- Binance intercepted $5.8M in stolen funds and will return them to refund the bridge smart contract.
- Axie Infinity starts Season 21 on April 25 for one last round of the old game rules.
- Origin in maintenance to repair bugs.
The funds taken from the Axie Infinity Ronin-ETH bridge are still monitored, and recently, Binance managed to intercept some of the specially created accounts attempting to liquidate. Some of the funds were mixed using Tornado Cash, but others spread to various addresses and were still visible on the Ethereum network.
The hacking attack was earlier linked to the Lazarus hacker group of North Korea. Binance has intercepted exploit funds in the past, at least partially reimbursing the owners. Changpeng Zhao, co-founder and CEO of the Binance International Exchange,
The sum is a relatively small part of the whole haul, which is estimated at between $621M and $630M in ETH and USDC tokens. However, even this will lighten the load for Sky Mavis, which raised $150M and will fill in the rest from its treasury.
Axie Infinity has promised to return the funds to the bridge once it’s deemed safe to reopen. Ronin’s team has given a lot of leeway to audit the smart contracts and achieve better security.
The Ronin bridge hack was discovered on March 29, but the biggest withdrawals had already started on March 23. Ronin-ETH is currently the biggest single-strike exploit against a DeFi protocol.
Axie Origin Goes into Maintenance
The Axie Origin update has stunning art, but is still aiming to reach its promised goals with new functions. Recently, the game went into maintenance mode. Origin is yet to gain P2E functions and will continue to be tested as free-to-play.
Axie Infinity is three days away from Season 21, to run until June 24, possibly the last active game season before Axie Origin manages to put up leaderboards.
During the off-season period, AXS slid to $46.05. SLP is down to $0.016, not in freefall but also not recovering anywhere close to previous levels. RON, the native asset of Ronin, slid to $1.35 after another day of losses.
The new season will come with stricter rules that may affect large accounts, while distributing earnings to real players with a single team of Axies.
