Ronin Blockchain

History

2022: Theft of cryptocurrency for $625 million

At the end of March 2022, a cryptocurrency worth about $625 million was stolen from the Ronin blockchain project. This is the largest theft of cryptographic assets in history.

According to Ronin, representatives of the project continue to work with law enforcement agencies to return 173,600 Ethereum (at the end of March 2022 it is about $600 million) and 25.5 million USDC (cryptocurrency tied to the US dollar) from the criminal who removed them from the network on March 23.

The largest cryptocurrency theft in history

The attack was aimed at the nodes of the Ronin project validator - Sky Mavis Ronin and the nodes of the Axie DAO validator. According to Sky Mavis, the attacker used hacked private security keys to compromise network nodes that check transfers to and from the Ronin blockchain. This allowed the attacker to quietly output a large number of Ethereum and USDC.

Ronin representatives discovered the attack a week later - after the user said that he could not withdraw 5 thousand Ethereum coins.

According to Sky Mavis, NFT tokens that users must buy in order to access Axie Infinity were not compromised, as were in-game cryptocurrencies SLP and AXS.

The attack was made possible partly because of Ronin's decision to use fewer nodes for validation in order to increase transaction speed and reduce network load. However, this approach poses a security risk if most network nodes are compromised. This is a potential vulnerability for blockchains that position themselves as cheaper and more environmentally friendly than Ethereum.

Sky Mavis says it will increase the required number of nodes to eight for transactions and will launch the blockchain again as soon as it is safe. The Ronin hack, apparently, is the largest hacking of DeFi networks at the end of March 2022, following the theft of $322 million from Wormhole in February 2022.^[1]

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