Ronin Network bridge hack (Axie Infinity)
The Ronin bridge behind the game Axie Infinity was drained of about $625M in ETH and USDC in March 2022 after attackers obtained validator keys. U.S. authorities attributed the theft to North Korea's Lazarus Group, and OFAC sanctioned the wallet.
Also known as: Ronin Network, Ronin bridge, Axie Infinity, Sky Mavis
Summary
Ronin is an Ethereum sidechain built by Sky Mavis to support the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity. In March 2022, attackers compromised validator private keys and drained about 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC — roughly $625 million — in one of the largest crypto thefts on record. [1][2]
Attribution
The U.S. Treasury and FBI attributed the attack to the Lazarus Group, a hacking unit linked to North Korea, and OFAC added the receiving wallet address to its sanctions list. Sky Mavis reimbursed users after raising additional funding. [1][2]
Bracketed numbers refer to the numbered sources listed below.
Sources (2)
See also
World Liberty Financial (WLFI) — Justin Sun token freezeProjectsWLFI, a DeFi project linked to Donald Trump and his family, blacklisted/froze the wallet of major investor Justin Sun in Sept 2025 — ~540–595M unlocked WLFI tokens (~$107M) plus ~2.4B locked. Sun sued, alleging an undisclosed admin 'blacklist backdoor'; WLFI denied it and threatened a countersuit. The dispute is ongoing.
Gala Games exploitTokensOn May 20, 2024 an attacker abused a privileged minter account on the GALA token contract to mint 5 billion GALA (≈$200M+ nominal) and dumped ~600M of them for ~$22M of ETH before Gala froze the address. Gala Games called it an internal access-control failure; the attacker later returned the ~$22M.
This page was last updated on Jun 15, 2026. View revision history.
