Sky Mavis, the creator of popular play-to-win non-fungible token game Axie Infinity, has raised $150 million in a new funding round led by Binance.
The fundraiser is intended to repay funds lost from Axie Infinity's recent Ronin Bridge exploit, which resulted in losses of more than $600 million. The funding round also saw the participation of Animoca Brands, a16z, Dialectic, Paradigm and Accel.
Like Cointelegraph reported earlier, the explorer behind the hack managed to drain 173,600 Ethereum (ETH) and 25.5 million USD coin (USDC) in just two transactions using hacked private keys. At that time, the creators of the NFT game had promised that they would try to recover all lost funds or refund users with the help of their investors.
In addition to the $150 million raised, the remaining amount will be repaid from the balance of Sky Mavis and Axie Infinity. The developers also identified a small set of validators in Axie DAO as the root cause of the exploit and decided to increase the number of validator pools to 21 within the next three months.
The developers behind the project estimate that it could be several weeks before the Ronin Bridge is active again, as they are working on the security update and subsequent audits before reopening it for users. Meanwhile, Binance is helping Axie Inifitny users deposit and withdraw ETH on the Ronin network.
Related: Axie Infinity (AXS) Price Turns Head with Over 50% Gain Ahead of Origin Launch
If the stolen funds are not recovered within two years, Axie DAO would vote on the next steps for its treasury. Binance and Sky Mavis did not respond to requests for comment from Cointelegraph at press time.
Many in the crypto community believed that the hacker behind the Ronin Bridge exploit would eventually return the funds, much like the Poly Network operator. However, until now, there has been no evidence of any such communication between the game's developers and the hackers.
The exploiter account Axie Infinity has started moving funds to coin mixer services like Tornado Cash in an attempt to launder the stolen funds. However, it is important to note that at first the network operator Poly did the same, but eventually decided to return the funds, as it was becoming more and more difficult to launder such a high amount.
The address of the hacker who stole $610 million in the Ronin_Network case began to move, transferring 1,000 ETH to another address and then 200 ETH to TornadoCash. https://t.co/7RYHCmwght
โ Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) April 4, 2022
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