Sky Mavis, the creator of the popular non-fungible token game Axie Infinity has raised $150 million in a new funding round led by Binance.
The fundraiser is intended to repay funds lost from Axie Infinity’s recent exploitation of the Ronin Bridge, which resulted in the loss of over $600 million. Also participating in the funding round were Animoca Brands, a16z, Dialectic, Paradigm and Accel.
As Cointelegraph previously reported, the explorer behind the hack managed to drain 173,600 Ethereum (ETH) and 25.5 million USD Coin (USDC) in just two transactions using hacked private keys. At the time, the creators behind the NFT game had promised that they would try to recover all lost funds or refund users with the help of their investors.
Aside from the $150 million raised, the remaining amount would be repaid from the balance of Sky Mavis and Axie Infinity. The developers have also identified a small set of validators in Axie DAO as the root cause behind the exploit and have decided to increase the number of validator groups to 21 within the next three months.
The developers behind the project estimate that it could be several weeks before the Ronin Bridge is active again, as they are working on the security update and subsequent audits before reopening it to users. Meanwhile, Binance is helping Axie Infinity users deposit and withdraw ETH on the Ronin network.
If the stolen funds are not recovered within two years, Axie’s DAO would vote on the next steps for its treasury. Binance and Sky Mavis did not respond to requests for comment from Cointelegraph at the time of publication of this story.
Many in the cryptocurrency community believed that the hacker behind the Ronin Bridge exploit would end up returning the funds, much like the Poly Network attacker did. However, until now there has been no proof of such communication between the game’s developers and the hackers.
The attacker’s Axie Infinity account has started moving funds to coin-mixing services like Tornado Cash in an attempt to launder the stolen funds. However, it is important to note that the Poly Network attacker did the same, initially, but eventually decided to return the funds as it became increasingly difficult to launder such a large amount.
The address of the hacker who stole $610 million in the Ronin_Network case began to move, transferring 1000 ETH to another address and then 200 ETH to TornadoCash. https://t.co/7RYHCmwght
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) April 4, 2022
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