Axie Infinity Delays Origin Game Launch Due to Ronin Hack

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 31st.

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’ve decided to give the engineering and security team some more time to investigate all effects of the security breach, before focussing on backing Origin’s release.

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 Exploit and Aftermath

As reported by CryptoPotato, the exploit, that in actuality took place a week ago, affected Ronin validator nodes for Sky Mavis, who happens to be the publisher of the popular Axie Infinity game and the Axie DAO. The hacker reportedly used hacked private keys in a bid to forge fake withdrawals from the Ronin bridge across 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, has revealed working with Chainalysis for tracing the stolen funds and CrowdStrike to focus on forensics. While asserting that the breach was external, it added that “all evidence points to this attack being socially engineered” instead of a technical flaw.