Axie Infinity creator raises $150M led by Binance to reimburse stolen funds

Published at: April 6, 2022

Sky Mavis, the creator of the popular play-to-earn nonfungible token game Axie Infinity has raised $150 million in a new funding round led by Binance.

The fundraiser is aimed at reimbursing lost funds from the recent exploit on Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge, resulting in losses of over $600 million. The funding round also saw participation from Animoca Brands, a16z, Dialectic, Paradigm and Accel.

As Cointelegraph reported earlier, the explorer behind the hack managed to drain out 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 either try to recover all the lost funds or reimburse users with the help of their investors.

Apart from the $150M raised funds, the remaining amount would be reimbursed from Sky Mavis and Axie Infinity’s balance sheet. The developers have also identified that a small validator set on Axie DAO was the root cause behind the exploit and they have decided to increase the number of validator groups to 21 in the next three months.

The developers behind the project estimate that it could take several weeks before Ronin bridge becomes active again, as they are working on the security update and subsequent audits before re-opening it for users. In the meantime, Binance is helping Axie Inifitny users to deposit and withdraw ETH on the Ronin network.

If the stolen funds are not recovered within two years, the Axie DAO would vote for the next steps for its treasury. Binance and Sky Mavis didn’t respond to requests for comments from Cointelegraph at the time of publishing,

Many in the crypto community believed that the hacker behind Ronin Bridge exploit would eventually return the funds, quite similar to the exploiter of the Poly Network. However, until now, there hasn’t been any evidence of such communication between the game developers and hackers.

The Axie Infinity exploiter account has started moving funds to coin mixer services such as Tornado Cash in a bid to launder the stolen funds. However, it is important to note that the Poly network exploiter did the same, to begin with, but eventually decided to return the funds as it became increasingly difficult to launder such a high 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