Restarting Saydchane Ronin: What happened?

On June 28, 2022, a successful restart of Sidchane Ronin took place. The network did not work for several months: its work was stopped after a large-scale hacking of the cross-bridge at the end of March. As a result of the attack, attackers stole cryptocurrencies with a total value of $ 625 million. In this material, we have collected all the most important details about Ronin and its restart.

What was the Sidchan Ronin for what was needed?

Ronin is the project of Sky Mavis, which develops the popular blockchain-game Axie Infinity. Initially, the application worked on Ethereum, but its throughput was not enough to process intra -game operations.

Then Sky Mavis has developed a second -level solution – Ronin Saydchan. The communication channel between him and Ethereum was the Ronin Bridge cross-bridge, thanks to which the ERC-20 Standard could be translated in Axie Infinity.

In 2021, the popularity of the game increased sharply: only from May 2021 to January 2022, 1.44 million buyers made approximately 12.6 million transactions with incorrect tokens (NFT).

Axie Infinity became the absolute leader in the volume of NFT trading: in 2021, the NFT turnover is estimated in this application in the amount of $ 3.5 billion to $ 3.85 billion, while the nearest competitor, NBA Top Shot, this indicator was only $ 827 million.

Due to the excitement around the game, the bet on Sadchane justified itself. According to analysts, only in November 2021 Ronin processed more than 560% of the total number of transactions in Ethereum.

Ronin speed was approximately 4 times higher than on Ethereum. Thanks to Ronin, transactions on the Axie trading platform and the transfer of assets on the network were carried out within a few seconds.

Ronin also solved the problem of high commissions on the network. Gas fee in Ethereum may rang out from $ 100 to $ 200, which made microtransactions not economical.

In addition, users of the official Ronin Wallet wallet received a certain number of free transactions for performing various actions in Axie Infinity, as well as for storage in the NFT perfume wallet or virtual areas of land.

How Ronin hacked?

At the end of March 2022, Ronin Sadchan, used in Axie Infinity, became the victim of one of the largest hacker attacks in the history of decentralized finance (Defi).

Taking advantage of the exploit, the attackers brought crypto assets worth more than $ 625 million: 173 600 ETH and 25 Ecology comes first: .5 USDC.

The developers found a gap in the security system only a week after the attack. It turned out that one of the team employees was subjected to a phishing attack, as a result of which the attacker gained access to the infrastructure of the company and ronin validators.

Only 9 validators worked on the Ronin network. At the same time, only 5 of them were needed to confirm the transaction. At the time of the attack, Sky Mavis controlled 4 of 9 validators. The hackers received control over another missing validator controlled by Axie DAO with the help of a bacdor associated with a non -gazy RPC ronin node.

Such architecture contradicted the basic security rules. Typically, in the blockchain validator-nodes, various teams or companies that maintain a distributed structure control. The creators of Ronin used a centralized approach – a significant part of the validators belonged to one company. This was a fatal mistake.

Does Ronin have their own token?

At the beginning of 2022, Sky Mavis released the Ron token token. This asset is designed to manage the project and is used for transactions on the Ronin network. After hacking, the price of Ron began to decline and fell from $ 2.3 at the end of March 2022 to $ 0.2 by the end of June.

After the message about the restart of the Sidchane, the Ron course increased by about 40% during the week and by the time of the event reached $ 0.36. However, observers note a steady drop in income using Ronin blockchain games Axie Infinity and poor project tokensomics.

What applications worked on Ronin?

In addition to Axie Infinity, the main application of Sidchan was Ronin Wallet, which made it possible to store crypto assets associated with the game. Also in the ecosystem there was a decentralized exchange Katana (Ronin dex), where it was possible to exchange intra -game cryptocurrencies.

What happened after the restart?

Blockchain-game developers restarted Ronin after updating the security system and conducting several rounds of the Ronin Bridge source code. In addition, they introduced new security mechanisms, in particular, an automatic “switch” that stops the work of the bridge while trying to carry out a SUSPITALLY large size through it. Now for Ronin Bridge there is a limit for the withdrawal of funds – $ 50 million per day.

Immediately after the incident, Sky Mavis increased the number of validators necessary to confirm transactions in Ronin. The company promised to decentralize the network and bring the number of working NODs to 100, as well as implement the architecture of zero trust.

After restarting in Ronin Network, the Institute of Managers was introduced, which will vote for the addition of new validators, upgrades of smart contracts, a change in the daily limit for the cross-bridge and other major changes in the blockchain.

One of the most important elements of restarting is compensation for stolen means. Back in April, Ronin developers attracted funding for this purpose in the amount of $ 150 million. Another $ 450 million in Sky Mavis promised to pay at the expense of their own money.

As stated in the restart statement, all Weth and USDC users were returned to them, and these funds were fully provided with the corresponding collateral on the Ethereum network. In turn, the fate of another 56,000 Weth, stolen from the Axie DAO treasury, remains unknown – they are hoped to be returned as a result of the investigation of law enforcement.

How to transfer assets from Ethereum to ronin?

Ronin cross-bridge is already working. Through it to Ronin, you can translate from Ethereum ETH, AXS (native ecosystem coin), SLP (the main intra -game asset Axie Infinity) or USDC stablecoin. For swap, you will need a browser wallet supporting Ethereum, as well as Ronin Wallet.