Axie Infinity Reopens Ronin Bridge Months After $625M Hack

Axie Infinity has finally re-opened its Ronin Bridge, which allows users to make transactions within the game. This comes months after Sky Mavis, Axie Infinity’s developer, closed the bridge after a $625 million security breach. Now that the Ronin Bridge is open again, players can use it for making deposits and withdrawals. Here’s all you need to know about Axie Infinity’s latest development.

About Axie Infinity Reopening Ronin Bridge

Yesterday, June 28, Axie Infinity announced it has re-opened the Ronin Bridge after three audits. Sky Mavis added that they “successfully” conducted an internal audit and two external audits. Independent auditors Certik and Verichains carried out the external audits. 

“These audits enabled us to identify and implement a number of opportunities for improvement,” they wrote in a blog post. 

“All user funds are fully backed 1:1 by the new bridge,” they added. “The new bridge design includes a circuit-breaker system as a contingency plan which increases the security of the bridge by halting large suspicious withdrawals.”

Essentially, these withdrawal limits are based on overall value. Axie Infinity has also set up withdrawal thresholds that fall into three different tiers. Firstly, Tier 1 corresponds to withdrawals under $1 million and requires 70% of validators to sign off. Any amounts greater than $1 million falls under Tier 2, requiring 90% of validator to sign. 

Finally, Tier 3 is for withdrawals higher than $10 million. It requires 90% of validator signatures as well as a small transaction fee and a seven-day review process. 

What are the other security measures?

To enhance security, Axie Infinity has also introduced governors via a Ronin network upgrade. To explain, in the future, the governance process will follow a decentralised voting mechanism. In this, “governors” will be able to vote for changes such as upgrading contracts, adding/removing validator, changing thresholds, and more. 

Next, Axie Infinity updated the Bridge Smart Contract software to enable validators to set a daily withdrawal limit. Currently, this daily limit is set at $50 million. It is reset every day at 00:00 UTC. However, if the network reaches this limit earlier in the day, an administrator can reset it. 

About Axie Infinity’s $625M hack

In March 2022, a major security breach of Sky Mavis’s Ronin validator nodes and the Axie DAO validator nodes resulted in a loss of over $625 million. To make things worse, Sky Mavis noticed the breach only after six days.

Over a month-later, in a post-mortem, the company explained that an  “advanced spear-phishing attack” had compromised one of its employee’s accounts. This led to the hackers breaching Sky Mavis’ IT security, gaining access to the validator nodes. Furthermore, it failed to identify the breach sooner due to the lack of a “proper tracking system for monitoring large outflows from the bridge.”

Initially, Sky Mavis had planned to re-open the Ronin Bridge at the end of April. However, they delayed it, saying, “this is not a process we can afford to rush”. Besides, it has also compensated the Axie Infinity players affected by the hack.