Exposing the highly vulnerable nature of money sitting in crypto chains, a news of a huge heist of crypto assets has shocked the crypto currency world.
Hackers stole almost $620 million of crypto tokens from Axie Infinity’s Ronin network bridge, making it possibly the largest crypto heist recorded so far.
Ronin is a side chain of Ethereum created by Sky Mavis. It is used to power the popular online game Axie Infinity.
Axie Infinity is an NFT based gaming famous for its in-game economy. It uses Ethereum-based ERC-20 tokens. Players of Axie Infinity collect and mint NFTs of cute creatures known as Axies. These creatures can be made to battle with each other within the game.
It has been reported that unidentified hackers on March 23 stole almost 173,600 ether tokens and 25.5 million USD Coin tokens. The stolen crypto was estimated to be of $540 million at the time of theft but at current exchange rates, the stolen funds are worth $615 million.
According to blockchain analysis firm Elliptic, this could be the second largest crypto theft.
Ronin is said to possess the biggest NFT collection by sales volume.
According to a blogpost by Ronin, the hacker accessed the private keys (password to access crypto assets on blockchain) to steal the funds. It came to the notice of the management when the users of the platform were not able to withdraw or deposit funds on the network.
Susceptibility to hacks have kept the major economies of the world away from crypto currency. The risk to be the money of investors is always there in the crypto market.
Company developers are stated to be working with law enforcement officials, cyber forensic experts and investors to recover the stolen funds. But there is no update till now about any recovery of the heisted money from the hackers.
