Axie Infinity to reimburse hack victims and relaunch Ronin bridge

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Axie Infinity users who lost assets in the Ronin bridge hack suffered in March will begin to receive reimbursement following the bridge’s relaunch on June 28.

The announcement is in keeping with Sky Mavis’s , developer of the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, promise made at the time to reimburse victims. A spokeswoman for the company told Bloomberg that users could withdraw one ETH for each one they held on the platform at the time of the hack when it relaunches. 

In the hacking incident, 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC tokens were stolen from the Ronin bridge, the play-to-earn games cross-chain bridge that allows users to swap its AXS token for other digital assets. At present, the stolen assets are worth around $216.5 million.

Sky Mavis is using resources from a $150 million funding round closed in April for the purpose. The funding round was led by Binance, with participation from Animoca Brands,16z, Dialectic, Paradigm, and Accel. Part of the funding of the reimbursement will also come from the treasury of the company as well as from Axie Infinity. 

The company, meanwhile, plans to leave the 56,000 ETH tokens missing for the Axie Infinity-related decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) uncollateralized, Bloomberg notes.

Digital assets platform hack woes continue

When the $620 million Axie Infinity exploit occurred, it highlighted some of the insecurity issues faced in using sidechains as a scalability solution. The hacker was able to compromise the keys of the validators of the Ethereum sidechain to drain the funds.

The hackers also used the digital currency mixer Tornado cash to withdraw the funds. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the theft is connected to a North Korean hackers group called the Lazarus Group. The Treasury has now placed the hacker’s wallet address on its list of sanctioned entities.

While the Ronin Bridge hack has been the biggest in the history of the digital currency industry, several others have followed it. DeFi protocols, including RariCapital, and recently Horizon Bridge to the Harmony layer-1 blockchain, have also suffered exploits.

Going by data from SlowMist, a blockchain ecosystem security platform that tracks exploits in the industry, there have been a total of 163 recorded hack incidents so far in 2022. Over $1.9 billion has been lost by investors in these exploits.

Watch: The BSV Global Blockchain Convention presentation, Play2Earn with BSV Blockchain

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