Trung Nguyen, Sky Mavis CEO and co-founder of popular crypto game Axie Infinity revealed that he moved about $3 million worth of AXS governance tokens from the Ronin network to Binance right before the $622 million hacking incident.
A Bloomberg report states that Nguyen moved the tokens just three hours before Sky Mavis disclosed the Ronin network hack a full week after the incident occurred. It closed off all access to the network until late June. Kalie Moore, Sky Mavis representative, confirmed this transaction. She said Sky Mavis understood its position and options would be better the more AXS they had on Binance. Moore explained that it would give the company flexibility to pursue different options for securing the loans and capital required. She said funds were transferred from Nguyen’s own wallet so that AXS short sellers would not be able to front-run the news. The representative added that accusations of other motives regarding the nature of the transfer would be baseless.
The Ronin network was hacked on March 23 but went on undiscovered for days and was ultimately disclosed on March 29. The hacker made off with 173,600 Wrapped Ethereum (WETH) and 25.5 million USDC stablecoins – collectively worth $622 million. The hackers had managed to drain the funds through the Ronin bridge that connect it to the Ethereum mainnet. They used private keys to gain control of five of the network’s nine total validators to sign fraudulent transactions and transfer the funds.
The Ronin bridge was finally reopened on June 28. All users were reimbursed. A North Korean hacking group Lazarus is said to be behind this hack.
