- Tuesday morning, Ronin Network suspended its bridge due to $11.8 million being transferred to MEV bots.
- White hats get credited with the activity and will get paid a $500,000 bounty for returning the monies.
- A co-founder of Ronin claims that the bridge presently secures more than $850 million, which is “safe.”
- In 2022, Ronin’s bridge was already breached for over $600 million.
Axie Infinity, a play-to-earn game connected to the blockchain network Ronin RON -0.98%, stopped its bridge on Tuesday morning due to withdrawals of $11.8 million to MEV bots.
Around 9:37 a.m. UTC, the first transaction took place, including the transfer of around $3,996 ETH + 1.13% ($9.8 million). Around $2 million worth of stablecoin USDC was transferred in another transaction at 10:11 a.m. Though it could not be verified at first, many speculated that it might be white hat activity, which implies that an ethical hacker might have been responsible for the incident. At 10:15 a.m., the bridge was then put on hold.
The Ronin Network bridge has been put on hold while we look into a white hat report that Axie Infinity and Ronin Network co-founder Aleksander Larsen, nicknamed Psycheout, submitted on X regarding a possible MEV exploit. We’ll be in touch soon with further details. At the moment, the bridge safely secures over $850 million.
The actors removed roughly 4,000 ETH and 2 million USDC, which is the maximum amount of each asset that may be removed from the bridge in a single transaction, according to a later confirmation from Ronin Network.
White hats alerted us to a possible exploit on the Ronin bridge earlier today. The project said that the bridge was suspended about 40 minutes after the initial on-chain action was noticed, following verification of the reports. In order to improve the security of large fund withdrawals, the bridge limit is an essential safety measure that successfully stopped additional harm from this exploit.
The Ronin Network team clarified that a bridge upgrade on Tuesday caused a problem that caused the bridge to misread the necessary vote threshold for bridge operators to withdraw funds. The upgrade was implemented through the bridge’s governance mechanism. The team announced that it was now working on a root cause solution and that a new bridge upgrade would undergo extensive audits before being put to a vote by bridge operators in advance of deployment.
The project stated that Ronin is in the process of talking with the actors, who seem to be behaving in a good faith manner and are functioning as white hats. It reiterated that all user payments are secure and that any remaining funds will be reinvested into the bridge upon its reopening. Next week, a more thorough post-mortem on the incident is anticipated.
Ronin Network provided a further statement on Tuesday afternoon, stating that the ether had been refunded and that the USDC monies would be sent later in the day. The white hats will receive a $500,000 prize from Ronin’s bug bounty program, the team continued.
Prior Ronin-related events
In March 2022, Ronin’s Ethereum bridge experienced a hack that cost more over $600 million. The biggest DeFi exploit in history involved the loss of 173,600 ETH, or around $590 million, and $25.5 million in stablecoin USDC due to an exploit using five validator keys.
In February of this year, wallets associated with Jeffrey Zirlin, co-developer of Axie Infinity inventor Sky Mavis, were also compromised, resulting in the loss of $9.7 million in ether.
According to The Block’s Ronin Price Page, the price of RON, the cryptocurrency that powers Ronin, fell by almost 4% right after this most recent event. Nonetheless, it has gained over 9% in the last day amidst a widespread cryptocurrency rebound after Monday’s market collapse.
Disclaimer : This article was created for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. An asset’s past performance does not predict its future returns. Before making an investment, please conduct your own research, as digital assets like cryptocurrencies are highly risky and volatile financial instruments.
