Inside the mega crypto heist worth $600MILLION that ‘nobody noticed for six days’

A GAMING developer let an advanced blockchain system spiral out of control leading to a massive breach.

The hacker took the keys to a crypto bank and vanished into cyberspace.

Cryptocurrency is in the crosshairs of public opinion.

Some investors love crypto’s detachment from the US dollar while others feel there is a lack of use cases.

The popularity of digital currency spawned a whole genre of play-to-earn (P2E) games, where users can win cryptocoins that can be sold on trading markets.

Axie Infinity, one of the top-ranked P2E games, had a hacker slip into its servers and claim $600million dollars from the game’s digital treasury – the breach went undetected until a different user’s transaction failed six days later.

Axie Infinity’s in-game currency is called Smooth Love Potions (SLPs) – for a time, SLPs were attached directly to the Ethereum blockchain.

To circumvent Ethereum’s transaction fees, Sky Mavis – the game’s developer – built a parallel blockchain called Ronin.

Ronin was built on a proof-of-authority code, an approval mechanism where validators stamp transactions.

The Axie Infinity hackers compromised a majority of the nine validating signatures – giving them the ability to approve any transaction they imagined.

Evidently, the hacker imagined walking off with about 173,000 Ethereum coins and $25million in other crypto assets.

ARSTechnica reported that a considerable chunk of the heist – about 6,000 Ethereum coins worth $19million – is stored in a found crypto wallet.

The spotlight is on some of the loot, and loads of intersecting financial institutions are tracing the rest, but the hacker had a six day head start to bury their tracks.

A post to Ronin’s Substack wrote that the Ronin network is currently closed to withdrawals or deposits.

The letter concluded “Sky Mavis is committed to ensuring that all of the drained funds are recovered or reimbursed.”