How Axie Infinity Recovers From $600M Hack, New Ronin Bridge Re-Launched

The company behind the popular non-fungible token (NFT) game Axie Infinity, Sky Mavis, celebrated the re-launch of its Ronin Bridge. This cross-chain platform powers the game and allows users to deposit, stake, withdraw, and access other features. The bridge was drained out of $600 million in March 2022.

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 Since the attack, Sku Mavis and the team behind Axie Infinity have been working with law enforcement agencies to recover the 173,600 ETH and $25.5 million in USDC. In that sense, they have re-deploy the Ronin Bridge and covered all the users’ funds lost during the attack.

As stated in the announcement, all users have been made whole. The new Ronin (RON) network has been audited by two external companies, Verichains and Certik. These companies made their security findings public after analyzing the Ronin Bridge Smart Contracts and its components. Verichains said:

During the audit process, the audit team had identified some vulnerable issues in the application, along with some recommendations. Sky Mavis team has resolved and update smart contract code following our recommendations. Ronin Bridge Smart Contracts has passed with no Medium, High, or Critical severity issues.

In addition to the two independent audits on its smart contracts, the Ronin Bridge’s new design has implemented a new “circuit-breaker” feature. This was directly added to prevent a bad actor from replicating the previous attack or exploiting any potential new attack vector.

According to the announcement, the company will try to track down the stolen funds. In the meantime, as mentioned, all users will be able to withdraw their assets:

All wETH and USDC owned by Ronin Network users is now fully backed 1:1 by ETH and USDC on Ethereum, as promised. All users’ have been made whole.

This excluded the 56,000 ETH from the Axie Infinity DAO. The state of these assets will depend on the potential success of law enforcement actions. If this initiative yields no result after 2 years, the Axie DAO will “vote on next steps for the treasury”.

How Axie Infinity Will Protect Users From Potential Attacks

The circuit-breaker system will operate with a limit-based withdrawal on overall value. Large withdrawals will need to be validated by over 70% of the node or will need to obtain 90% of the validator signatures if they are over $1 million.

Withdrawals of over $10 million will need 90% of the validators’ signatures and will need to comply with a manual review process which can take up to 7 days. The new Ronin Network will have a daily total withdrawal limit of $50 million.

If transactions on the network reach this limit, a Ronin administrator will need to manually reset it. The team behind the project said:

We are more committed than ever to seeing Ronin become the industry standard for blockchain gaming and consumer applications.

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At the time of writing, Ethereum (ETH) trades at $1,184 with sideways movement on the 4-hour chart.