Pete Pachal, CoinDesk’s chief of staff for the content team, argues the gaming-focused Ronin Network’s announcement of a security breach shows that ‘things start to get a little dicey’ when moving further away from core crypto products.
Some of the stolen crypto assets from one of the biggest heists have been recovered.
It may be a small portion of what was taken in the hack, but its a start.
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The digital-asset exchange Binance said it was able to recover about $5.8 million worth of the stolen loot that had made its way onto its platform in disguise, according to Bloomberg.
The discovery comes more than a week after the U.S. tied one of the biggest heists in crypto to a North Korean hacking group.
$625M RONIN CRYPTO HEIST: WHAT TO KNOW
Last week, the U.S. Treasury Department pinned the theft of more than $600 million in cryptocurrency to the North Korean hacking group Lazarus.
The theft was from the Ronin software bridge, which is used by players of Axie Infinity to transfer crypto.
Axie Infinity, which has 2.8 million daily active players, allows users to earn money by collecting, trading and playing with virtual creatures called Axies. Players have traded approximately $3.6 billion on its in-house marketplace prior to the hack (Axie Infinity / Fox News)
It was reported hackers stole some 173,600 ether tokens and 25.5 million USD Coin tokens on March 23.
Binance discovered the stolen assets by literally following the money through a series of moves made by the hackers.
Treasury identified an Ethereum wallet address tied to the group. Binance traced the stolen funds when they were moved from the hackers’ wallet to Tornado Cash — a service that allows for anonymous token transfers on the Ethereum blockchain. The funds then made it to the exchange.
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The crypto was discovered in 86 different accounts on Binance’s exchange, the firm’s chief executive officer, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, said in a tweet.
The recent find raises hopes that more will be recovered.
The moving of roughly 56,200 Ether, or about $170 million worth of stolen cryptocurrencies were discovered this past week moved out of the main address on the Ethereum blockchain used by the perpetrators, blockchain data shows.
The stolen funds were all sent to newly created addresses, with some of those addresses in turn transferring the tokens to Tornado Cash.
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All told, more than $230 million of the crypto has moved from the wallet, according to blockchain data firm Peckshield.
