Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge Attacker Starts Moving The Stolen Funds

Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge attacker started moving the stolen funds through anonymizing services as we can see further in today’s latest crypto news.

There has been some activity on the blockchain address which was flagged as being involved in the hack on the Axie Infinity Ronin Bridge a month ago and there were some transactions over the past few hours from the ETH Address. The first was the movement of 1000 ETH valued at $3.5 million to another address and a few more transactions followed with all of them going to Tornado Cash ETH mixing service. The movements were noticed by Colin Wu on Monday morning.

The address of the hacker who stole $610 million in the Ronin_Network case began to move, transferring 1000 ETH to another address and then 200 ETH to TornadoCash. https://t.co/7RYHCmwght

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) April 4, 2022

Major exchanges aren’t often used by criminals because most of them require extensive KYC procedures and even those that don’t provide fiat conversions, they had to follow the global regulatory rules. However, some of the funds from this hack were actually moved through FTX, Crypto.com, And Huobi and all of them vowed to take action. Malicious actors are likely to attempt to obfuscate the transactions several times before they are able to cash out into fiat. The founder of Immutable Vision commented that this can lead to even tighter regulations and even punishment for the investors:

“This is when privacy blockchains fail and acts as ammunition for stricter regulations which impacts legitimate retail and institutional investors.”

This is what has happened in the traditional banking industry which has now become a minefield of restrictions for the average user. Tornado Cash became the main weapon of choice for crypto hackers and scammers and provides private transactions for ETH and ERC20 tokens by breaking the link between the source and the destination addresses whcih is a perfect combination for someone that wants to move stolen assets.

The Ronin Bridge enables cross-chain transfers to and from the Axie Infinity ecosystem and it got exploited for more than $610 million back in March. Sky Mavis which is the company behind Axie Infinity stated that it is fully committed to reimbursing the victims of the attack. The ETH prices are tradign fiat on the day at $3500 and the asset had a solid day with a gain of 22.4% while ETH prices have been down by 28% from their ATH of $4,878.