Axie Infinity Delayed Ethereum’s NFT Game Upgrade After $622M Hack

Axie Infinity delayed the ETH NFT game upgrade after the recent Ronin sidechain hack and Origin will launch a week later so let’s read more in today’s latest crypto news today.

The long-awaited Axie Infinity origin will launch a week later due to the recent Ronin sidechain hack. The ecosystem suffered a security breach last week with more than $600 million worth of funds stolen. Now Axie Infinity delayed the upgrade of the game after the attack.  Axie Infinity developer Sky Mavis revealed that the ROnin sidechain was hacked with $622 million worth of funds being drained from the bridge that connects Ronin to Ethereum and now the security breach led to the creators delaying the upgrade to the game.

Origin is a largely upgraded version of the NFT battling game which was planned to launch today as an alpha version but because of the fallout from the exploit that It happened on March 23, the Origin launch was delayed a week to April 17. a post from Sky Mavis reads:

“While the game is ready for soft launch, we’ve decided to give the engineering and security team an additional window of time to deeply investigate all implications of the breach, before asking for their full attention to support Origin’s release.”

Sky Mavis disclosed that a hacker stole 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC stablecoins from the Ronin sidechain and at the time of the announcement, the crypto funds were worth $622 million. The actual attack took place on March 23 and it went unnoticed for a few days. Sky Mavis said that it was clued into the issue when someone tried to withdraw 5000 ETH worth of funds from the Ronin sidechain but was unable to do so. According to the developer, the exploit was executed when someone used hacked private keys and took control of nine validators that sign transactions on the Ronin sidechain. Sky Mavis shut down the bridge and the Katana DEX once the attack was discovered in order to mitigate potential exploits.

The studio pledged to make sure that the funds are recovered and it is working with law enforcement and Chainalysis to figure out new steps. Sky Mavis said that the funds remaining on Ronin are safe and some of the funds were already transferred from the attacker’s wallet to the centralized exchanges so there’s a chance that they can be identified and even brought to justice.