Axie Infinity has announced postponing the launch of its much-anticipated play-to-earn game – Origin – after what appears to be the biggest hack in DeFi history.
According to the post on substack, Axie Infinity: Origin will go live on the Mavis Hub on April 7th. It was originally slated to launch on March 31.
Axie Infinity: Origin
Following the major security breach, Axie stated that the platform needs to reprioritize its efforts and delay the launch date by a week. While the game is ready for a soft launch, however, the move would provide the engineering and security team an additional window of time to deeply investigate all implications of the breach before asking for their full attention to support Origin’s release.
While the game is ready for a soft launch, we decided to give the engineering and security team some extra time to investigate all the effects of the security flaw, before focusing on the out of Origin.
The announcement also read,
“On Thursday, April 7 – Origin will be available for download via Mavis Hub! We are incredibly excited to get Origin into the hands of our community! Even though we’re not able to share it with you today as planned, we’re hoping that the onslaught of videos and content we’ve prepared will help prepare you once it’s available next week.”
Ronin feat and aftermath
As reported by CryptoPotato, the exploit, which actually happened a week ago, affected Ronin validation nodes for Sky Mavis, which happens to be the publisher of the popular game Axie Infinity and the Axie DAO. The hacker allegedly used hacked private keys in an attempt to forge fake Ronin Bridge withdrawals on two transactions.
More than $624 million in Ethereum and USDC were drained in the process. According to Ripple Co-founder Chris Larsen, a major portion of the stolen funds belonged to Axie players and included Axie Infinity’s Treasury Revenue.
Sky Mavis has promised to reimburse the victims. Ronin Network, on the other hand, revealed working with Chainalysis to track down stolen funds and CrowdStrike to focus on forensics. While claiming the breach was external, he added that “all evidence points to this attack being socially engineered” instead of a technical fault.
