Ronin Bridge: Biggest DeFi Hack worth $625 Million

Summary

• Ronin Bridge hackers took about 625 Million dollars worth of Ether, USDC on March 23.
• The Bridge is associated with Axie Infinity.

What is a Bridge?

A bridge is software that lets people convert tokens into one another to use on another network. Ronin Bridge was operated by Sky Mavis(Owner of Axie Infinity) and Axie DAO.

Details about the Hack

The hacker attacked the bridge and drained it. There was a loss of:

• 173,600 Ether
• 25.5 Million USDC

The bridge was hacked on March 23 but the hack was only discovered on March 29, six days later. The hacker gained control over a majority of Validator Nodes( those machines that validate transactions). Ronin Bridge has a total of 9 validator nodes.

How to avoid such attacks?

Security audits can help a lot in avoiding such attacks. Many nodes run on poorly written code. These codes are seldom audited. If you run any crypto business, we suggest, you get your projects audited via Certik, NonceAudits, etc. These companies can root out a majority of bugs and loopholes in your projects.

Reactions

1/ @Ronin_Network update

Our Ronin Substack has been updated with additional information.

We are in the process of conducting a thorough investigation; working with @Chainalysis to monitor the stolen funds and @Crowdstrike to handle forensics.

— Ronin (@Ronin_Network) March 30, 2022

Unfortunately, the hack of @Ronin_Network is the latest in a series of DeFi thefts. In 2021, $3.2B in crypto was stolen from individuals and services — 6x the amount stolen in 2020. https://t.co/MMzB2cYihS pic.twitter.com/UBweiiovvB

— Chainalysis (@chainalysis) March 29, 2022

Ronin Bridge has jumped into maintenance mode as soon as the fault was discovered. We expect something positive comes out of this activity.