Axie Infinity's Ronin Ethereum bridge officially reopens following hack

Quick Take

  • Ronin announced Tuesday that its Ronin Ethereum bridge has gone live.
  • Added changes include 1:1 backing and a system to halt suspiciously large withdrawals. 
  • The souped-up bridge came after an exploit in March that drained over $600 million in user funds.

Sky Mavis-backed blockchain developer Ronin has officially reopened the Ronin bridge. 

Now, users can transact funds to and from the Ronin network with all wrapped ETH (wETH) and USDC backed 1:1 by ETH and USDC on Ethereum, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

Ronin is the Ethereum sidechain undergirding the hit play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, developed by blockchain game developer Sky Mavis. 

These changes are the result of the $600 million hack the infrastructure on March 29 of this year. In addition to this bridge backing user funds, Sky Mavis also employed a zero-trust redesign and a circuit-breaker system that halts suspiciously large withdrawals for added security. 

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After announcing plans last week, that bridge has relaunched after two external audits and one internal audit. The Sky Mavis team promises to reimburse those affected by the exploit now that the bridge is live. 

“All users have been made whole,” Ronin said in a Tuesday newsletter. 

The United States government connected the Ronin hackers to the Lazarus Group, a cybercriminal organization connected to the North Korean government. The group took control of nine validator nodes on Ronin to take 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC from the bridge, The Block previously reported. 


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About Author

MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.