Ronin network falls victim to another exploit, loses over $11 million

Ronin Network, an Ethereum virtual machine blockchain for play-to-win games, just witnessed its second hack in roughly two years. Miners have mined over $11 million from the protocol.

A tweet from blockchain security firm PeckShield revealed that a Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bot has just withdrawn $11.33 million worth of Ether (ETH) and USD Coin (USDC) from the Ronin Bridge of the net. The tweet speculated whether the transactions were executed by exploiters or white hat hackers.

Ronin Bridge loses $11.33 million in operating income

The first transaction saw 4,000 ETH worth $9.33 million leave the Ronin bridge to the MEV bot address. In the second, the MEV bot withdrew approximately $2 million in USDC and exchanged it for 796 Wrapped Ether (WETH) on the Uniswap V3 decentralized exchange.

Shortly after PeckShield’s alert, Aleksander Leonard Larsen, the co-founder and COO of Sky Mavis, the developer behind the Ronin network, revealed that the protocol team had halted operations to investigate a report by white hat hackers about a potential MEV exploit.

According to Larsen, Ronin Bridge currently has more than $850 million in cryptocurrencies and all assets are safe. He said more information about the attack will be released after the team completes an in-depth analysis.

Another Ronin attack

The latest attack against Ronin has raised concerns in the crypto community about a repeat of an incident that rocked the network two years ago. In March 2022, the Ronin network was the victim of the largest crypto hack in history, losing approximately $620 million in ETH and USDC because the network’s validator nodes were compromised.

Although Sky Mavis offered a $1 million reward in exchange for the funds, the attackers eventually revealed themselves to be the notorious North Korean hacking entity – the Lazarus Group – which disseminated the stolen storage via of centralized exchanges, the Bitcoin network and the Tornado Cash crypto mixer. .

The Ronin network took a huge hit after the incident and struggled to refund affected users. Three months after the attack, the project finally rebooted the bridge, implementing a hard fork that required network validators to update their software.

Meanwhile, cryptographic losses from exploits have not only been specific to the Ronin network; one of its co-founders has also lost millions to exploiters. Earlier this year, Jeff Zirlin lost $10 million in ETH due to a security breach in his wallets.

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