The most popular NFT game in history, Axie Infinity, has suffered a severe setback. A hacker has penetrated his blockchain and has taken 173,600 Ethereum.
not the first great theft associated with NFTs and cryptocurrenciesand we intuit that it will not be the last either.
According to the victim himself, the developer Sky Mavis, the bridge of the Ronin blockchain, which uses the popular NFT game Axie Infinityhas been compromised by a hacker, who has been able to move at will and steal 173,600 ethereum. At today’s exchange rate, some €535 million.
NFT games offer unique characters or content, which are paid for with cryptocurrencies, and are then upgraded in-game and can be sold for more money. You have a more detailed explanation in this video:
Axie Infinity game is the most popular of all NFT games. You buy some Pokémon-type creatures, upgrade them by doing quests and in fights, and then you can sell them for more money.
The game has been so successful that in poor countries like the Philippines hundreds of thousands of people play it, who spend all day hooked to get a salary.
Axie Infinity has its own cryptocurrency that is bought with Ethrerum through a blockchain or chain of blocks of its own, called Ronin.
This blockchain works differently from that of Ethereum and Bitcoin, which use a network of thousands of computers, which makes them highly polluting.
Ronin employs a simplified system that requires much less power. Last Christmas they installed a kind of “shortcut” on the Ronin bridge that converts Ethreum to the cryptocurrency of the game, due to the massive growth in the Philippines and other Asian countries.
This shortcut has since been removed, but the credentials to access it have remained. The result is To validate the entry and exit of cryptocurrencies, only 9 operator validation nodes were needed.
The hacker managed to take control of 4 nodesand with the data they contained, hack a fifth Axie Infinity community node. With 5 of the 9 nodes in power he was a majority, so moved 173,000 Ethereum to your account without being detected, in two massive operations. The rest of the cryptocurrencies, including the one in the game, did not touch them. Of course he knew which one has real value…
The robbery occurred on March 23, and Those responsible for Ronin have taken 6 days to realizewhen a user tried to withdraw 5,000 Ethereum that he had put in the blockchain… and they were not there.
Sky Mavis is working with authorities and crypto experts, stating that “our number one priority is to recover the Ethereum”. They are all together in the hacker’s accountidentified, but due to the anonymous nature of cryptocurrencies, she does not know who she is or where she is.
In the end these robberies usually end up paying a ransombecause it is difficult for cybercriminals to spend those 535 million euros from a single account.
If you have money invested in Axie Infinity, all your cryptocurrencies other than Ethereum are safe. But if you had invested Ethereum all the tokens have been stolen, and the conversion of cryptocurrencies from the game to real money has also stopped, until it is confirmed that they have plugged all the security holes.
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism