One of the most successful games on the market that make use of NFT is Axie Infinity, also known as the “Pokemon of the NFTs“. In the last hours it has been news after taking place in him the biggest cryptocurrency heist in history of this technology. The problem started when Ronin, the blockchain network responsible for supporting this title, suffered a massive hack.
As Sky Mavis, the company that controls this network, has communicated, a group of hackers has taken advantage of a security breach to sneak into the platform without problems. This has allowed them to carry out two transactions: the first of 173,600 Ethereum and the second of 25.5 million in USDC, the cryptocurrency linked to the US dollar.
This represents a sum of 594.5 million dollars in the case of the first transaction, which when combined with the second amounts to a total of 620 million dollars that have been stolen, about 560 million euros to change. However, despite the fact that all this happened on March 23, it was not until yesterday that Ronin realized this detail when a user tried to withdraw 5,000 Ethereum and the service denied the request.
It was there when he contacted the company and the reason for this situation was discovered. Sky Mavis has pointed out that to validate cryptocurrency transactions it is necessary to control more than half of the nine operator validation nodes, so the person in charge took control of four of them, enough to hack a fifth node thanks to the data they contained. That allowed him to open a back door to get into the server and carry out the robbery.
Naturally Ronin plans to take matters into his own hands. To begin with, he is taking all necessary measures to protect himself from future attacks that may be attempted. In the meantime, he has blocked any network transactions and increased the number of validators needed from five to eight as a temporary measure until a better solution is established.
In addition, it is working with government agencies in order to bring criminals to justice for the crimes committed, as well as joining security companies and crypto experts to recover all funds and have them reimbursed.