The blockchain project, Ronin, which was hit last week with over $600 million in cryptocurrency, is currently being investigated to identify the trail of hackers. The funds’ movement is presently being monitored around a system that the critics’ term “the Wild West of Finance”. However, the gaming company scammed earlier last week did not even notice the missing funds for six days, a surprise to many.
The hack is being termed the biggest one till now in cryptocurrency. It has raised several questions about the security of the cryptocurrency network. The current marketing and heavy endorsements are all about top celebrities promoting cryptocurrencies and promising wealth untold and unfathomable. The reality, however, is highly grave, with the entire network ridden with scams and hacks.
This week’s theft takes place with Axie Infinity, a game where the players hold a chance to earn cryptocurrencies via playing the game or trading their avatars. The noteworthy point is that the hack comes after the hackers made off around $320 million in a similar scam.
Said correctly by Roman Bieda of Coinfirm, a crypto-security company, “We are seeing more hacks because there is more money in blockchain,” while referring to the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies. He remarked that the network’s security sacrifices are being made for profits, labelling Axie Infinity’s failure to notice the missing funds a considerable deficiency. He further continued that with the growing popularity of cryptocurrency, the industry must have enforced stringent security protocols and at least learned some lessons from the previous attacks.
Axie Infinity Promises Refunds to its Players
The attackers have exploited bottlenecks in the set-up put together by Sky Mavis, a Vietnam-based gaming company. The current stand is such that the company needs to solve issues in their Ethereum blockchain, where the transaction is maintained are either slow or expensive.
To allow the game’s players to buy and sell at speed, the company created an in-game currency and bridged it with the main Ethereum blockchain. The result was a faster and cheaper transaction and logging. Hackers, however, were somehow able to take over the bridge and empty it without anyone realizing what happened. Although experts investigating the same contemplate that this is almost impossible in the Ethereum blockchain.
The firm, in a statement, said that if any player has lost any funds, the firm will reimburse them, easing the anxiety of its gamers.
