Axie Infinity Ronin Bridge Is Back Online After $622 Million Hack

The Axie Infinity Ronin bridge is back online after the $622 million hacks, three months after the hackers completed one of the biggest heists in the DEFI space so let’s read more today in our latest Ethereum news.

The Axie Infinity Ronin Bridge connects the NFT game Axie Infinity’s sidechain to the Ethereum mainnet and today it is back online. The bridge was taken down in March after a $622 million worth of crypto assets exploit. The biggest NFT-based video game in terms of total trading volume suffered one of the biggest DEFI hacks of all time and now the exploited bridge which connects the game’s sidechain was restored today.

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

Axie Infinity developer Sky Mavis announced that the Ronin Bridge Is back online three months after the attack so now users can make deposits and withdrawals from the network. The bridge allows users to transfer assets between the Ronin sidechain and the Ethereum mainnet and in March it was hacked with the attackers taking 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC stablecoin in process. The assets were worth a little less than $522 million and $622 million by the time Sky Mavis revealed the exploit.

The United States Treasury connected the Ronin Bridge attack with the Lazarus Group which is a North Korean state-sponsored hacking group. Lazarus was tied to the 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack and the 2015 Sony Pictures one as well. Last week, Sky Mavis announced plans to relaunch the Ronin Bridge and revealed that a hard fork of the network was required to resume the functionality in other words, the Ronin validators had to update their software and enable the restart. The company conducted the internal audit of the code as well as external audits from Certik and Verichains.

Ronin users that had their funds stolen in the attack were refunded. According to the post, 56,000 ETH belonged to the Axie DAO or decentralized autonomous organization and the community funds will remain unaccounted for as the company works with law enforcement to try and recover the assets. If the funds are not recovered in two years, the DAO will vote on what to do with the treasury.

The Axie Infinity creator admitted that the Ronin Bridge was vulnerable due to insufficient decentralization with the company controlling half of the validators which approved transactions. The attacker was able to access five of the nine validators via the hacked private keys and steal the funds. The game saw less than $3.5 million worth of NFT trading in the past month and less than a year after hitting a peak of $848 million in August last year.