Three months after the Ronin Bridge was breached for more than $600 million, Sky Mavis, the creators of the well-known play-to-earn (P2E) nonfungible token (NFT) game Axie Infinity, stated that the bridge is back up.
Users can move assets between the sidechain and the Ethereum mainnet via the Ronin bridge, an Ethereum sidechain created for Axie Infinity.
On March 29, 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC were removed from the bridge after hackers were able to somehow get access to private validator keys. The hack was valued at around $620 million at the time.
Ronin Bridge is back online after three audits
The Sky Mavis team said on Tuesday that the Ronin bridge is now operational following three audits (one internal and two external), a redesigned layout, and complete restitution of users’ stolen assets:
By providing the ETH liquidity to support customers’ Wrapped ETH (wETH) on the Ronin network, Sky Mavis has already refunded 117,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC in total.
Due to Binance’s offering of a bridge to its exchange that let users to convert their wETH to ETH, some 46,000 of those ETH had already been paid out as of April.
Liquidity for the purchase was provided by the founders’ cash and the remaining amount at Axie Infinity. Binance also organized a $150 million investment round to help Sky Mavis pay back Axie Infinity consumers.
The remaining 56,000 of the total stolen ETH are owned by the Axie DAO Treasury and will remain uncollateralized as Sky Mavis “works with legal authorities to collect the money.”
Sky Mavis has upgraded the smart contract software as part of the revised bridge architecture to allow validators to establish daily withdrawal limitations, with the starting amount set at $50 million at this time. Additionally, the company put in place a circuit breaker system that categorizes withdrawals into three groups.
Sky Mavis recognized that the Ronin bridge had been vulnerable to the assault because of its lack of decentralization in a postmortem investigation that was published in late April. There were now only nine validator nodes, and only four of them were usable by employees.
After quickly increasing the number of nodes to 11, Sky Mavis announced intentions to do the same within three months of the autopsy, bringing the total number of nodes to at least 21, with the long-term goal of topping 100.
In the most recent statement, the team did not offer an update on the number of validator nodes that the Ronin network presently has.
