Hackers Loot $9.5 Million Worth ETH From Axie Infinity Founder

Back-to-back hacks and theft are troubling the market. Today, a bad actor reportedly wiped out around $9.5 Million worth of Ethereum from the Ronin wallet of the Axie Infinity founder. 

PeckShieldAlert’s ‘X’ post says, “It appears a whale wallet has been compromised, & 3,248 ETH (worth $9.7m) from the Ronin Bridge was withdrawn and transferred to TornadoCash.”

The stolen funds from the founder’s wallet were deposited in three different Ethereum wallets. The usage of Tornado Cash and other similar crypto mixers is surging in the crypto market. 

Hackers use a crypto mixer to eradicate the origin and destination of the crypto token or coins stolen from different accounts. 

Webacy, the wallet monitoring firm, reported nearly an hour ago that a whale wallet on Ronin Bridge was hacked. The post noted, “At least three wallets were linked and pre-funded with 0.1 ETH from Tornado. All of them withdrew a total of $3250 ETH from the Ronin Network bridge at similar time frames.”

Ethereum has shown continuous growth in the past few weeks, but a steep decline of 1.30% in the trading price has been seen in the past 24 hours. Some analysts claim that the theft of more than 3k ETH has troubled the prices. 

On February 23, Ronin’s co-founder Jeff “Jiho” Zirli came up to ‘X’ and posted that his personal Ronin wallet was compromised in an attack. 

Jeff wrote, “This has been a tough morning for me. Two of my addresses have been compromised,” he added. “The attack is limited to my personal accounts, and has nothing to do with validation or operations of the Ronin chain.” 

Ronin Bridge Hack 2022 Explained 

According to available data, Ronin Bridge hacks are among the most destructive attacks in the industry; bad actors wiped out over $600 Million worth of cryptocurrencies. Ethereum and USDC were the major cryptos that the hacker stole from the bridge.

Hackers succeeded in looting the cryptos from Ronin as they succeeded in compromising the private keys.

Market Price Updates

The crypto market capitalization did not reflect any significant improvements in the past 24 hours; earlier on February 21, the market cap had achieved the much-awaited milestone of $2 Trillion. 

It is crucial to note that a significant surge in crypto adoption has been seen to date compared to what will happen in 2023. Bitcoin (BTC) is the most used cryptocurrency, followed by Ethereum, USDC, Solana, and Cardano. 

When writing, BTC was trading at $ 50,945 with a decline of more than 2% weekly. Ethereum, the second most talked about crypto in the market, has recently reflected impressive growth and reached $3,000.

Mr. Pratik chadhokar is an Indian Forex, Cryptocurrencies and Financial Market Advisor and analyst with a background in IT and Financial market Strategist. He specialises in market strategies and technical analysis and has spent over a year as a financial markets contributor and observer. He possesses strong technical analytical skills and is well known for his entertaining and informative analysis of the Financial markets.