Key takeaways:
- Binance and a number of prominent investors have participated in Sky Mavis’ $150 million funding round
- The newly acquired capital will go towards the reimbursement of victims affected by the recent Ronin bridge attack, the largest DeFi exploit to date
- Sky Mavis plans on increasing its platform’s security to prevent the possibility of a similar attack taking place in the future
Axie Infinity creators Sky Mavis raise $150M from Binance and other notable investors
On Wednesday, Binance announced that it had led Sky Mavis’ $150 million financing round, which saw the participation of a number of prominent crypto-focused investors, including Animoca Brands, a16z, Dialectic, and Paradigm.
Sky Mavis, the creators of a popular blockchain-powered gaming universe Axie Infinity, will use a part of the funds to shore up its security and increase its network validator count from five to 21.
As a reminder, Axie Infinity’s sidechain Ronin was hacked roughly two weeks ago, after a malicious actor gained access to five of the nine Ronin chain’s validator nodes (4 Sky Mavis validators and 1 Axie DAO) and was able to exploit the Ronin bridge and made away with 173,600 ETH and 25.5M USDC. At the time, the combined value of stolen crypto assets surpassed $600 million, making the Ronin attack the largest of its kind to date (as shown in The Block‘s interactive table below).
The funds collected in the new funding round will help reimburse victims of the attack. Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao said in a statement:
“In order for the global ecosystem to continue thriving and maturing, it is imperative that we work together, especially when it comes to security, which is our strong suit. We strongly believe Sky Mavis will bring a lot of value and growth for the larger industry and we believe it’s necessary to support them as they work hard to resolve the recent incident.”
According to Binance’s blog post, the leading crypto exchange and Sky Mavis will be joining forces for upcoming exclusive Land NFT sales and to provide access to Binance login through The Mavis Hub.
Sky Mavis CEO Trung Nguyen said in a statement that Sky Mavis will be “implementing rigorous internal security measures to prevent future attacks,” and added that Binance’s support will be instrumental to increase the security of the Ronin network.
