Axie Infinity's New Ronin Bridge Resumes Transactions After $600M Hack

Axie Infinity is an online video game with non-fungible tokens created by the Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis. It is well-known for its cryptocurrency-based in-game economic system where Ronin Network is used to power saw one of the biggest Defi hacks in March. But the good news is that the bridge exploited to link Ethereum to the game’s sidechain has now been restored. Nearly three months after the studio revealed the hack, Axie Infinity creator Sky Mavis confirmed that it is again fully operational. Consumers now can make deposits and withdrawals over the Ronin network.

About the Hack
On March 23, the Ronin bridge, which let users transfer funds between the Ronin sidechain and Ethereum’s mainnet, was breached, and the hackers made off with 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC stablecoin. Nobody became aware of the attack for six days until a user tried to withdraw money but was unsuccessful. In a postmortem, Sky Mavis cited the absence of a tracking mechanism to keep track of significant outflows and a spear-phishing assault that compromised the account of an employee who no longer works for the company.

The US Treasury Department launched sanctions against the wallet address holding the stolen cryptocurrency after investigating and attributing the theft to the North Korean hacking outfit Lazarus. The bridge was thought to reopen by the end of April, but Sky Mavis later changed its reopening date because they believed it would secure billions of dollars in assets and said they could afford to accelerate this process.

Sky Mavis seems to keep its promise to compensate players harmed by the hack. Sky Mavis claims that user monies are completely backed 1:1 by the new bridge, but it hasn’t yet recovered a significant amount of the money stolen from the Ronin network.

In April, Sky Mavis raised an additional $150 million in funds to help address the effects of the Ronin bridge attack. Binance, along with Andreessen Horowitz and others, took the lead in the round. According to Sky Mavis, it is fully covering these responsibilities. Additional community validators were something Sky Mavis intended to have for Ronin, and investor Animoca Brands intended to run one of them.

The Ronin Bridge is open!

• All user funds are fully backed 1:1 by the new bridge.
• The bridge has undergone an internal audit and two external audits.
• We are still on track to release Land Staking this week.

📝 : https://t.co/QX9hY1xKYX

— Axie Infinity🦇🔊 (@AxieInfinity) June 28, 2022

How Axie Infinity Will Safeguard Users From Possible Attacks
The circuit-breaker system will function using a withdrawal restriction depending on the total value. Large withdrawals will require the approval of over 70% of the nodes or if they exceed $1 million, the signatures of 90% of the validators. 

Withdrawals of more than $10 million require the approval of a manual review process that takes up to 7 days and requires the signatures of 90% of the validators. Furthermore, $50 million will be the daily maximum withdrawal amount. This limit will be manually reset by a Ronin administrator if network transactions exceed it.

Overall, according to data from CryptoSlam, the play-to-earn game saw less than $3.5 million worth of NFT trade over the past 30 days. It is less than a year after reaching a monthly peak of $848 million in August last year. Although the company has made the game’s backend even more secure, it’s unclear how these changes will affect the actual game experience.