Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network Suffers $625M Exploit

The latest crypto hack may be the largest yet.

The gaming-focused Ronin Network announced Tuesday a loss of over $625 million in USDC and ether (ETH).

According to a blog post published by the Ronin Network’s official Substack, the exploit affected Ronin Network validator nodes for Sky Mavis, the publishers of the popular Axie Infinity game, and the Axie DAO.

An attacker “used hacked private keys in order to forge fake withdrawals” from the Ronin bridge across two transactions, as seen on Etherscan.

While the Ronin sidechain has nine validators requiring five signatures for withdrawals and is meant to protect against these types of attacks, the blog post notes that “the attacker found a backdoor through our gas-free RPC node, which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator.”