Axie Infinity earlier this year experienced a notable hacking incident. The attackers compromised a series of validator nodes connected to Axie Infinity to conduct fraudulent withdrawals. Hackers stole 173,600 Ethereum and 25.5 million USD Coins. This was valued at approximately $620 million at the time (and approximately $370 million as of the time of writing). As a result of the breach that occurred on the Ronin blockchain in March, the Vietnamese game developer Sky Mavis, which is the entity behind the blockchain-based game Axie Infinity (AXS), is denying any wrongdoing. An approximately USD 3 million worth of its native AXS token was transferred from Ronin to a Binance account in the hours leading up to the discovery of the breach.
According to Bloomberg, Sky Mavis asserts that its CEO Trung Nguyen was diverting the funds to his wallet. The decision is to protect the company and assist users in the aftermath of the hack.
Furthermore, the hackers targeted Axie’s Ronin bridge. This enables users to send cryptocurrency between Ethereum (ETH) and Axie’s Ronin sidechain. In addition, this led to an exploit to the tune of more than USD 600 million in March of last year. Resulting in making it one of the largest thefts in the history of decentralized finance (DeFi).
Nguyen tweeted that the “accusations are baseless and false” in response to what he describes as “speculation of insider trading”. This is related to the Ronin attack, which would financially benefit him. He added that, in addition to this, the “accusations are baseless and false.”
In point of fact, “the Founding Team even deposited [USD] 7.5M from a known Axie multi-sig wallet TO Ronin Network prior to the bridge closing to avoid triggering any short-sellers watching,” according to the article.
Nguyen, the Axie Infinity developer, asserted that Axie Infinity and the community surrounding it are his life’s work.
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) stated that “the Founding Team chose to transfer it from my wallet to ensure that short-sellers, who track official Axie wallets, would not be able to front-run the news.”
“I accept full responsibility for the breach in security, and I will use this situation as a teaching opportunity.”
Upon the news of the re-opening of the bridge and all the player funds backed 1:1. This prompted a variety of responses from other Twitter users, the majority of which were positive.
One Twitter user stated, “The Axie Infinity community will continue to support you Trung, shun the non-believers.”
In contrast to this, another user asked the company’s CEO “what you were doing every week the bridge was down” and “why did it take so long to BUILD the bridge back up?”
At the beginning of this month, Sky Mavis made public a number of updates to the popular game. These updates included a variety of upgrades. Furthermore, Sky Mavis stated that “an incredible amount of progress has been made in refining and aligning the typical Ronin user experience”. They explained that this involved improving the asset on/off ramp interface by making it more user-friendly and simpler. In addition, they stated that this involved:
We are making rapid progress toward decentralizing the Ronin network; however, there are a number of additional backend functions that we need to build for validators. Thus, these functions include voting processes and various summary dashboards.
