronin which is Axie Inifity’s crypto gaming platform has announced a security breach through which hackers stole cryptocurrency worth $625 million from the platform. The company said that the incident occurred on March 23.

Addressing queries related to the hacked funds, the company said that most of the hacked funds are still in the wallet of the hacker. This is reportedly the second-largest crypto theft that is recorded as per a blockchain analysis firm Elliptic.

The company in a blog post mentioned, 

There has been a security breach on the Ronin Network. Earlier today, (March 29) 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 (1 and 2).

The post furthermore mentioned that the hackers made forged fake withdrawals using private keys. According to the post, Sky Mavi’s Ronin chain right now requires approvals of 9 validators. Also, in order to make a deposit or withdrawal, five signatures are mandatory out of nine. As per mentioned by the company, the attacker was able to get control over four Ronin Validators and a third-party validator which is run by Axie DAO.

“The validator key scheme is set up to be decentralized so that it limits an attack vector, similar to this one, but the attacker found a backdoor through our gas-free RPC node, which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator,” the company said in the post.

Describing how the incident occurred, Ronin said, 

The validator key scheme is set up to be decentralized so that it limits an attack vector, similar to this one, but the attacker found a backdoor through our gas-free RPC node, which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator.

Talking about the actions that the company is currently taking, it said that it currently working directly with various government agencies in order to ensure that the criminals get brought to justice. It also mentioned that it is undergoing discussions with Axie Infinity /Sky Mavis stakeholders regarding finding out the ways in order to ensure that ‘no users’ funds are lost.’

Notably, after the revelation of the incident the Price of Ron (token used on Ronin) dropped over 22 percent, and AXS (token used in Axie Infinity dropped over 8.5 percent, CoinMarketCap reported.

What is Cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrency, also termed ‘crypto-currency’, or ‘crypto’ is a digital currency that is not tangible and denotes a unit of currency working as a medium of exchange using a computer network. Unlike any other currency, cryptocurrency is not reliant on any government or a bank and is monitored by blockchain.