After $600 million crypto heist, Axie Infinity team raises $150 million and launches another NFT game
Last week Sky Mavis, the Vietnam-based company behind the crypto game Axie Infinity, revealed that a hacker stole hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto from its blockchain. Sky Mavis realized it had been attacked when a user could not make a withdrawal six days after the breach, and the company froze transactions on its compromised Ronin Network bridge.
Now Sky Mavis has announced it’s received $150 million in investments that “will be used to ensure that all users affected by the Ronin Validator Hack will be reimbursed.” At nearly the exact same time, it’s launching a new version of the game, Axie Infinity: Origin. According to Sky Mavis CEO Trung Nguyen, “As a team, we have made an intentional decision to focus on what lies ahead.”
Other crypto companies that work with Axie Infinity and Sky Mavis — and have enormous sums tied up in Web3 and NFTs — lead the list of names that bought in to bail out Sky Mavis instead of potentially seeing it collapse. The list includes crypto exchange Binance, Web3-promoting venture capital firm A16z, and Animoca Brands, which owns The Sandbox, among several others.
Now Sky Mavis says that it plans to reopen the Ronin Network bridge after it undergoes a security upgrade and audits to try and detect if there are other weaknesses. Binance (which just invested in the game) has reopened transactions with the network, and according to the exchange, that means “all individual users will be able to withdraw their funds.”
The Sky Mavis team says the March 23rd heist (that, again, went unnoticed until March 29th when a user tried to withdraw funds and couldn’t) was “socially engineered,” taking advantage of vulnerabilities from trade-offs made while attempting to reach mainstream
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