As announced in a recent post by the game developer Sky Mavis on March 29, Axie Infinity lost roughly $600 million in crypto due to a major hack on its Ronin blockchain. This cyber-attack is recorded to be one of the biggest losses in DeFi heist history and left millions of users unable to withdraw their assets.
On April 9th, Aleksander Larsen, co-founder of Axie Infinity’s developer Sky Mavis sat with Coindesk TV for an interview regarding the massive hack that happened on the play-to-earn platform. He apologised to the victims and said ‘These are the players that deposited their funds into the Ronin network, and who trusted us, and we failed to live up to that trust,’.
Larsen also stated that the speed at which the success of Axie Infinity was going made it hard to manage. He also added ‘So, lesson learned, we’re taking full responsibility for this internally.’
On behalf of his team, he admitted their mistakes and will make the rightful actions since their recently implemented blockchain change became a significant factor in the attack. Larsen said, ‘We’re the team that pushed to go down this path of … progressive decentralisation and … all those trade-offs made us vulnerable for this attack.’
Recently, Axie Infinity changed its system from decentralised to centralised. They did this by leaving the Ethereum network and opting for a much cheaper, faster and more centralised option in the form of the Ronin network. This network only had a handful of validators tasked with authenticating the network. Additionally, all of these validators were closely overseen by Sky Mavis themselves.
This sudden shift in the network was acknowledged by Larsen to be a huge factor in leaving the users vulnerable to the subsequent attack back on March 29th.
Axie Infinity quickly grew to become one of the most played play-to-earn games despite its simple Pokemon-like premise of collecting cute creatures and battling them against other players’ collections. Today, it records 2 million users every day and its marketplace has facilitated $3.6 billion in transactions. With the damage the network has received, Aleksander Larsen and his team predict that recovering the lost crypto could take about two years.
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