Binance retrieves back $5.8m in Axie Infnity stolen funds

Binance, a leading cryptocurrency exchange, announced the recovery of $5.8 million related to the recent hack of popular blockchain gaming project Axie Infinity.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) said in a tweet on Friday that the group behind the hack began moving the stolen funds today and deposited about $5.8 million to Binance, possibly in an attempt to launder it.

According to CZ, the hackers skillfully distributed the funds across 86 different accounts. Remember that it was reported last month that the Ronin network, an Ethereum sidechain developed by Axie Infinity, was exploited, resulting in the theft of an estimated $625 million in crypto assets.

Remarkably, the Ronin team did not discover the hack until six days after the network had been compromised. When a user reported being unable to withdraw 5,000 ETH from the network, the team was notified.

Following the hack, the US Treasury Department stated in a report that it was able to link the Axie Infinity hack to Lazarus, a notorious North Korean hacking group that has allegedly stolen approximately $2 billion in assets from cryptocurrency exchanges.

The department stated that it identified the same Ethereum address associated with the group as the one responsible for the Ronin hack.

AXS, the native cryptocurrency of Axie Infinity, has lost more than 30% of its value since the Ronin hack was discovered. AXS was trading around the $70 mark prior to the incident, but at the time of writing, the token was trading at $46, representing a 34% drop since the hack.

The hack also had an impact on the price of Ronin’s native cryptocurrency, RON. The coin is currently trading around $1.35, a 41 percent drop since the exploit. Wormhole, based in Solana, recently lost over $300 million in an exploit similar to Ronin’s.

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