Ronin Hacked, Axie Infinity Delays Origin

Axie Infinity delays Origin launch. (Axie)

JAKARTA – The popular play-to-earn (P2E) game Axie Infinity recently announced the postponement of Origin's release. This is the impact of the Ronin crypto wallet hacking.

Previously, Axie Infinity: Origin was scheduled to launch on March 31 yesterday. However, due to this unexpected incident, the developer finally decided that Origin would be released on April 7th.

Reporting from CryptoPotato, after the major security breach Axie stated the platform needed to prioritize its efforts and postponed the launch date by a week. While the game is poised for a soft launch, the move will give the engineering and security teams additional time to thoroughly investigate all the implications of the breach before calling their full attention to supporting Origin's release.

"While the game is poised for early launch, we've decided to give the engineering and security teams more time to investigate all the effects of the security breach, before focusing on supporting the Origin release," said P2E game developer Axie Infinity's announcement.

“On Thursday, April 7th – Origin will be available for download via Mavis Hub! We are so excited to bring Origin to our community! While we can't share it with you today as planned, we hope that the videos and content we've prepared will help you prepare for it once it becomes available next week.”

Last week's hack had a huge impact on the Ronin validator node for Sky Mavis, which happens to be the publisher of the popular games Axie Infinity and Axie DAO. The hacker reportedly used the hacked private key in an attempt to fake a fake withdrawal from the Ronin bridge across two transactions.

Hackers have stolen more than $624 million in Ethereum and the USDC stablecoin. According to reports, the stolen funds belonged mostly to Axie gamers and Axie Infinity's Treasury Revenue.

The Ronin Network claimed to have collaborated with Chainalysis to track the stolen funds. Ronin also enlists CrowdStrike's help to focus on forensics. For this incident, the party associated with the launch of Origin, Sky Mavis, promised to compensate the victims. Based on the tracking results, it was concluded that the hacking action was socially engineered and it was not due to a technical error.