Also known as the ‘Pokémon of NFTs’, ‘Axie Infinity’ has long become a viral phenomenon in the world of cryptocurrencies. Its popularity and success have now been compromised by the biggest heist in the history of cryptocurrencies: hackers managed to steal nearly $600 million.

What is ‘Axie Infinity’?. It is a video game developed by the Vietnamese company Sky Mavis. Players can collect and create NFTs represented by digital pets called Axies. One can breed them and then put them to fight with others.

The game is famous for its ‘play to win’ model (something like “play to make money”) and has become a viral phenomenon and a real economic success: it was recently the first game of its kind. Sales in excess of $4,000 million. For its operation ‘Axie Infinty’ uses its own cryptocurrency and the Ronin network, a blockchain derived from Ethereum.

What is a ronin? As we said, the Ronin network is a blockchain created by Sky Mavis in February 2021 that solves a big problem: the fees charged for transactions with the ETH and Ethereum network are very high, making it impossible to use them successfully. Infinity’.

What did its creators do? Well, inventing a new blockchain that connects with Ethereum via a bridge or ‘bridge’. This bridge is nothing but a smart contract that allows tokens to be transferred between two different blockchains.

dude where is my ETH. Yesterday, those in charge of Ronin announced that this bridge was compromised and 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, were stolen. The current value of these cryptocurrencies brings the amount of theft, including both cryptocurrencies, to about $615 million.

The narrowest heist in crypto history: The Poly Network heist in August 2021 was worth $610 million, but the hacker responsible returned all the money because he wanted the company to learn something. It seems that this is not the intention of the hackers who are currently stealing from the Ronin network. As always, you know which wallet the money is in, but good luck identifying its owner.

Key to theft: (several) verifiers. The theft was not caused by a traditional vulnerability in the blockchain or a bridge smart contract – that’s what happened with Poly. It was actually much easier, because the hacker (or hackers) managed to take control of the majority of the nodes controlling the blockchain.

These validators allow transactions to be confirmed on the Ronin network (which uses a Proof of Authority model). The problem is that there were only 9 validators on Ronin and the hacker took control of five of them. The Bitcoin blockchain, for example, has about 15,000 nodes, so an attack that tries to gain control and thus manage consensus is much more complex.

‘Axie Infinity’ (and NFTs) going straight. As they stated on Vice, this is probably not the last of the concerns for this video game. Its creators promised to strengthen the functioning of their network, but even before this massive theft, the value of the platform was declining: its tokens and NFTs were noticeably devalued, causing the creators to reduce the mintage of these tokens to avoid collapse. . It’s not just something that happens in this game: a third of the NFT is no longer worth anything.