Another blow to the crypto ecosystem, and this time to Axie Infinity, the most successful of the games born in the shadow of the boom in cryptocurrencies and NFT assets. A platform that, it must be recognized, during its early days enjoyed great growth, generating a large number of players and investors around it, who saw in this title the example of the games of the future and, incidentally, of the new paradigm play to earn, play to win (money). At the time I got to know a couple of people who aspired to become millionaires playing Axie Infinity.
I admit that I have never played Axie Infinity, mainly because I did not see any reason to make the necessary investment to enter, and I was not interested in applying for one of the numerous “scholarships” that many investors created, that “did” the use of their teams to other people, who would also receive part of the benefits (if any) achieved in their many hours of play. A kind of commission wage earners, another contribution of the crypto economy.
The fact is that, after an initial boom, for some time now the value of their NFTs has already begun to decline, something that I find hard not to relate to the fact that that new investors have stopped entering in the proportion necessary to maintain their growth (no, no, I have not mentioned the word pyramid at any time, more would be missing…), and now, with the blow that Axie Infinity has received, its future does not seem to have cleared up, but rather the opposite.
And it is that, as its own managers have had to report, the block chain network on which the Axie Infinity cryptoeconomic infrastructure is based has been compromised and, as a consequence, There has been a theft of more than 600 million dollars. More specifically, the attackers have seized 173,600 ethereums and 25.5 million USDCthe stablecoin referenced to the dollar and is viewed favorably by much of the financial sector.
Some of the latest operations of the wallet to which the stolen funds have been transferred in Axie Infinity.
The biggest problem, however, is not the robbery itself, but rather that it has brought to light an open secret, which is the poor security of the Ronin network, the one used by Axie Infinity, due to the small number of validators (the elements responsible for validating each operation of the chain) that make it up. Nine, only nine validators are responsible for accrediting operations on the network. Thus, if an attacker manages to gain control of five of them, he will have absolute control over it. And this is what has happened.
As always in these cases, there is explicit evidence of the cryptocurrency wallet to which they have been transferred the stolen ethereums and USDC (if you are curious you can see it in this link), but also as always, solving that wallet in a person is terribly complex, so the possibility of recovering all the money stolen from Axie Infinity users is not is exactly high.
At the moment, those responsible for Axie Infinity have taken several measures, such as increase the number of validators needed in each operation from five to eight, in addition to disconnecting Ronin from the Ethereum network. However, if we add what has happened to the fact that in recent months the interest in the game seemed to be declining, it draws us an unflattering future. I hope that there will be no one left who aspires to become a millionaire, because I am afraid that he will have to sit and wait… and watch what happens with his cryptos and his tokens, lest, in the end, he end up losing more than he has earned .
