Key takeaways:
- Over 65,000 ETH (worth approx. $205M at current market rates) out of 173,600 ETH stolen in the Ronin attack have already been moved
- The attacker is sending ETH to Tornado Cash, a popular anonymizing service that breaks the on-chain link between source and destination addresses
- Ronin Bridge was exploited from over $600M in ETH and USDC in late March in what was the biggest hack of its kind to date
Almost a third of ETH stolen in the Ronin Bridge hack has been sent to new addresses
In late March, the Ronin Network was exploited for more than $600 million worth of Ethereum in what was the largest DeFi attack to date. At the time, the team behind the Ethereum-linked sidechain of the popular crypto game Axie Infinity stated that the attacker gained access to the majority of validators nodes and was able to sign transactions, and made away with 173,600 ETH and 25.5M USDC.
Roughly three weeks after the initial attack, more than 65,000 ETH have been transferred out of the Ethereum wallet associated with the Ronin Bridge hack. It is currently presumed that the attack originated from North Korea, although some in the crypto community believe that the attack was carried out by a single person not associated with state actors.
Whoever was behind the attack has already moved roughly a third of the stolen funds to new addresses, according to Etherscan. What’s more, the attacker is upping the amount of transferred ETH with each subsequent transfer. The largest transaction at press time was approved on April 19 and amounted to 18,256 ETH, worth over $57 million at the time of the transaction.
The funds transferred to new addresses have been sent to Tornado Cash in 100 ETH increments. The attacker is apparently using the popular decentralized service to mask his transactions and make it possible to cash out stolen funds.
In the aftermath of the Ronin Bridge attack, Axie Infinity’s creators Sky Mavis raised $150 million in a funding round that was led by Binance and saw participation from Animoca Brands, a16z, Dialectic, and Paradigm. The Sky Mavis team said the funds will be used to reimburse victims of the unfortunate attack and to enhance security of its blockchain platform.
