One of the biggest hacks to have occurred in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space was the exploit of the Ronin network of Axie Infinity.
However, it turns out that investigators are making some progress in terms of recovery, as blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis disclosed that more than $30 million worth of crypto was recovered.
The funds
The announcement from Chainalysis came in Barcelona at the AxieCon event and it also published a blog post on the same.
The analytics firm said that it had been able to track the funds that had been laundered and then sent to centralized exchanges.
According to the US Treasury Department, the Lazarus hacking group of North Korea was behind the Axie Infinity hack.
Once the crypto funds were sent to centralized exchanges, law enforcement authorities seized them immediately.
Hackers had sent them to exchanges in hopes of swapping them for fiat currency and then making a withdrawal.
The hack occurred on March 23rd of this year when the Ronin bridge that connects the custom sidechain of Axie Infinity to the Ethereum mainnet had been compromised.
The hack
25.5 million USDC stablecoin and about 173,600 Wrapped Ethereum (WETH) had been stolen, which had collectively been worth $552 million at that time.
The attack had been disclosed a week later to the public and this had seen its value increase to almost $622 million.
But, once the crypto market crashed in May and conditions worsened, the value of the stolen tokens dropped and they are now worth $307 million.
Investigators have so far managed to make a recovery of 30% of the stolen funds. Erin Plante, the Senior Director of Investigations at Chainalysis, said this was a first.
She said that crypto funds had not been seized from a North Korean hacking group before and it definitely would not be the last instance.
Axie Infinity
Based on Ethereum, Axie Infinity is a monster-battling game, which has become the most successful in the crypto space in terms of NFT trading volume.
Data shows that the volume is more than $4 billion and most of it had been generated in a period of six months last year.
At the end of last year and the beginning of this one, the NFT and token prices of Axie Infinity crashed.
This is because the play-to-earn economy of the game had struggled due to flagging demand and a rising supply of reward tokens.
Since then, an overhauled version of the game was launched by Sky Mavis, its developer that comes with a free-to-play mode.
Some adjustments had also been made to the reward model. Lack of decentralization had been blamed as the reason for the Ronin hack.
This was because only nine validators were involved and Lazarus had managed to control five via hacked private keys that allowed them to steal millions in crypto.
In late June, the closed Ronin bridge was reopened by the developer once more and all individual users had been refunded, while law enforcement tried to make a recovery.
