The Ronin network breach of Axie Infinity is one of the biggest DeFi hacks ever, but that damage is becoming minimized. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis announced that over $30 million worth of the stolen cryptocurrency has been recovered.
Aside from the blog post, this news was also revealed at the official AxieCon event in Barcelona.
Chainalysis, according to the firm, was able to locate the stolen funds, which the North Korean hacker group Lazarus was claimed by the US treasury to have stolen, which were laundered and then transferred to centralised exchanges.
Chainalysis stated that the law enforcement authorities were able to reclaim the stolen cryptocurrency after arriving at the exchanges, where the hackers were found trying to trade the tokens for fiat money and subsequently withdraw it.
On March 23, the theft of 173,600 WETH (Wrapped Ethereum) and 25.5 million USDC stablecoin from the bridge that links the custom sidechain of Axie Infinity to the Ethereum mainnet occurred as part of the Ronin network breach.
At the time of the attack, all of the cryptocurrencies were valued at $552 million in total. But, by the time it was made to the public almost a week later, its value had grown to $622 million.
The stolen crypto is currently only worth roughly $307 million due to the crypto market crash in May and the bleak economic climate. As the result, the investigators have currently recovered about 10% of the stolen crypto.
Cryptocurrency stolen by a North Korean hacking group has never before been seized, but Erin Plante, Chainalysis Senior Director of Investigations, believed that “it won’t be the last.”
With only nine validators in all of the blockchain, which was attributed to insufficient decentralization, five of them are controlled by Lazarus via the use of stolen private keys. This enabled the hacker group to steal hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency during the Ronin bridge attack.
The closed Ronin bridge was reopened by Sky Mavis in late June, and all individual users were fully reimbursed. However, an amount of 56,000 missing ETH remained in the Axie DAO’s treasury while law enforcement worked to retrieve the stolen funds.
