Binance recovers funds worth $5.8m from Axie hack

Crypto exchange Binance has recovered funds worth US$5.8 million, stolen in the hack of the Ronin Network, Axie Infinity’s bridge, last month.

The stolen funds were spread out over 86 accounts, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao said in a tweet. He added that North Korean hackers began moving the lost funds only today.

Axie Infinity marketplace / Photo credit: Emfarsis Consulting

Last month, the Ronin Network suffered a security breach that resulted in the theft of 173,600 ether (nearly US$521.9 million at the time of writing) and about US$25.5 million in USDC stable coins. The stolen tokens sum up to US$620 million, making the hack the largest ever in the crypto world.

Hackers also transferred at least 2,000 ether (nearly US$6 million as of writing) to privacy mixer service Tornado Cash – a move that typically prevents cryptocurrency from being tracked and frozen.

See also: Is Axie Infinity too big to fail?

To reimburse players for their funds, Sky Mavis, developer of Axie Infinity, raised US$150 million in a funding round led by Binance and joined by Animoca Brands, a16z, Dialectic, and Paradigm.

The sales volume of Axie Infinity’s non-fungible token collection jumped over 350% following the news that Sky Mavis would reimburse players. The Vietnamese firm also added five new organizations to its validator node pool: Nansen, Delphi Digital, Stable Node, Animoca Brands, and Dialectic, adding more layers of defense to the platform.

Currency converted from ether to US dollar: US$1 = 0.00033 ETH.