BREAKING: Another Ronin Hack? Over $11.3M Moved from Network

The Ronin network may have experienced another hack of over $11.3 million, possibly from a white hat hacker. Although investigations are underway, one of the network’s development team members announced that the Ronin bridge has been halted.

The @Ronin_Network bridge has been paused while we investigate a report from whitehats about a potential MEV exploit.

We will follow up with more information shortly.

The bridge currently secures over $850M which is safe https://t.co/lUjIIgb1DD

— Psycheout.ron (@Psycheout86) August 6, 2024

The latest exploit comes two years after the network suffered a cataclysmic $625 million security breach, which it has yet to fully recover from.

Ronin Bridge Hacked for $11.3M

Blockchain security firm PeckShield was the first to identify the issue and label the exploit as a possible white hat attack. Such breaches are deliberate acts to hack the protocol for faults and prevent malicious actors from identifying and exploiting them. If true, the white hat hacker(s) should return millions of dollars worth of crypto assets and possibly receive a portion of the funds for detecting the bug.

The Ronin co-founder noted that the Ronin Bridge holds over $850 million. He added that the fault may originate from a maximal extractable value (MEV) bot, an automated software tool developers use to interact with Ethereum-based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. These automated tools identify opportunities and execute them on the developer’s behalf. It is likely that the MEV bot has identified the Ronin bridge vulnerability and exploited it for its owner.

In March 2022, the Ronin Bridge suffered a $625 million hack, which caused its operations to be paused for months. Notably, several crypto exchanges aided the project in recovering most of the stolen funds. The notorious North Korean hacking group Lazarus was allegedly behind the high-profile attack.

Impact on RON and AXS

Interestingly, Ronin’s native token, RON, was not impacted by the entire drama. Its price is $1.4, nearly an 11% increase within the past 24 hours.

AXS, the native crypto for Axie Infinity, Ronin’s flagship game, also soared by almost 13% to $4.38 at press time.