An Ethereum (ETH)-based gaming altcoin is skyrocketing after being abruptly listed by Coinbase, the top US-based crypto exchange platform by volume. In a new announcement, Coinbase says that starting on March 21st, it will be adding support for Ronin (RON), a protocol developed by play-to-earn blockchain game developer Sky Mavis, the same team that created […]
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A gaming-focused Ethereum (ETH) sidechain is integrating with Binance Pay as a means of making wallet funding easier for consumers. In a new blog post, Ethereum sidechain Ronin (RON) says that it is collaborating with the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume to make it easier to fund the Ronin crypto wallet. According to Ronin, […]
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The first Web2 game of the series to be bridged to Ronin is Zoids Wild Arena.
On November 2, Sky Mavis, the developer behind the popular monster-battle nonfungible tokens (NFT) game Axie Infinity, announced a partnership with Korean gaming studio Act Games, to bring a variety of Japanese video game franchises to its native Ronin blockchain.
In an email seen by Cointelegraph, the partnership revealed that the first game to be bridged to Ronin is Zoids Wild Arena, inspired by Japan's largest toy manufacturer Tomy's award-winning anime series. It was first unveiled by Tomy in 1983 as a plastic model figure. Other franchises to be migrated include Hello Kitty Aggretsuko and Bubble Bobble.
"Act Games excels at expanding iconic IPs, transcending demographics, and enhancing player engagement. This alliance will allow us to combine our web3 learnings and expertise with nostalgic IP backed by a pre-existing core fanbase," said Trung Nguyen, CEO and Co-founder of Sky Mavis, regarding the development. Initial incentives include Zoids NFTs and a token drop for users who migrate to a Ronin wallet to play the game. Since 2019, Act Games has developed four arcade-style games with net sales of $6.4 million and 3 million downloads.
Since inception, Sky Mavis' Axie Infinity has $4.2 billion in NFT sales volume, millions of daily active users during its peak, and $1.3 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, its Ethereum Virtual Machine-powered gaming blockchain Ronin ranks only behind that of Ethereum itself in terms of NFT sales transactions. The company is currently based in Vietnam and Singapore, with noticeable funding rounds led by investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, Libertus, Mark Cuban, and Binance.
Related: Axie Infinity accounted for nearly two-thirds of blockchain-game NFT transactions in 2021
Axie Infinity Origins, the blockchain-based, play-to-earn (P2E) game, has successfully cleared Apple’s rigorous App Store review process and the game’s app is now available for Apple iOS users. Sky Mavis, the creator behind Axie Infinity, has adopted a strategic approach by rolling out the game’s app in stages, with targeted release plans for various Latin […]
Contrary to the obvious explanation, this massive whale wallet is not owned by Axie Infinity or the company behind it, Sky Mavis.
For nearly a year now, a mysterious Axie Infinity wallet has been quietly amassing billions of Smooth Love Potion (SLP), the in-game cryptocurrency powering one of the industry’s most popular play-to-earn (P2E) crypto games.
Today, the anonymous whale wallet now holds a little over 22 billion SLP — more than 50% the total circulating supply of the token.
The problem? No one knows who it belongs to and what their intentions are.
The wallet in question was brought to Cointelegraph’s attention by Axie Infinity player and tech co-founder Michael Benko, who first caught wind of this mysterious wallet on Aug. 25.
Benko told Cointelegraph he became concerned about the wallet given the amount of SLP it had gathered in a relatively short amount of time, which could potentially wreak havoc on the game’s ecosystem.
“The significance of a wallet holding so much SLP, if it's an individual person, gives that person a huge amount of control over an economy, especially in an economy where it’s so hard to mint a token.”
Launched in 2021, Axie Infinity is a blockchain-based game in which players purchase NFTs of cartoon creatures which they breed and fight against other players in turn-based gameplay.
SLP is earned by players for completing daily quests, battling other players in the “Arena” mode or playing against AI in the “Adventure” mode. The SLP can be used for breeding Axies, crafting in-game runes and charms (power-ups), and can be sold on exchanges.
Benko noted that as per the latest season update, an average Axie Infinity player can generate between 10 to 70 SLP per day, depending on how good they are at the game.
“So it is a concern, if someone's sitting there with 22 billion SLP [...] they could really keep the price flat or keep the price down when it actually should, by natural market conditions, be going up.”
The cryptocurrency is currently priced at $0.004, down 99% from an all time high of $0.40 on Jul. 13, 2021, according to Coingecko.
Theories explaining the existence of the wallet have only led to dead-ends so far.
Benko initially theorized that the wallet was “some system Axie Infinity had to automatically distribute SLP to players who earned it.”
However, Sky Mavis co-founder and COO Aleksander Larson told Cointelegraph that neither Sky Mavis nor Axie Infinity hold any of the game’s cryptocurrency, stating:
“All tokens in existence have been created by players.”
Yield Guild Games co-founder Gabby Dizon — one of the major DAOs for players of Axie — said YGG didn’t own the wallet and suggested it could be a wallet used by an exchange to hold liquidity.
Related: Axie Infinity looking to ‘double-down’ on Korean market: KBW
“Don't think this is ours as we typically use all of our minted SLP for breeding,” said Dizon, adding that “the most likely explanation is that an exchange is holding it for their liquidity.”
Benko however noted that while many SLP transactions saw Binance as a sender or recipient for many transactions, upon looking at the transactions, he doesn’t believe that it is a wallet owned by the crypto exchange.
“Binance seems to have an official wallet [already] and this doesn't seem to be that wallet.”
Cointelegraph reached out to Binance for comment but has not received a response at the time of writing.
If you have any theories on who is behind the wallet contact felixng at cointelegraph.com
The Ronin bridge tied to Axie Infinity is back up with a new design after Sky Mavis introduced a circuit breaker system and daily withdrawal limits.
Sky Mavis, developers of the popular play-to-earn (P2E) NFT game Axie Infinity have announced that the Ronin bridge is back online three months after it was hacked for more than $600 million.
The Ronin bridge is an Ethereum sidechain built for Axie Infinity, and it enables users to transfer assets between the sidechain and the Ethereum mainnet.
On March 29, 173,600 Ether (ETH) and 25.5 million USD Coin (USDC) was drained from the bridge after hackers managed to gain access to private validator keys. The hack was worth more than $620 million at the time.
According to the June 28 announcement from the Sky Mavis team, the Ronin bridge is back online after three audits (one internal, two external), a new design and full compensation of users' stolen assets.
“All wETH and USDC owned by Ronin Network users is now fully backed 1:1 by ETH and USDC on Ethereum, as promised. All users’ have been made whole.”
In total, Sky Mavis has now reimbursed 117,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC by providing the ETH liquidity to back users’ wrapped ETH (wETH) on the Ronin network.
In April, around 46,000 of that ETH had already been compensated after Binance provided a bridge to its exchange so that users could swap out wETH for ETH. Liquidity was sourced from the Axie Infinity balance and founders' funds to support the move. Binance also led a $150 million funding round to help Sky Mavis repay Axie Infinity users.
The remaining 56,000 of the total stolen ETH belongs to the Axie DAO Treasury and will remain uncollateralized as Sky Mavis “works with law enforcement to recover the funds.”
good job.
— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) June 28, 2022
As part of the revamped bridge design, Sky Mavis has updated the smart contract software to enable validators to set daily withdrawal limits, with the initial amount set at $50 million at this stage. The team also introduced a circuit breaker system that breaks down the monetary value of withdrawals into three tiers.
Tier 1 is for withdrawals less than $1 million, and requires 70% of validators to sign off, and tier 2 is for amounts greater than $1 million and requires 90% of validator signatures. Tier 3 is for withdrawals greater than $10 million and requires a 90% validator sign-off, a small transaction fee and a seven-day review process.
“The new bridge design includes a circuit-breaker system as a contingency plan which increases the security of the bridge by halting large suspicious withdrawals.”
Sky Mavis admitted in a postmortem report in late April that its lack of decentralization had made the Ronin bridge vulnerable to the hack. At the time it had just nine validator nodes, with employees having access to four of them.
After promptly raising the number of node to 11, Sky Mavis outlined intentions to raise the count to 21 within three months of the postmortem, with the long-term goal of surpassing 100 total nodes.
Related: Harmony hacker sends stolen funds to Tornado Cash mixer
The team did not provide an update on how many validators nodes the Ronin network now has in the latest announcement however.
Axie Infinity has seen its monthly NFT sales volume tank dramatically in 2022, with data from CryptoSlam showing that the game went from generating $126.4 million in January to just $2.8 million in June.
The Ronin Network and Sky Marvis are significantly upgrading their security measures after they vowed to ensure a hack “never happens again.”
The Ronin Network and Sky Mavis have vowed to upgrade their smart contracts, offer lucrative bug bounties and ramp up security following the $600 million hack late last month.
As Cointelegraph previously reported, the Ethereum sidechain developed for the popular NFT game Axie Infinity was the victim of an exploit for 173,600 Ether (ETH) and 25.5 million USD Coin (USDC) worth more than $612 million at the time.
Earlier this month the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) attributed the attack to North Korea-based and state-sponsored hacking group Lazurus, as it fired off a warning to other crypto and blockchain organizations.
Ronin announced its platform changes via a post-mortem report published yesterday, noting that all user funds are in the process of being restored as it vowed to make sure this “never happens again.”
We have put together a postmortem regarding the Ronin exploit that occurred on March 23rd.
— Ronin (@Ronin_Network) April 27, 2022
• Why it happened
• What we're doing to make sure this never happens again
• Ronin bridge re-opening updatehttps://t.co/FfwCtCG84E
The hack was the result of a spear phishing attack on a former Sky Mavis employee (developers of Axie Infinity). The bad actor was able to leverage the employee’s credentials to access Sky Mavis’s four validator nodes out of a total of nine in the Axie/Ronin ecosystem.
This by itself was not enough to do any damage, but “the attacker found a backdoor through our gas-free RPC node, which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator.”
“This traces back to November 2021 when Sky Mavis requested help from the Axie DAO to distribute free transactions due to an immense user load. The Axie DAO allowlisted Sky Mavis to sign various transactions on its behalf. This was discontinued in December 2021, but the allow list access was not revoked,” the report reads.
Following the hack, big changes are being implemented at both Sky Mavis and the Ronin Network.
The Ronin Network hopes to have its bridge open again by mid to late May, with Binance providing support until then with withdrawal and deposit infrastructure for Axie users.
The team is about 80% through upgrading Ronin bridge smart contracts, they’ll be reworking the backend, migrating all pending withdrawals and launching a validator dashboard that “allows for approving large transactions and adding/removing new validators.”
“The Ronin Network bridge is currently being redesigned and will open once we are confident that it can stand the test of time. We initially expected to be able to deploy the upgrade by the end of April, but this is not a process that we can afford to rush.”
Related: Binance recovers $5.8M in funds connected to Ronin bridge exploit
Sky Mavis will ramp up its security measures by seeking the help of “top tier security experts,” conducting contract audits and implementing stricter internal procedures such as training courses to “combat external threats.”
Notably, it will also be significantly upping its node count to help decentralize the project. Having already increased from nine to 11, Sky Mavis intends to get that number up to 21 within three months. Longer-term, the project is eyeing more than 100 nodes.
Sky Mavis will also be launching bug bounties of up to $1 million for any white hat hackers who are able to find further vulnerabilities.
“We recognize the importance and value of security researchers’ efforts in helping keep our community safe. Sky Mavis is offering bounties of up to $1 million to encourage responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities.”
Sky Mavis, the company behind the play-to-earn (P2E) game Axie Infinity, announced it has raised $150 million in a funding round to replenish the funds the company lost in the Ronin Network exploit. The funding round — which was led by Binance and had the participation of companies like Animoca Brands, a16z, Dialectic, Paradigm, and […]