Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge to Resume Operations Next Week

Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge is set to resume operations in the coming week following months of activity halt after its funds were drained when a damning hack disrupted its operations. Taking to Twitter to share the news, the Ronin protocol said its engineers have been hard at work to get the platform restarted after the exploit.

With June 28th projected as the set time for the re-opening, the protocol confirmed all user’s previously locked funds will be restored.

The protocol said that for the bridge to re-open without a hitch, there will be a need for a hardfork, which will require all validators to update their software. The protocol confirmed that the validators have shared the necessary information that will guide them towards the next steps to take to update their softwares.

The Ronin Bridge comes off as the biggest Decentralized Finance (DeFi) hack in recent times, with more than $625 million stolen by the hackers. These hackers are suspected to be the North Korean cybercrime ring, Lazarus Group. These groups have been flagged based on the involvement of US authorities who also unveiled that the proceeds of the hack were sent to the crypto mixing service, Blender.io. 

A lot of addresses including those associated with Blender have been placed on the Treasury Department’s sanctions list.

Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge Recovery

The attack on the Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge is a major one for the broader NFT gaming ecosystem, and a lot of players in the space have come together to support the protocol to achieve its observed rapid recovery.

One of these entities is Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency trading platform. The exchange, according to its Chief Executive Officer, Changpeng Zhao, said it was able to help Ronin Bridge recover $5.8 million of the stolen funds as the hackers made an attempt to launder the funds through the trading platform. 

While not all exchanges announce their collective efforts in this manner, it is safe to say more are involved in helping to monitor the activities of the hackers to help discover a loophole that can aid in recovering the funds.