The $5.7 million in cryptocurrency that was taken during the Ronin Bridge attack has been successfully frozen and returned by Norwegian police.
In 2022, the online game Axie Infinity experienced a $620 million attack. Norway successfully froze and returned roughly $6 million in stolen cryptocurrency.
In an X post on Friday, Sky Mavis, the blockchain firm behind Axie Infinity, revealed that the National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime froze the assets in close collaboration with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, and blockchain forensic firm Chainalysis.
According to the Singapore-based company, about 15% of the recovered funds will go toward paying recovery-related expenses, with the remaining 85% of the money “being deposited into the Axie Infinity treasury.” Sky Mavis said:
“We’d like to publicly extend our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who assisted in the recovery efforts, especially Økokrim and the FBI in the U.S., for their tireless effort to track down and recover these assets for the Axie and Ronin communities.”
The blockchain firm also added that an additional $40 million in separate crypto funds have been frozen, although it declined to elaborate on the matter, saying “these assets will take some time to recover and we don’t have enough information to give guidance around a specific timetable for recovering and returning this separate pool of assets.”
In 2022, a $620 million attack occurred on Axie Infinity’s cross-chain bridge when hackers, who were purportedly North Korean, took advantage of a weakness in the bridge that linked the Ethereum blockchain to the Ronin sidechain.
According to later reports, the attack was most likely made possible by hackers fooling an engineer into applying for a fictitious job that included malicious code malware to access Ronin’s systems.
