Axie Infinity Plunges 27% As Builder Takes Blame of the $625M Hack

Key Insights:

• The Chief Operating Officer of Sky Mavis, Alexsander Larsen, took full responsibility for the Ronin hack.
• Larsen stated that their drive towards “progressive decentralization” left the users vulnerable.
• Axie Infinity, since the $625 million hacks, has lost over 27.7%

In the world of crypto, where the anonymity of a user is its biggest strength, Sky Mavis’ Chief Operating Officer (COO) has come forward to take the blame for what happened on March 23.

The biggest hack in the history of crypto cost Axie Infinity users to lose $625.5 million as the decentralization of the Ronin Network was compromised due to Sky Mavis centralization. But since then, things have changed for executives thanks to accountability taken by executives of the platform.

“Our Fault,” Says Sky Mavis

In an interview with CoinDesk, The COO of Sky Mavis, Alexsander Larsen, said,

“These are the players that deposited their funds into the Ronin network, and who trusted us, and we failed to live up to that trust; We’re the team that pushed to go down this path of, you know, progressive decentralization and, and all those trade-offs made us vulnerable for this attack…So, lesson learned, we’re taking full responsibility for this internally.”

As per Larsen, Sky Mavis’ decided to move to the Ronin network from Ethereum to accommodate more transactions on the platform since Ronin was significantly cheaper than Ethereum. But in doing so, they dabbled with the biggest strength and weakness of crypto – decentralization.

Since the validator requirement notably reduced on the Ronin network, Axie Infinity became vulnerable to a majority attack which is precisely what happened when the exploiter gained control over Sky Mavis nodes.

Regardless since then, the network has come to deploy preventive measures and even raised $150 million in funding from Binance, Animoca Brands, a16z, Dialectic, and Paradigm to reimburse the treasury.

However, the more significant impact of this hack was on investors whose AXS holdings have been compromised thanks to the falling prices.

Axie Infinity Loses Over $20

While the broader market cues haven’t been as bearish, AXS has been facing the brunt of skepticism following the hack. Since March 29, AXS has noted mostly red candles, which resulted in the altcoin slipping by 27.72%.

Surprisingly since the night of the announcement of the hack, despite the falling prices, investors have been consistently buying more AXS out of exchanges. The total existing supply has reduced from 3.28 million to 2.71 million today.

Thus maybe those who anticipated a price fall following the hack are getting in early to cash out for profit when the prices recover again.