In late March, Ronin bridge, an Ethereum sidechain built for the widely popular play-to-earn (P2E) NFT game Axie Infinity to handle surging demand from gamers, was hacked for over 173,600 Ether (ETH) and 25.5 million USD — a combined value of over $600 million. The company’s official report regarding the hack noted that the hackers managed to get access to validator nodes, which resulted in the compromise of five validator nodes, a threshold also required to approve a transaction. Currently, the Ronin chain consists of nine validator nodes, and the hacker managed to get access to four of them and a third-party validator run by Axie DAO. This Axie DAO node was the root cause of the exploit last year. The DAO gave its access to Sky Mavis, the developers behind the game to sign off on transactions on its behalf. Because the access was never revoked, hackers leveraged it to their benefit by turning it into backdoor access, leading to a multi-million dollar hack. In the aftermath of the exploit, the Ronin bridge was closed, and all the deposits and withdrawals were halted for investigation purposes. In response to the hack, Axie Infinity co-founder and COO Aleksander Leonard Larsen said at the time that they would be adding several new validators to the Ronin Network to decentralize the network further. The game developers also promised to increase the number of validator nodes from nine to 21 in the future. The Inevitable Fu...
