What Happened on March 29, 2022?
The biggest hack in DeFi happened today through a security breach on the Ronin Network and more specifically, the Ronin bridge. As a result of the security breach, a total of 173,600 Ethereum and 25.5M USDC was moved off the Ronin side chain, totalling ~$624M. You can read the official statement from the Sky Mavis team here.
According to REKT, this exploit tops the leaderboard in size being ~$13M larger than the Poly Network hack that happened on August 10, 2021, for ~$611M. However, what’s more baffling to some is that despite the statement from the Sky Mavis team that Ronin had been hacked on March 29, 2022, the hack actually first began on March 23, 2022, at 01:58:58 PM +UTC. The transaction to move an initial 300 Ether was completed here with subsequent transactions that continued to funnel out Ether and USDC from the Ronin bridge. You can see where the “exploit” transactions begin here from this wallet address. The wallet was funded through Binance and later deposited some funds onto FTX and Crypto.com. The wallet has kept a majority of remaining funds in its original wallet address. To note, the wallets on the centralized exchanges could be KYC’d accounts that the hacker purchased so there is no way to determine their real identity.
So, how did the exploit happen? Essentially, the attacker managed to get control over Sky Mavis’s four Ronin Validators and a third-party validator run by Axie DAO. The attacker found a backdoor through the gas-free RPC node, which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator, and somehow gained access to Sky Mavis’ four Ronin Validators’ signatures (it is still unknown how this was accomplished). As a result, the attacker was able to move funds from the Ronin chain due to the five signatures out of nine required.
Sky Mavis is now working with law enforcement and their investors to assess next steps and potentially reimburse lost funds. CZ from Binance and SBF from FTX have already publicly committed to doing so.
In other news, OpenSea teased its future integration with Solana coming in April 2022, $WAVES continues to pump as shorts consistently get liquidated, and a future $SAFE airdrop may be coming to holders of the $GNO token.
Stock Market Index Daily Performance (3/29/2022)
Dow Jones ($35,294.19): +$338.30 (+0.97%)
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Majors 24H Performance (3/29/2022) as of 10:42pm ET
BTC ($47,158.95): -$309.19 (-0.65%)
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