The NFT-based battler Axie Infinity stands as a massive success amongst the crypto field. But now, a new problem comes out among their success story: they’ve been scammed out of $600 million.
The Axie Infinity breach
Ronin Network, the blockchain behind Axie Infinity, made a statement regarding what they discovered:
“There has been a security breach on the Ronin Network. 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 hacker supposedly hacked private keys and ordered the money withdraw through it. Ronin Network states “the attacker found a backdoor through our gas-free RPC node, which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator.”
The way Ronin Network works for the game is set up with 9 validator nodes. These nodes prevent fraudulent transactions. As more players poured into the game, the network signed privileges over to Sky Mavis, the game’s company. These privileges included signing transactions on their behalf.
Ronin Network discontinued Sky Mavis’ privileges back in December 2021. However, the access list was not revoked, which led to the hack. The hacker got a hold of Sky Mavis systems and then they were “able to get the signature from the Axie DAO validator by using the gas-free RPC.”
Axie Infinity accounts were locked down after the hack as the network investigates, meaning no players are able to receive their funds. The network’s native token, RON, has plummeted more than 25% among the scam.
Yet another hack in the crypto field
This isn’t the first cryptocurrency network to be hacked. Another hacker successfully scammed Poly Network for a similar $600 million. Other hackers snatched a good $30 million from Crypto.com. Given all of this, it’s not too surprising there’s been another crypto hack. The price for selling your own scams, it seems.
Via, Kotaku.
