A major milestone for Sky Mavis arrives this week as the developer behind Axie Infinity secure additional funding which will be used to reimburse or restore assets to those who were affected by the recent Ronin validator hack.
Among those who participated in the funding round were Binance, Animoca Brands, a16z, Dialectic, Paradigm and Accel. With the successful funding round,Sky Mavis nets a total of USD 150 Million most of which the developer says they will use to restore stolen funds from recent Ronin Hack.
Back in March 23, 2022, validator nodes for the Ronin network were compromised which led to funds being siphoned into hacker wallets resulting in a loss of 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC for affected users. Sky Mavis states that the hack was caused due to a loophole involving the Axie DAO validator node which opened an exploitable backdoor that the hacker used to initiate the attack. The funds were eventually tracked and a thorough investigation in an attempt to recover those funds are also ongoing while the Ronin network itself will be getting some needed security upgrades.
Affected users might not wait long to have their funds restored though as the new funding, together with Sky Mavis’ balance sheet funds will be used to reimburse the players. As for Ronin’s security upgrades, Sky Mavis states that they will be increasing the validator group to 21 validators within the next 3 months and as well as go through several security audits to make sure that the system won’t be easy to compromise next time. Ronin network functionality might take weeks before being restored to 100% but the waiting time should be a fair trade off for increased security and ease of mind for the network’s users.
This big news of the monumental Sky Mavis funding round comes just in time for Axie Infinity’s Origin release, whose Alpha test version is now live via the Sky Mavis hub.