Sky Mavis, the company behind the popular play-to-earn (P2E) game, made the announcement.
Sky Mavis, the company behind the popular for-profit (P2E) game Axie Infinity, announced that with the help of Norwegian authorities, it has recovered $5.7 million following the infamous Ronin Bridge incident in 2022.
On June 7, Sky Mavis reported that Norway’s central economic and environmental crime unit, called Økokrim, had frozen and returned $5.7 million in funds generated by the Ronen Bridge hack.
Sky Mavis said this effort requires coordination between law enforcement, lawyers, accountants and blockchain forensic teams like Chainalogy.
The blockchain gaming company publicly thanked the Norwegian government and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for tracking the funds and recovering the assets.
Part of the money will be used to cover expenses
The newly recovered funds will be returned to Axie Infinity’s (AXS) treasury, the gaming company said. However, part of the funds will be allocated to cover the expenses of those who worked to restore it. They wrote:
“15% of recovered assets will be used to cover costs and expenses incurred by those involved in recovery efforts. The remaining 85% of the refund will be deposited into the Axie Infinity vault.
At the same time, the company announced that in addition to the $5.7 million in recovered funds, law enforcement authorities froze an additional $40 million in digital assets. The company said recovering these assets will take time and it does not yet have a specific timetable for their return.
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Ronin Bridge Incident
The Ronin Bridge hack remains one of the costliest security breaches in the cryptocurrency space. On March 29, 2022, the Ronin network reported a security breach affecting its Ronin Bridge, a protocol that facilitates asset transfers from Ethereum to Ronin.
The vulnerability saw 173,600 Ethereum (ETH) and $25.5 million (USDC) drained in two transactions when the attacker used compromised private keys to make fake withdrawals. At that time, the assets were valued at $612 million.
Sky Mavis raised $150 million to compensate affected users in April 2022 through a funding round led by cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Since then, the creators of Axie Infinity have strengthened the security of the Ronin blockchain by collaborating with more validators such as Google Cloud.
Despite the incident, Ronin remains one of the leading blockchains for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Currently, it ranks as the third best blockchain in terms of NFT sales of all time, behind Solana and Ethereum.
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